Horney and Stalin Biography Chair: Bernard J. Paris, Ph.D. Presenter: Robert A. Tucker, Ph.D.

After a brief welcome and introduction by Bernard J. Paris, the first presentation of the conference was offered by Robert A. Tucker, Professor Emeritus of Princeton University. Tucker provided a psychobiological examination of the Soviet World War II leader, Joseph Stalin. In analyzing Joseph Stalin's cult of personality, he drew extensively on Karen Horney's psychoanalytic contributions.

Tucker, who is currently completing the third and final volume of the Stalin biography, witnessed momentous events in the Soviet Union while stationed in Moscow and serving as a wartime translator (Tucker, 1973, 1990). With his fluency in Russian, he was able to gauge the extraordinary interplay between Joseph Stalin and the Russian people. The interplay was all the more extraordinary because Stalin was Georgian by birth and not native to the Russian motherland. The psychological connection became cemented, however, through Stalin's deliberate self-transformation to the next Russian cultural hero and political savior, seeking to reincarnate the mythic Lenin himself. Indeed, Stalin selected his political name because of its rhythmic similarity to Lenin's name.

Reasoning that the more compulsive a character solution, the more predictable a personality becomes, Tucker was able to deduce that Stalin's death would lead to convulsive changes in Soviet society: the more extensively arrogant and vindictive a leader, the less he will allow himself to be surrounded by like personalities and the less institutionalized his leadership will become. In keeping with Tucker's prediction, a rampant cult of personality developed around Stalin, wrapping the Soviet people in an ever-tightening embrace, paralyzing and destroying their capacity to act or react. The spell was broken only in 1956 when Nikita Khruschev, in an ostensibly secret speech, dramatically exposed the full effects of Stalin's reign of terror.