Psychobiography done right
Anyone undertaking to probe the psychic sources of the devastating hostility of Josef Stalin would have to at a minimum be conversant with all of his public statements and able to show a convincing pattern of belief motivating the speaker/writer.
That's only the beginning of what Robert Tucker did in his masterpiece of a lifetime of Soviet studies. He has not only assembled a clear documentary record of his subject's written and spoken opinions, but has exhausted the testimony of contemporaries as well.
The thesis is, Stalin looked for and found a male role model in V. I. Lenin. He saw himself from the beginning of his association with Lenin as the best Leninist, and he induced the convulsion of the First Five-Year Plan as a means of completing the October Revolution.
Tucker's search for the facts in the case extends to his reminding the reader that Stalin had an enviable revolutionary record and a need, shared with most Party members, to secure socialism within Russia. Resistance to the mustachioed one's tyranny was nonexistent because Stalin had succeeded in winning majority support for his succession to Lenin, and to resist Stalin was to resist the Party, which never, in Party members eyes, could make a mistake.