Averell Harriman on Aleksey Tolstoy on understanding Russia

Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, said Tolstoy once told him that to understand Stalin’s Kremlin you had to understand Ivan’s reign. Harriman clarified that Tolstoy did not mean Stalin was like Ivan the Terrible, rather that to appreciate Stalin’s Russia you needed to know something about Russia’s past. Harriman, who spent a lot of time with Stalin during the war, saw no traces of a court like that of Ivan IV. In his view, Stalin was a popular war leader; he was the one who held the country together: ‚So I’d like to emphasise my great admiration for Stalin the national leader in an emergency — one of the historic occasions where one man made so much difference. This in no sense minimises my revulsion against his cruelties; but I have to give you the constructive side as well as the other.‘

—Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Library, (London: Yale University Press, 2022), 140.