{"id":26553,"date":"2025-11-29T11:15:36","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T10:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=26553"},"modified":"2025-11-29T11:18:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T10:18:09","slug":"averell-harriman-on-aleksey-tolstoy-on-understanding-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/?p=26553","title":{"rendered":"Averell Harriman on <span class=\"\" style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">Aleksey Tolstoy<\/span> on understanding Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, said Tolstoy once told him that to understand Stalin&#8217;s Kremlin you had to understand Ivan&#8217;s reign. Harriman clarified that Tolstoy did not mean Stalin was like <span class=\"\" style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">Ivan the<\/span> Terrible, rather that to appreciate Stalin&#8217;s Russia you needed to know something about Russia&#8217;s past. Harriman, who spent a lot of time with Stalin during the war, saw no traces of a court like that of <span class=\"\" style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">Ivan IV<\/span>. In his view, Stalin was a popular war leader; he was the one who held the country together: &#8218;So I&#8217;d like to emphasise my great admiration for Stalin the national leader in an <span class=\"\" style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">emergency \u2014<\/span> 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.&#8216;<\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"padding-left: 6em; text-indent: -3em;\">\u2014Geoffrey Roberts, <em>Stalin&#8217;s Library<\/em>, (London: Yale University Press, <span class=\"\" style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">2022), 140<\/span>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, said Tolstoy once told him that to understand Stalin&#8217;s Kremlin you had to understand Ivan&#8217;s reign. Harriman clarified that Tolstoy did not mean Stalin was like &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/?p=26553\">Weiterlesen <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}