War & Peace Quote by W. Averell Harriman

It is hard to find a cleaner example of wartime moral triage than Harriman’s blunt concession: Stalin was monstrous, and still, in the calculus of survival, indispensable. The line doesn’t plead ignorance about the gulags or the purges; it names them upfront, then steps over them. That’s the rhetorical move: acknowledge the horror to inoculate against it, then deliver the real thesis with bureaucratic coolness - “great war leader” - as if leadership can be audited separately from terror.

Harriman, a senior U.S. diplomat and envoy to the Soviet Union during WWII, is speaking from inside the Allied bargain: the West needed the Red Army to absorb Hitler’s force, and the Red Army needed industrial aid and a second front. In that context, “we became convinced” reads like collective self-authorization. It spreads responsibility across a committee of realists, turning complicity into consensus. The phrase “regardless of” is doing heavy ethical laundering; brutality becomes a parenthetical, while victory gets the main clause.

The subtext is not admiration so much as justification after the fact: a way to defend an alliance that looked strategically obvious in 1942 and morally queasy in 1946. “Without Stalin, they never would have held” isn’t merely about battlefield command; it suggests the grim premise that Soviet endurance required coercion - that fear, discipline, and centralized control were part of the war machine. Harriman’s sentence captures a persistent American temptation: to treat authoritarian competence as a usable asset, then act surprised when the costs don’t stay contained.