At Stalin’s Side: His Interpreter’s Memoirs by Valentin Berezhkov

Although Valentin Berezhkov was not Stalin’s primary interpreter, he attended numerous important meetings with Stalin during the Second World War, including Yalta and the talks in Moscow. With a natural flair for languages, Berezhkov found himself chosen for important work by Molotov, the number two man in the country, and was suddenly thrust into the middle of history making events. His memoirs, which run from the October Revolution to the fall of the dictator’s empire, are valuable because they capture the mindset of suspicion, fear and ambition at the very highest levels of Soviet government. The leaders of the State were constantly looking over their shoulders and testing the ground beneath their feet while their leader, Stalin, the consummate politician and absolute ruler, watched them for any inkling of disloyalty or lack of duty.

The Need to Show Absolute Loyalty

Those same leaders had to submit to the grossest demands. Molotov’s wife, Polina, was arrested and sent to the Gulag. When Molotov went to Stalin for help, Stalin pointed out that all of his own relatives were also in prison. In fact, almost all the relatives of Stalin’s first and second wives were either in prison or had been shot. The same was true for the wife of the Soviet President, Kalinin, and for Stalin’s chief assistant, Poskrebyshev. To add salt to the wound, Beria, the feared head of the Soviet secret police, would whisper to Molotov from time to time, “Polina is still alive.”

Living in such an atmosphere was obviously stressful, and the stress increased when Beria suggested, during the Second World War, that Berezhkov’s parents might still be alive in Kiev, which had been overrun by the Nazis. Anyone living in an occupied area was automatically suspected of collaboration, and so Berezhkov, being so close to Stalin, could be seen as a threat.

Survival in Stalin’s Inner Circle

Fortunately for Berezhkov, Stalin never uttered those dreaded words, “he knows too much,” in his direction. He was spared arrest, the Gulag, and death by car accident, which was one of the favorite methods of disposing of potential threats, real or imagined. Allowed to take other work, he survived the Stalin years and ended up as a senior researcher at the Institute of USA and Canada Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He later taught political science at Claremont College and at the Monterey Institute of International Studies before his death in the late 1990s.

Opinion: Is the Book Worth Reading?

This is a fine book, tracing his early life and his belief in the Communist ideal through to his awakening about the reality of the Soviet state. We see through his eyes the hopes and dreams of a better life, and the realization of the terrible cost that hundreds of millions paid for their participation in the Communist experiment. In the end the problem was not Stalin, but rather a system which claimed to be based on “science” and which allowed men like Stalin and Beria to rise to the top of the State machinery.