At Stalin's Side: His Interpreter's Memoirs from the October Revolution to the Fall of the Dictator's Empire

As an interpreter for both Stalin and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, Berezhkov was privy to such historic events as the negotiations culminating in the 1939 Soviet-Nazi nonagression pact, the Stalin-Churchill talks in Moscow in 1942, and Stalin's 1943 meeting with Roosevelt and Churchill in Teheran. Packed with credible eyewitness testimony, human drama and encounters with Hitler, Gustav Krupp, Chou En-lai and Lavrenty Beria, this vivid memoir offers a fresh perspective on Stalin's admiration for Hitler, the Yalta Conference, the U.S. program to develop the atomic bomb, Molotov's threat to occupy Finland in 1944, FDR's last telegram to Stalin and much else. Born in 1916, Berezhkov, who teaches political science at Claremont College in California, interweaves his personal recollections of his parents' flight to the Ukraine after the October 1917 revolution, famine, repression, his engineer father's humiliating arrest and torture in 1928-29, his parents' disappearance during the German occupation of Kiev in the 1940s and his heartbreaking reunion with his mother, his only surviving parent, 30 years later in a Swiss sanatorium. Photos. (Sept.)