Aide to Stalin Has Last Word : Books: Unlike many in the dictator’s orbit, Pomona College professor survived to tell his story. His memoirs, ‘At Stalin’s Side,’ describe his years as a Soviet interpreter.

He was Stalin’s interpreter.

But unlike most people in the dictator’s orbit, Valentin M. Berezhkov lived to tell the tale, which is just what the Pomona College professor does in his just-published memoirs, “At Stalin’s Side.”

Born in 1916 in Kiev--when his country was still ruled by autocratic czars--Berezhkov arced the trajectory of Soviet Communism, spanning the Russian Revolution, communism’s long reign and the Soviet Union’s collapse 74 years later. Completing the circle, Berezhkov’s son Sergei interprets for Boris N. Yeltsin when the Russian leader meets with President Clinton.

Through eyewitness accounts of history, the elder Berezhkov offers Claremont students a priceless, first-person view of pivotal Soviet events. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a statesman’s presence and leonine white mane, Berezhkov, 77, feels free to tell his tales now. The Soviet Union is no more and most of his contemporaries are dead.

Berezhkov “has an extraordinary ability not only to re-create what he thought and felt at the time but to reflect on it, without fear of political pressure, as a historical episode that has run its course,” said David Elliott, a professor of government at Pomona College who co-teaches a class on the Cold War with Berezhkov.

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Berezhkov’s survival during the terror unleashed by Josef Stalin, his fall from grace at the hands of dreaded KGB chief Lavrenti Beria, and his subsequent rehabilitation and rise to diplomat would be the stuff of spy novels if it wasn’t real life.

“I have had the good fortune to be witness to some of the events that helped shape our century,” Berezhkov wrote in the preface. “I was 1 1/2 years old when the czarist empire crumbled. . . . My grandson, Daniel, had reached the same age when the Soviet empire fell to pieces. May God spare him the experience of my generation!”

Berezhkov was born in St. Petersburg, but his family fled to Kiev during the Russian civil war that followed the revolution. He recalled that as a young boy in the early 1930s he stepped over the frozen corpses of peasants who died of starvation when Stalin closed off the Ukraine--then known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union--to create an artificial famine that would force peasants onto collective farms.

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Although he escaped the fate of up to 7 million Soviets who died during the famine, Berezhkov recalls gnawing hunger during much of his childhood that left him too weak to walk.

Now, moving fluidly between personal anecdotes and historic events, he draws colorful sketches of times between upheaval and famine when Russians snatched briefly at happiness.

On warm summer nights in the 1930s, family and friends gathered in the Berezhkov apartment for impromptu concerts, causing passersby to gather under the window to hear the music. Berezhkov was part of a bohemian crowd of painters, artists and writers, all of whom spoke many languages and were happy to gather with a little food and drink in someone’s dacha, or country house, for a weekend of singing and dancing.

“We were convinced that in the Soviet Union we were building a system that would be fair for all; we didn’t think we needed to lead the kind of lavish lifestyle that the capitalists indulged in,” Berezhkov said of his youthful idealism.

As a young man, he studied German, English and naval technology. While serving his army stint in Vladivostok, Berezhkov’s language skills got him transferred to Moscow. World War II had just broken out and the Soviet Union, whose foreign service had been devastated by Stalin’s paranoid purges, desperately needed interpreters.

Berezhkov recalls being shocked upon meeting Stalin in late September, 1941, while interpreting at a dinner for an Anglo-American mission of British statesman Lord Beaverbrook and U.S. diplomat W. Averell Harriman. Stalin was small and haggard, with a pockmarked face and one arm shorter than the other, Berezhkov recalled, but he could exert great personal charm when he wanted.

But “Stalin always treated me in the same, even indifferent manner,” Berezhkov said. “Sometimes it seemed to me that he was looking right through me.”

Berezhkov had to adapt to Stalin’s nocturnal work habits. The Georgian statesman, who seized power in the U.S.S.R. after V.I. Lenin died in 1924, began work late in the evening and often continued until dawn, which meant that Berezhkov never went to bed until morning.

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Stalin unnerved him, Berezhkov said, filling him with a desire to hide like a child behind the curtains when the dictator appeared. Berezhkov was well aware of Stalin’s fear of people who knew too much. The dictator’s favorite axiom was “A dead man cannot bite.”

When a war cable sent by Stalin was two days late arriving in Washington, Berezhkov was told to investigate but could turn up no mistakes, he recalls.

“What do you mean, no one is to blame?” Soviet foreign minister V. M. Molotov thundered at him. “What will I say to Comrade Stalin, who demands an investigation and strict punishment for the culprits? When something goes wrong there is always someone to blame.”

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One time at his dacha, Stalin was kept awake by a barking dog, Berezhkov recalled. He summoned a guard and ordered him to kill the dog. The next morning, Stalin inquired about the dog and was told that the animal was a seeing eye dog for a blind peasant, and it was still alive. Instead of killing the dog, the sympathetic guard had succeeded in having the man hush the pet.

Enraged, Stalin ordered the guard brought before him and reordered him to kill the dog. “Next time you fail to obey my orders, I will order you killed too,” Stalin warned the man.

Berezhkov has spent long years mulling over Stalin’s legacy, which he says continues to haunt and hinder progress in Russia today.

“One of the main reasons for the failure of perestroika is that Stalin’s system continues to operate, particularly in remote areas,” he wrote. “. . . The psychological basis for the command-and-administer system that Stalin had created over the years . . . was a combination of fawning, loyalty, blind enthusiasm--and fear. When the master was no more, when fear disappeared and enthusiasm fizzled out, the system began to backfire and the country ended up on the edge of a precipice.”

Berezhkov still doesn’t understand why Stalin spared him after the KGB learned that the interpreter’s parents had defected to the West during World War II, enough of a taint to send thousands of others to Siberia or worse.

But after being told never to speak of his previous job, Berezhkov, then 30, was put out to pasture to edit magazines with names such as “Peace and the Working Class.” After Stalin’s death in 1953, Berezhkov’s old boss Molotov brought him back into favor, and he eventually rose to be first secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Washington.

When he received an invitation to teach in the United States, Berezhkov jumped at the chance to earn hard currency to send to his family back home. Since 1991, he has taught at the Claremont Colleges, Occidental College and the Monterey Institute of International Studies.