THOUSAND OAKS : Onetime Stalin Interpreter Talks at College

In 1941, shortly after Hitler’s troops invaded the Soviet Union, a young Russian interpreter in the Berlin embassy suddenly found himself both a diplomat and spy behind enemy lines.

Assigned to negotiate the fate of Soviet citizens living in Berlin, Valentin M. Berezhkov could travel only under the watch of Hitler’s S. S. guards. Still, he helped smuggle a suitcase containing a radio transmitter to an underground network of anti-Nazi Germans.

“I was afraid the S. S. commandant was going to want to open the suitcase,” Berezhkov said, “and of course, if he had, he would have seen that the bottom (of the suitcase) was much higher than it should have been and he would have discovered the transmitter.”

Berezhkov, who spoke Monday at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, also spent five years interpreting for Joseph Stalin and foreign minister Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov. It was hard work, he said, because of Stalin’s habit of working 16 to 18 hours a day.

But as the official interpreter, Berezhkov witnessed history in the making. He attended wartime conferences with Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. In 1939, when Germany and the Soviet Union operated under a nonaggression pact, he translated for Molotov at a meeting with Adolf Hitler.

As they entered the richly carpeted meeting room, Berezhkov recalled being struck by the difference between the public and private Fuehrer.

“He did not look so impressive as when he addressed a crowd from very high,” Berezhkov said. “His handshake was rather unpleasant. The hand was wet and cold.”

Now 78, Berezhkov, whose face is framed by a shock of white hair, teaches at the Claremont Colleges. He also is a senior researcher at the Institute of USA and Canada Studies of the Russian Academy of Science.

While most of the 65 people who attended Berezhkov’s lecture were students or professors, at least one woman came out of professional curiosity.

“We have to interpret verbatim and simultaneously,” said Varvara Y. Olson, a Russian interpreter for the Los Angeles Superior Court. “I wanted to know how they did it.”