In November 1940 a young engineer-turned-interpreter sat at Hitler's conference table in the Reich Chancellery, close enough to shake his hand and to record that the palm was cold and damp. Three years later the same man sat between Stalin and Cordell Hull in the Kremlin, and then alone with Stalin and Roosevelt at Tehran, turning one man's Russian into another's English while the shape of the postwar world was settled over his shoulder. Almost nobody alive had been in those rooms. That is what this book is for. Valentin Berezhkov was not a soldier or a Party theoretician but an interpreter, which turns out to be the most useful vantage in the building. An engineer by training with good German and English, he served in the Soviet Trade Delegation in Berlin, translated for Mikoyan's commercial talks, and in November 1940 was attached to Molotov's delegation to Berlin as one of two Russian interpreters. He was in the German capital when the invasion came on 22 June 1941, was interned and repatriated through Turkey, and returned to Moscow as one of the two men who interpreted for Stalin and Molotov with the Western Allies. At Tehran he handled, by his own account, the entire private conversation between Stalin and Roosevelt with nobody else present. First-hand testimony of the rarest kind, by a witness who was in the room and remembered the detail. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the one room the memoir was required to bar.
