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Late at night in suburban Claremont, Valentin M. Berezhkov scans the shortwave radio dial for news of his Russian homeland, listening with growing unease to speeches by Communist hard-liners.
The voices take him back half a century to the days when, filled with idealism and the invulnerability of youth, he interpreted for the most ruthless dictator in Soviet history, Josef Stalin.
Berezhkov was on the scene at critical moments in history, including Adolf Hitler's 1941 declaration of war against the Soviet Union and the 1943 Tehran Conference, when the Allies agreed to open a Western front.
Working for Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, he met Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The tall, gaunt interpreter was at times the essential link through which communications flowed.
Today, at 75, he is still a commanding presence, sporting a leonine mane of white hair and speaking in faintly accented English as he navigates his way around the Claremont colleges, where he is a visiting professor of political science.
Berezhkov's account of what Soviets call The Great Patriotic War and his later rise to prominence as a diplomat is a riveting tale filled with the stuff of spy novels: narrow brushes with death, Kremlin intrigue and a teen-age son who caused an international incident in 1983 by trying to defect to the United States.
But Berezhkov's eyewitness account of how this century's leaders carved up the world and charted a future that puts him in a unique position among scholars. He is a living repository of history whose most famous Russian book, "I was Stalin's Translator," is now being considered for publication in English by Random House.
Berezhkov says it was only fate-or perhaps uncharacteristic oversight-that led Stalin to spare his life when many who knew much less were being shot or sent to rot in Siberia. Lecturing to Pitzer and Pomona college students in a course titled "Gorbachev and Perestroika: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union," he weaves in reminiscences and details that few academics can match.
"Now, of course, I know he (Stalin) was a bloody monster . . . and I wonder how I survived, but then I had no fear. I believed in Stalin, I felt he was a...