I just got done reading At Stalin's Side (Valentin Berezhkov, 1994, Birch Lane Press).
It's a good book, although it might confuse readers not intimately acquainted with the socialist regime in Russia 1917-1991, because the writer wrote at length starting from the beginning, and then suddenly bumped up to 1945, and then went back to the beginning, and then went back to 1945, &c., &c., &c.
It's sort of like reading history 1916, then 1945, then 1920, then 1943, then 1924, then 1939, then 1929, then 1946, then 1931, then 1953; but as long as one's aware that's the format, it's an easy read.
The writer was first a German-language translator for the Russian ambassador to Germany 1939-1941, and then an English-language translator for Molotov and Stalin, a job he shared with another guy.
He sets the record straight about certain events and personalities about whom myths and mistruths had been told during the socialist era; facts which were then (1994) emerging and have since been verified by other sources.
For those not familiar with post-socialist biography (actually, beginning with Khrushchev Remembers, in 1970), there are gaps in stories, and that is a flaw too in this book.
Berezhkov was one of the few fortunate Soviet subjects in the carnage and disarray of both the second world war and the decades following. He had been very close to his parents, who were in Kiev when that city was taken by the Germans, after which his parents disappeared for twenty-eight years; evaporated without a trace.
He was reunited with his mother in 1969 (his father had recently died), but his description of that is simply a couple of paragraphs in which he betrays no feeling, only a newspaper-reportage of the facts.
Then there had been a sister, also lost in Kiev and thought dead, until he discovered her--by sheer chance--in Lost Angeles in 1992, more than fifty years after they had last seen each other. He had not even mentioned this sister until the final pages of the book, giving the impression he had been an only child. Their reunion was, again, only a couple of paragraphs, a cold detachment merely reciting facts, betraying no feeling.
I have no idea why he treats the reader so; either the reunions were so powerfully overwhelming he could not articulate his feelings, or having been raised under socialism, he was naturally inclined to omit things.
Some might remember an incident from 1983, when the teenaged son of a Soviet diplomat in Washington, D.C., wrote Ronald Reagan, asking for political asylum in the United States; that was this writer's son from a second marriage.
It's a good book, and as long as one knows the format (this switching back-and-forth), an easy read too. But be aware there's unexplained gaps.
