Some memoirs are valuable for what their author saw, and a few for what he was forbidden to say; this one is remarkable because it is both at once, and because the same man performs both offices. In November 1940 a young engineer-turned-interpreter named Valentin Berezhkov sat at Adolf Hitler's conference table in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, close enough to shake the Führer's hand and record that "his palm was cold and moist to the touch, and his feverish eyes seemed to bore through you like gimlets." Three years later he 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 man's English while the shape of the post-war world was settled over his shoulder. Almost no one alive had been in those particular rooms. That is the rescue this book performs, and it is a real one. But the same author, writing in 1983, also had to stand at the door of a room the Soviet state insisted did not exist — and he did his duty there too, denying under his own eyewitness authority a document we now know was signed. Read for the rooms he describes, History in the Making is first-hand testimony of the rarest kind. Read for the room he bars, it is a small masterclass in what a Soviet diplomatic memoir of the pre-glasnost years was required to forget.
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, then translated for Anastas Mikoyan's commercial talks, and in November 1940 was attached to Molotov's delegation to Berlin as one of two Russian interpreters. From there his career runs straight through the high diplomacy of the war. He was in the German capital when the invasion came on 22 June 1941, was interned and repatriated through Turkey, and returned to Moscow to serve as one of the two men — Vladimir Pavlov was the other — who interpreted for Stalin and Molotov with the Western Allies. He rendered Stalin's words to Hull at the Moscow Conference of October 1943; at Tehran that winter he handled, by his own account, the entire private conversation between Stalin and Roosevelt with no one else present, Roosevelt having deliberately left his own interpreter behind. Yalta and Potsdam he reconstructs rather than remembers — by 1945 other interpreters had taken his place at the summit table — but the wartime alliance is narrated by a man who was, for its decisive years, physically in the room. When he describes Ribbentrop drawing a folded sheet of proposals from his tunic, or the air-raid siren that drove the whole German delegation into a bunker, he is describing what he watched happen a metre away.
Establish the date of the text before weighing it. The spine reads 1983 and the copyright page carries Progress Publishers, Moscow, in that year, translated from the Russian Tak delalas' istoriya. The latest event the book reaches for is a speech by Zbigniew Brzezinski to American newspaper editors in April 1980, which means the Russian was written around 1981–82 and the English issued in 1983 — the very end of the Brezhnev era, running into the brief Andropov interval, and squarely before Gorbachev, glasnost (openness) and the reckonings they permitted. This dating matters, because the book's governing purpose belongs to that exact moment. History in the Making is not, at bottom, a war memoir. It is a détente document, written as détente died. Its closing chapter, "Prospects for Peaceful Coexistence," argues that because the USSR and the United States cooperated against Hitler despite "the fundamental ideological differences between the two main partners," they can cooperate again; the Soviet Union, it says, remains "guided by the Leninist principle of peaceful coexistence between states with differing social systems." The whole apparatus of the book — the Big Three at their friendliest, the shared toasts, the experience of cooperation between two systems — is marshalled to make a single argument to a Western readership at the opening of the second Cold War: it worked before, it can work again. The commission is a plea for the alliance's spirit, addressed across the wreckage of SALT and the invasion of Afghanistan to the people who were about to elect Ronald Reagan.
That purpose is honourable enough on its face, and parts of the book serve it honestly. But it requires the author to present the Soviet state of 1939–41 as an unambiguous force for peace, betrayed by Western appeasers — and there the memoir meets the one set of facts it cannot admit, and does not.
On the night of 23 August 1939 in Moscow, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the German-Soviet Treaty of Non-Aggression. To it was attached a Secret Additional Protocol dividing Eastern Europe into "spheres of influence": Finland, Estonia and Latvia to the Soviet sphere, with Lithuania added by a further secret protocol of 28 September; Poland partitioned along the line of the Narew, Vistula and San; the Soviet interest in Bessarabia noted and Germany's disinterest recorded. This is not a matter of interpretation. The German originals were photographed from the captured Foreign Office files at the end of the war, produced at the Nuremberg tribunal, and published by the United States State Department in 1948 as part of Nazi–Soviet Relations, 1939–1941. The map of the following two years — the Red Army's entry into eastern Poland on 17 September 1939, the absorption of the three Baltic republics in 1940, the taking of Bessarabia — followed the protocol's lines almost exactly. The Soviet government denied the document's existence or authenticity for fifty years, until the Congress of People's Deputies, on the report of a commission chaired by Alexander Yakovlev, formally acknowledged and condemned it in December 1989.
In 1983 that admission was six years away, and Berezhkov writes on the near side of it. His treatment of the pact runs through the whole first movement of the book, and it is a careful, practised defence: collective security had failed because Britain and France would not deal seriously with Moscow; the pact bought time; it was, as the questions of "the younger generation who have insufficient knowledge of the facts" are told, a regrettable necessity forced on a peace-loving state. He quotes Stalin's own formula — "A non-aggression pact is a pact of peace between two states" — and, crucially, Stalin's assurance that this particular pact "did not jeopardize, either directly or indirectly, the territorial integrity, independence and honour of the peace-loving state." The territorial integrity of whom, exactly, the passage does not ask. It cannot, because the answer is Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania, and the instrument that jeopardised them is the protocol whose existence the book must deny.
And deny it the book does, in the open, in the author's own voice, in the single most revealing passage in three hundred pages. Berezhkov recalls that in April 1980 Brzezinski, then Carter's national security adviser, had spoken of "a secret protocol in a draft agreement between the Soviet Union and the Axis powers" as evidence of long-standing Russian designs on the Persian Gulf. Berezhkov, who happened to be in Washington, wrote to the Washington Post to refute him. As "an eye-witness of those far-off events," he testifies that the Soviet delegation refused Hitler's proposals outright and that "there had been no agreements or secret protocols signed by the Soviet government." He calls the charge a "blatant attempt to falsify history," and when the paper declines to print his letter he draws the moral: "Anti-Soviet insinuations can always find space in the American newspapers, but for the restoration of historical truth there is no room."
It is worth being precise here, because the passage is more damning under precision, not less. Brzezinski's specific reference was to the Berlin negotiations of November 1940 — the four-power talks Berezhkov himself interpreted, at which Ribbentrop urged the USSR to join the Axis and carve up "the British estate," and to which the Soviet side replied on 25 November with counter-demands that Germany never answered. On the narrow point, Berezhkov is not lying: no agreement was signed in November 1940; the Soviet delegation did decline Hitler's grand design; his eyewitness account of that refusal is accurate and valuable. But he does not confine his denial to November 1940. He widens it, in the same breath, into a blanket — "no agreements or secret protocols signed by the Soviet government" — and that blanket is cut to cover August 1939 as well. The rhetorical machinery is exquisite and it is worth naming: a true and defensible denial about one meeting is used to smuggle in a false and indefensible denial about another. The eyewitness deploys the authority of what he really saw in Berlin to vouch for something he was not present at in Moscow and which had, in fact, occurred. This is not the passive silence of a man who leaves a subject alone. It is an active testimony to a negative, sworn by a witness, in a matter where the document existed. It is the load-bearing wall of the book's whole account of 1939–41, and it was false when it was written.
Around that central denial the smaller silences arrange themselves. The seizure of eastern Poland in September 1939 appears only as "the reunification of the Western Ukraine with the Soviet Ukraine and Western Byelorussia with Soviet Byelorussia" — a homecoming, not an invasion, with the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) that had entered from the west three weeks earlier nowhere in the frame. When the Polish frontier is argued out at length in the chapters on Tehran and Yalta, the moving of the border is justified by the Curzon Line and by a 1939 settlement made "in accordance with the will of the people living in these regions as expressed in a plebiscite conducted on a broad democratic basis" — a plebiscite conducted, in fact, under Red Army occupation. The three Baltic republics are described as having entered the Soviet Union in 1940 "at the express will of their peoples." Each of these is the official formula of its day, and each is the visible cladding over the protocol beneath.
One silence is total, and it is the one that matters most for the book's own subject, because Berezhkov's later chapters turn on the breakdown of trust between Moscow and the Poles. In the spring of 1940 — the same season the pact's map was being filled in — the NKVD shot some 22,000 Polish officers, officials and prisoners at Katyn and other sites, on a proposal from Beria approved by the Politburo on 5 March 1940. The Germans discovered the graves and announced them in April 1943; Moscow used the London Poles' appeal for a Red Cross investigation as the pretext to break relations, and blamed the Germans for the killings until the Soviet government itself admitted NKVD responsibility in 1990. The word Katyn does not appear in this book. The only "graves" in its pages are the German war graves whose whereabouts Ambassador Schulenburg keeps asking about — for intelligence purposes, Berezhkov shrewdly notes — in the tense months before Barbarossa. A diplomat's memoir that spends chapters on the poisoned relations between the Soviet command and the Polish government-in-exile, and never once names the massacre that poisoned them, is not telling the story incompletely. It is telling a different story, from which the decisive fact has been surgically removed.
There is a further irony the author cannot have intended. Berezhkov reaches confidently for captured German records when they indict Hitler: he cites Halder's diary, Directive No. 18, "the secret archives of the German government" and "the documents of the Nuremberg trials" to prove that Hitler was plotting eastward even as he signed the pact. He is right to. But the same Nuremberg record, the same captured German archive, contains the photographed secret protocol. The book trusts that archive absolutely on one page and denies its most inconvenient contents on another. The evidentiary standard is not a standard at all; it is a filter, admitting what convicts the enemy and excluding what implicates the state that published the book.
None of this is a reason to throw the book away, and a reader told to would be poorly served, because the eyewitness core is exactly as good as its subject is rare. Strip out the enforced account of 1939 and what remains is one of the very few first-hand records of Soviet high diplomacy written by a man who was physically present at its central scenes, and who could write.
The Berlin chapters are the jewel. Berezhkov's Hitler is observed, not editorialised: the theatrical entrance through an arch of SS men, the small figure "hardly noticeable" in the vast office, the long fluent monologue delivered "like that of an actor who knew his lines well," the cold moist palm and the boring eyes. His Göring is a corpulent peacock in silver-thread fabric with rings on every finger; his Ribbentrop a man who reads out plans for dividing the British Empire and then, when the sirens wail, hustles his guests down to a bunker. And it is in that bunker that the memoir gives us its finest moment, one no institute history could invent because it happened and Berezhkov was there to hear it. Ribbentrop resumes his talk of spheres of influence, insisting Britain is finished — and Molotov cuts in: "If England is finished, why are we sitting in this shelter? And who is dropping bombs so close that we can hear them even from here?" The British bombs that fell on Berlin that night, driving the architects of the New Order into their cellar while they discussed the carve-up of a supposedly beaten enemy, are the kind of detail that only a witness brings back. The book is full of them.
The wartime chapters carry the same authority whenever Berezhkov is reporting what he personally handled: the mechanics of Lend-Lease and the convoy suspensions, the long argument over the second front, the texture of the Moscow Conference and of Tehran — Stalin's manner across a table, the drafting of telegrams checked and corrected in Stalin's own hand, the private Roosevelt conversation he interpreted alone and was terrified of muffing. On the technique of summit interpreting itself, and on the personalities as they struck a sharp-eyed young man in the room, the book is a genuine primary source, and historians of the alliance have mined it as one. Where Berezhkov reconstructs from documents — Yalta, Potsdam, the percentages Churchill scrawled in the Kremlin — he is a competent narrator working from the record like anyone else, and no better; where he remembers, he is close to irreplaceable. The reader who wants to know how the diplomacy of the Grand Alliance actually felt from the Soviet side of the table will find more here than in a shelf of the official histories this series also reprints. That is the rescue, and it is worth the reader's time.
The judgement the memoir is built to prevent had already been written, in the days the pact was signed, by the tradition this series speaks from. When Ribbentrop's plane landed in Moscow in August 1939, the exiled Trotsky — with one year left to live before Stalin's assassin reached him — read the event with a clarity the passage of time has only confirmed. In a statement to the British press dated 2 September 1939, as German troops poured into Poland, he fixed the sequence the Soviet censorship would spend half a century blurring: "the Stalinist parliament ratified the German-Soviet pact on the very day that Germany invaded Poland." It was the pact, he argued — the "particular percussion" — that fired the starting gun, and he understood already that this was the fact the Kremlin would most want erased. "No power," he wrote, "can erase this from the annals of history." It is hard to imagine a sentence that sits more exactly across Berezhkov's letter to the Washington Post: one man insisting in 1939 that the record cannot be erased, another insisting in 1980 that there was no record to erase.
Nor did the Fourth International flinch from the second half of the truth, the half about territory that the "reunification" and "plebiscite" formulas exist to hide. Writing on 25 September 1939, as the Red Army completed its share of Poland, Trotsky named the arrangement for what it was — "a military alliance with Hitler" through which the Kremlin gained "the possibility of occupying Poland" — and drew the conclusion that no Progress volume could: "We were and remain against seizures of new territories by the Kremlin." This was not hindsight. It was published within weeks of the events Berezhkov spent his career translating into the language of legitimacy, by the movement his own state's textbooks denounced as fascist agents. The anti-Stalinist left did not need the archives opened in 1989 or the confession of 1990 to see the shape of the thing. It saw it in real time, said so, and paid for saying so.
That is the case for republishing History in the Making precisely as it stands. Its Berlin scenes and its account of the wartime alliance are a real contribution to the history of the twentieth century, made by an observant, literate man who was genuinely present. Its treatment of 1939–41 is a real contribution to a different history — the history of what a Soviet state at the end of the Brezhnev years required an honest and gifted servant to affirm, in his own name, against the documentary record. The one thing the book cannot give the reader is the means to tell its two halves apart, because it presents the eyewitness Berlin of 1940 and the sworn-blind Moscow of 1939 in the same steady, plausible, first-person voice. Bring the other voice to it — the one that wrote in September 1939 that no power can erase this from the annals of history — and the seam becomes visible. Read the rooms Berezhkov describes for the truth he carried out of them. Read the room he denies for the truth he was made to leave behind. The denial is as historic as anything he witnessed; it simply belongs to a history he was not allowed to write.