“There had been concern expressed that I should have a State Department translator present also,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. Sukhodrev was the sole interpreter at summits between President Richard M. In Moscow in 1972 and in Washington a year later, Mr. “An interpreter at that level cannot - not ‘should not’ - simply cannot make a mistake.” Sukhodrev told the New York Times in 2005. As much as anyone else, he gave voice - in two languages - to the language of diplomacy and brinkmanship at the very highest levels. He was present at more meetings of the world’s superpowers than almost any other person in history, including the leaders for whom he spoke. Sukhodrev became recognized as so skilled and discreet that he was often trusted to be the only intermediary between the two sides. (Bob Burchette/The Washington Post)īecause language is so subject to misinterpretation, the long-standing diplomatic protocol at Cold War summit meetings had been for each country to bring its own interpreters.

Nixon, at a Washington summit in June 1973. Soviet interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev, center, with Soviet premier Leonid I. Sukhodrev maintained that he gave an “exact translation” of the Soviet leader’s words. The meaning of Khrushchev’s comment was endlessly parsed by Kremlinologists for decades, but Mr. Sukhodrev who provided the on-the-spot English translation of what became perhaps the most memorable and most threatening statement of the Cold War: “Whether you like it or not, we are on the right side of history. While Khrushchev spoke to a gathering of Western diplomats in Moscow in 1956, it was Mr. He put his linguistic skills to use in the Soviet foreign ministry and became the primary spoken-word interpreter for every Soviet leader from Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev. Sukhodrev, who was born in Moscow, spent several years in London as a child and learned to speak English with flawless fluency. According to Russian news media reports, the cause was cardiac arrest. The Russian foreign ministry and other outlets announced his death. Viktor Sukhodrev, a polished interpreter who was at the side of every Soviet leader for three decades as the English-language voice of the Kremlin and who was often the third person in the room during high-level summit meetings throughout the Cold War, died May 16 in Moscow.

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