Anatol Goldberg

Anatoly "Anatol" Maksimovich Goldberg (; 7 May 1910 in St Petersburg – 5 March 1982 in London) was a broadcaster and writer who became head of the BBC Russian Service during the Cold War.

Life Goldberg was born on 7 May 1910 in St Petersburg, Russian Empire. Following the Russian Revolution he emigrated with his parents in 1918 and settled in Berlin, where he attended a French school, and later studied Chinese and Japanese at the Berlin School of Oriental Studies.

In the early 1930s when an architecture student he made his first visit to Moscow, acting as interpreter on the construction of the British embassy. and with the advent of the Nazi government in Germany he and his wife emigrated to Britain, where at the outbreak of World War II in 1939 he joined the BBC Monitoring Service, working in German, Russian and Spanish.

From its inception on 26 March 1946 He was made MBE for his services,

In fact the BBC's position seems to have been more complex. Ian Jacob, the BBC's Director of Overseas Services, wrote in 1949, "It is evident that any country deciding to embark on a service of broadcasts to foreign audiences does so because it wants to influence those audiences in its favour. All such broadcasting is therefore propaganda." The government department with responsibility for producing the propaganda was the Information Research Department, or IRD, a secret unit within the Foreign Office. A 1957 internal memorandum by the BBC's Foreign Office Liaison Officer says "much of the material and a great deal of the background for the BBC's broadcasts to the Soviet Union, the satellites and China reaches the BBC from this department. The liaison in this respect is both close and constant."

The issue of propaganda "led to bitter editorial disputes within the BBC", In 1958 Goldberg was replaced as head of the Russian Service, It was brought to press by his former BBC colleague Erik de Mauny. The New York Times wrote, "Ilya Ehrenburg, born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Kiev in 1891, was an outsized romantic who fell in love with Russia, revolution and Europe, embracing all three simultaneously, unable to deny any of them even when they betrayed his vision of their ideals.... No one was better fitted to write his biography than Anatol Goldberg, a product of the same cultivated Russian-Jewish professional class that molded Ehrenburg's temperament."

In paying tribute to Goldberg's gifts as a biographer, de Mauny says the study "sometimes seems too ready to give its subject the benefit of the doubt."