Interpreter’s Life in Political Waters : Diplomacy: A United Nations official looks back at his past career as a top-level Soviet translator.

UNITED NATIONS —  It was the most dramatic clash of Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev’s coast-to-coast tour: The mayor of Los Angeles stood up and informed the visitor that his people would never bury America, as the fiery Soviet leader had threatened to do.

As a banquet audience gasped, Khrushchev tossed aside a prepared speech and ripped into Mayor Norris Poulson with a scathing reply.

For young Viktor Sukhodrev, the interpreter, it was a nightmare.

“He started quoting Ukrainian proverbs, and I don’t speak Ukrainian,” Sukhodrev said in an interview during a break from his new job as a General Assembly official. “I still talk about it when I give lectures to young foreign service officers, telling them how you have to expect anything.”

Sukhodrev said Khrushchev was already irritated when the Soviet entourage arrived in Southern California just after noon on Sept. 19, 1959, because of Cold War regulations that had placed Disneyland off-limits to him.

And he was further annoyed that the main event of the day was a visit to the set of “Can Can” at 20th Century Fox, rather than an inspection of an aerospace plant or some other more serious activity.

When the group reached the Ambassador Hotel that evening and was greeted by a less-than-friendly Poulson, the premier turned purple.

“I was looking at Mrs. Khrushchev’s interpreter, and all I could see was her eyes widening in horror,” Sukhodrev said. “I can remember this proverb, something about, ‘Your eyes have seen what you’re buying but you can’t swallow it,’ and others that I really had to guess about. At one point, he turned to young Tupolev, the son of the aircraft designer, and asked how many hours it would take to fly back to Moscow, and I thought we were on the way, but somebody in the back of the room saved the day.

“As Khrushchev was shouting that he had come to Los Angeles with his hand extended, a voice--it must have been that of an emigre--called out in perfect Russian, ‘We take it.’ ”

Sukhodrev was picked as the junior partner to Oleg Troyanovsky, now the Soviet ambassador to Beijing, for the interpreting team to go along on the first U.S. visit by a Kremlin chief.

He had entered the foreign service only three years before after graduating from the Moscow Foreign Languages Institute, and gone to work almost immediately for Andrei A. Gromyko, the poker-faced foreign minister who would be elevated to the presidency in 1986.

His first assignment for Gromyko, Sukhodrev said, was to interpret at a meeting with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

“I could hardly believe that I was in a room with the man we all regarded as the architect of the Cold War,” he recalled. “He noticed me and said to Gromyko ‘You’ve got a new interpreter. You always had Troyanovsky.’ Gromyko answered, ‘He’s a good substitute,’ so I knew that I had made the grade.”

The veteran interpreter--his once jet-black hair now slightly gray--later traveled with Leonid I. Brezhnev, and his final service for a Soviet head of government was with Mikhail S. Gorbachev last December for the meeting with President Reagan in New York.

“That was my voice you heard when Gorbachev spoke on television,” he said, shaking his head. “It was especially strange to hear myself on all the news broadcasts later. That was sort of a new experience for me.”

Other interpreters have long recognized Sukhodrev as a master of his craft, able to slip from British- to American-accented English and back without a slip.

As reporters observed during his frequent appearances at the Geneva peace talks over the years, he polished his vocabulary and stayed current with slang through voracious reading of the Western press.

It was not all learned in school, he confessed.

As a youth, he accompanied his mother to London at the beginning of World War II. She worked with a Soviet trade mission there until 1945. Although he attended an embassy school, he played in the street with English children.

“I think I can still hold my own with a London taxi driver,” he said with a grin.

Although Soviet diplomats have customarily displayed better language facility than Americans, Sukhodrev said, he believes U. S. diplomats have improved substantially in the more than three decades he has dealt with them.

“In my first contacts with the embassy in Moscow in 1956, there were just a few who could barely manage to communicate,” he said. “Now, any U.S. official whose job is to maintain contact with the government can speak Russian.”

In his new post at the United Nations, Sukhodrev works directly under Ronald Spiers, the undersecretary for political and General Assembly affairs, who until his retirement earlier this year was undersecretary of state for management.

“It’s a reflection of the new atmosphere between our countries that I think we work well together,” he said of Spiers.