Pavel Palazhchenko
Pavel Palazhchenko or Palazchenko is a former high-level Soviet conference interpreter who was the chief English interpreter for Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze from 1985 and 1991.
Biography
Personal
Palazhchenko was born on 17 March 1949 in Monino, Moscow Oblast, Russia. He graduated from the Maurice Thorez Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages in 1972.Interpreter
As one of the leading interpreters of his time, Palazhchenko participated in all US-Soviet summit talks leading to the end of the Cold War. He is the author of a personal and political memoir, My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet Interpreter.In 1997, he helped Larry Ray arranged a New York City Hall meeting between Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Gorbachev, after he had become friends with Ray. Years later, Ray was convicted of sex trafficking, extortion, forced labor, conspiracy, money laundering, and other offenses, and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
Writer
Palazhchenko also wrote the Moi Nesistematichesky Slovar or My Unsystematic Dictionary which was published in Russia by R. Valent publications in May 2002. The 300-page Russian-English dictionary provides information, insight and cultural observation on the linguistic twists and turns that lie between the English and Russian languages; and was a sequel to Palazhchenko’s other work: the English-Russian dictionary published in 1999. The 1999 English-Russian dictionary dealt with trends in the political, diplomatic and journalistic usage in the English language.In 2005, the third book of this series, Unsystematic Dictionary-2005 was published.