[3] He was a "brilliant linguist and a lifelong Anglophile",[4] 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.
[4] In this position in the 1950s he was the focus of a dispute between the Foreign Office and the BBC,[1][4] the former accusing him of appeasement[3] of the Soviet regime, and in the late 1960s was attacked from Moscow over Czechoslovakia.
[3] However, for 35 years he delivered his Sunday evening interpretation of British and world current affairs, "Notes by our Observer", to his Russian audience, along with numerous additional topical commentaries.
[4] The BBC was broadcasting material that was "damaging to the Free World",[4] and the Russian Service failed to reflect "responsible British opinion"[4] and followed a general line "more like that of the New Statesman and Nation".
For me and people like me Anatol Goldberg exemplified the highest intellectual level and incomparable ability to analyse the most complicated events in the world in such a way that everybody could understand.
He taught us, or at least me, to see Britain not as a potential enemy, but as a society made up of people who, like us, just want to live.... And in this sense [he] was one of the main agents who prepared the ground for our perestroika.
"[4] In 1979 the Soviet Union issued a book warning of the dangers of the BBC, and drew attention to Goldberg's broadcasts:one can hear in his commentaries a respectful tone towards his audience, a familiarity with the true facts of real life, the outward appearance of logic in his reasoning.
One can hear of his genuine concern over the threat of military conflicts and the atmosphere of violence in the world, of the 'satisfaction' which he feels at the peace initiatives of various states including the USSR.
[4] At the time of his death, Goldberg was working on, and had substantially completed, a study of Ilya Ehrenburg, subtitled Revolutionary, novelist, poet, war correspondent, propagandist: the extraordinary epic of a Russian survivor.
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.
"[10] 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.