Goldberg was born on 7 May 1910 in St Petersburg, Russia. Following the 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. He was a "brilliant linguist and a lifelong Anglophile", 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 a member of the Russian Service of the BBC and rose to become its head. In this position in the 1950s he was the focus of a dispute between the Foreign Office and the BBC, the former accusing him of appeasement of the Soviet regime, and in the late 1960s was attacked from Moscow over Czechoslovakia. 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. He was made MBE for his services, and was retained by the BBC beyond the normal retirement age. He had the reputation of being a helpful colleague, "always willing to give others the benefit of his great experience, elephantine memory and wide international contacts". He died in his post in 1982 at the age of 71, having recently celebrated his golden wedding; his funeral was at Golders Green.