The Mystery of Olga Chekhova Read online

  Lyuba and Lev moved in with Aunt Olya at 23 Gogolevsky bulvar, and a year later their son, Andrei, was born. The population of the apartment even included Lev’s old nanny, Fanny Stangel, who still spoke only German. Lev himself, however, was hardly ever there. He was supposedly touring Central Asia, composing songs for the Red Army, to whose propaganda department he was now attached.

  Lev’s apparent freedom to roam seems extraordinary at such a time of bureaucratic controls. In 1930, the year of his marriage, he travelled down the Caucasus, through South Ossetia and along the Black Sea coast. He was fascinated by the polyphonic singing he had heard on the way, but his real reason for vowing to return was a growing obsession with the mountains themselves. ‘I was addicted for ever,’ he wrote later. He argued that this love of rock climbing was not to conquer peaks, but to explore his own limits of endurance, to train his will and to survive everything that nature put in his path.

  As the tensions of the Stalinist regime began to build in the 1930S, the dangers would not come on a cliff-face. Nobody would be safe, even in their own apartment. Fear took on a different dimension as people lay in bed before dawn, awakened by the footsteps of an arrest squad rushing up the communal staircase. They relaxed only after they heard the hammering on somebody else’s door.

  14. The Totalitarian Years

  On 30 January 1933, after a day of confusion and uncertainty, the evening paper in Berlin announced: ‘Hitler Reichschancellor’. A few hours later, massed ranks of SA Brown Shirts marched in a victory parade through the floodlit Brandenburg Gate. Their supporters on both sides of the Pariser Platz cheered and chanted, their arms erect in the Nazi salute.

  From the windows of the Adlon Hotel, the rich looked on as if from theatre boxes, still unable to take such vulgar street drama seriously. But even those who could imagine what it signified experienced a sense of angry disbelief. There were many who loathed the Nazis in Berlin, a city which had always taken pride in its irreverent jokes. The Nazi vote, to the frustration of Goebbels, who had been put in charge of the party in the capital, had always been lower than anywhere else. But the parade that evening was a warning that electoral percentages were about to become as irrelevant as the rule of law.

  Those who believed that such a grotesque political movement could not last long were rapidly disabused. Carnival in Berlin, a more nervous one than in previous years, was suddenly pushed aside by the Reichstag fire on 28 February. The Nazis had called the Reichstag a ‘hot air factory’, but Hitler, seizing the opportunity, promoted it to the symbol of German civilization. Well before dawn, the first Nazi snatch squads were on their way to arrest Communists and Socialists alike. Within hours, emergency legislation gave Hitler total power.

  Even after the suspension of all civil liberties, many Berlin Jews still joked that they had passed through the Red Sea and that they would ‘pass through the brown shit’. Others had a clearer idea of what was at stake. Left-wingers and Jews in the theatre and cinema would never be allowed to work again. Ernst Toller and Max Reinhardt soon left for the United States. Altogether that year, 40,000 Jews left Germany, including twenty Nobel laureates, Einstein among them. Others in artistic and scientific circles waited much longer, in many cases until 1938, to see whether their world would return to its senses. Conrad Veidt, who in 1931 had starred with Olga Chekhova in Die Nacht der Entscheidung (The Night of Decision), left because his wife was Jewish. Yet he later became famous in the English-speaking world for his role as Major Strasser ‘of the Third Reich’ in Casablanca.

  The very fact of staying enforced a large degree of collaboration on actors who continued to work. Some of the theatrical anecdotes which tried to mitigate their complicity with the regime were less than convincing. Olga Chekhova recounted the following story. She and a friend, the elderly comic actress Adele Sandrock, who called her ‘Mouse’ (presumably because she was so unmouselike), were apparently invited to the propaganda ministry, known to Berliners as the Promi. ’Adele had some fluffy garment wrapped around her and had a huge embroidered handbag. Hitler appeared and started one of his monologues as always. He said that he knew the Burgtheater, where Adele was playing, and he had admired their previous plays, but he had to point out that in a recent performance Jewish actors had been enthusiastically applauded. Adele interrupted him. “Herr Reichschancellor,” she said. “Please drop this subject. I don’t want to hear about it. But between you and me, I must admit that my best lovers were Jewish.” Hitler was stunned into silence. Adele got up from her chair, turned to Olga Konstantinovna. “Mouse, can you take me home, please?”

  “‘Of course, dear Adele,” she said, and bade Hitler and Goebbels farewell: “Alles Gute, meine Herren.”’

  This highly dubious vignette raises a question about Olga Chekhova’s first meeting with Hitler. Her version of events depended upon her audience. In her two post-war volumes of memoirs, she of course played down her contacts as much as possible. She was also a good deal less than frank in her written report for Abakumov, the chief of SMERSh, in Moscow in May 1945. Yet she did reveal in her first SMERSh interview in Berlin on 29 April, while the fighting still raged in the city, that she had been presented to Hitler very soon after the Nazi takeover:

  Q [COLONEL SHKURIN]: Did you happen to meet leaders of the German fascist state?

  A [OLGA CHEKHOVA]: When Hitler came to power in 1933 I was invited to a reception given by Propaganda Minister Goebbels where Hitler was also present. I and other actors were introduced to Hitler. He expressed his pleasure at meeting me. Also he expressed his interest in Russian art and in my aunt, Olga Leonardovna Chekhova.

  It is a great pity that she did not record in more detail Hitler’s opinions on Russian art. Would he, like Lenin, have enjoyed the plays of Chekhov, while wanting to exterminate the human material in which they were set? Or was he, the arriviste dictator, simply fawning upon a star he had worshipped in his years as an outcast?

  Both Hitler and Goebbels were obsessed with the cinema. Goebbels is estimated to have seen more than 1,100 films in the dozen years of the Nazi regime. On Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, Goebbels presented him with a collection of 120 movies for the screening room in the Fiihrer’s Alpine retreat, the Berghof. Albert Speer later recounted how Hitler used to keep them up into the early hours of the morning, lecturing them on what they had just seen as if he were a frustrated movie critic.

  Hitler was also fascinated by the Swedish actress Zarah Leander, who was frequently compared to Olga Chekhova. Leander was famous for her singing in a low, husky voice. Hitler used to coax his adored dog, Blondi, to sing when he wanted to impress his inner circle of secretaries and officers at the Berghof. Then, when she began to give voice, he would say: ‘Sing lower, Blondi, sing like Zarah Leander!’ and she would howl like a wolf. It has recently emerged that Zarah Leander was probably a much more active agent for Soviet intelligence than Olga Chekhova. Leander, who was given the NKVD codename of ‘Rose-Marie’, had the advantage of being able to travel back to Sweden, where she could make contact unseen with her controller, Zoya Rybkina, the deputy rezident in Stockholm. Rybkina would not have been informed of Olga Chekhova at that time, but Beria made Rybkina Olga Chekhova’s controller in extraordinary circumstances in 1953, as will be seen later.

  For Hitler and Goebbels, the movies were a make-believe world of intoxicating power. Nazism, like Communism, had copied much from the Church, but it owed just as big a debt to the artifical glamour and emotions of the Kino. It is highly significant that the Nazis saw nothing strange in the idea of politics imitating popular art. It was part of their breathtaking irresponsibility. Of course, Hitler and Goebbels also saw the cinema as a powerful weapon of propaganda and social engineering. The Nazification of the industry was vital for their purposes and UFA returned to the role originally planned for its prototype in 1917.

  Yet this was not an entirely dramatic change of course. During the two years before Hitler’s assumption of power, the UFA studios, financed by right-wing
money, had produced a series of strongly patriotic historical movies, such as Der Choral von Leuthen, another Frederick the Great film in which Olga Chekhova starred, Yorck, the hero of the Prussian volte-face against Napoleon, and Der schwarze Husar (The Black Hussar). Another film, the story of a heroic struggle by a German U-Boat crew against a British destroyer during the First World War, happened to be launched on the day after the Nazi assumption of power.

  In the beginning, the new rulers of Germany also needed glamour, especially at their government receptions. Most of the heavily built Nazi wives constituted both an aesthetic and a social embarrassment. Some of the leaders themselves were little better. Himmler, according to Olga Chekhova, used to shuffle his feet. He was both gauche and uneasy in female company. The presence of movie stars, especially one like Olga Chekhova, famous for her roles as a baroness, was important for the nouveaux puissants. It was slightly reminiscent of Napoleon’s hope that the young émigré nobles whom he had allowed to return would raise the tone of his court. But the cosmopolitan sophistication of stars like Olga Chekhova was also needed to make the regime more acceptable internationally.

  Olga’s mother, Baba Knipper, was indignant when an early-morning call summoned her daughter to an early-evening reception given by Goebbels. ‘What sort of manners is it to invite a lady by telephone in the morning to command her to come to something in the afternoon?’ she demanded. Olga Chekhova, a true professional, was far more concerned with the effect on the day’s filming, which did not finish until seven. Her director, however, told her that she must go. Nobody at Babelsberg could afford to thwart the Reichsminister for Propaganda and People’s Enlightenment. As Olga left the studio, she found a ‘little man’ from the propaganda ministry waiting to drive her in a sports car to the reception in the Wilhelm Strasse. On the way, she insisted that he stop so that she could buy a rose to smarten up her dress.

  Magda Goebbels, the only grande dame the Nazi regime possessed, reproved her gently. ‘So late, Frau Chekhova.’

  ‘I came here straight from work, Frau Goebbels,’ she replied, ‘and I only received the invitation by telephone this morning.’

  Hitler on this occasion was talking about what he expected from the arts, which led him on to the subject of his own painting as a young man. He spoke to Olga Chekhova about her movie Burning Frontiers, released in 1926. ‘Hitler flooded me with compliments,’ she recounted, and she remarked on his ‘Austrian courtesy’. In her view Hitler made an effort to be charming, while Dr Goebbels succeeded by dint of tremendous application, ‘a polished intellect’ and a sun-ray lamp. According to one of Hitler’s secretaries, her counterparts at the propaganda ministry used to rush to the window to watch him leave the building. ’Oh,‘ they gushed to her amazement, ’if you only knew what eyes Goebbels has, and what an enchanting smile!‘

  Goebbels often described Olga Chekhova in his diaries as ‘eine charmanteFrau‘, but how far he attempted to exercise his own charm with her is not known. The Reichsminister for Propaganda was so famous for his casting-couch tactics that starlets were known as ‘Goebbels-Gespielin’ or ’Goebbels play-things‘. Berliners used to joke that he did not sleep in his own bed, but in his own big mouth, because the slang word for mouth—’Klappe‘—also meant a clapperboard in the movies.

  The diminutive and club-footed ‘Goat of Babelsberg’ was not, however, all-conquering. His pouncing was seen as an unpleasant rite of passage to be brushed off by those who had the courage. The actress Irene von Meyendorff said of him: ’Ach, der mit seinem Regenwurm!‘ (’Oh, him with his little worm!‘)

  Goebbels probably did not really love women. He just needed to conquer them because he had a severe inferiority complex due to his physical limitations. One of the intriguing paradoxes is that Goebbels preferred exotic-looking women and was not attracted by the stereotypes of blonde Aryan beauty which he lauded in his propaganda films. Nevertheless, all that can be said in his favour is that his approach was less brutal than Beria’s technique of kidnap, rape and then Gulag for those who resisted.

  The Goat of Babelsberg’s greatest mistake was to fall dramatically in love with a young Czech actress called Lida Baarova. He met her just before the 1936 Berlin Olympics on the set of the aptly named movie Stunde der Versuchung (Hour of Temptation). Lida Baarova, who was slim and extraordinarily beautiful, with wonderful eyes, lived with her co-star, Gustav Fröhlich. They shared a house close to the Goebbels villa on the Schwanenwerder peninsula next to Wannsee. Fröhlich is said to have surprised the secret lovers in the back of a car. According to some versions, Fröhlich punched the Reichsminister for Propaganda, but he is more likely to have taken it out on Lida Baarova.

  The rumours in movie and Nazi circles intensified over the next eighteen months. Goebbels tried to cover his tracks in the evening. On several occasions, he invited himself to Olga Chekhova’s apartment to provide himself with an alibi. Not surprisingly, he was unable to keep the affair secret. When confronted by his outraged wife, Magda, he told her that he wanted a divorce. This was unwise. Magda was a formidable opponent. She worshipped Hitler, and he in return admired her enormously for her damenhaft, or ‘ladylike’ qualities, which were so rare among the wives of the Nazi elite.

  Hitler was furious when Magda Goebbels told him what was happening. He had no idea, because nobody around him had dared to repeat the stories. Goebbels was the great propagator of Nazi family values. His ministry had even issued an immodest amount of newsreel footage about the perfection of the large Goebbels family, with a row of shining, well-drilled children, almost as if they constituted the ersatz royal family of the National Socialist state. And now Goebbels wanted to divorce Magda and marry a non-German - in fact a Slav. Hitler clearly thought that his most trusted deputy had taken leave of his senses. Goebbels was told in very harsh terms that he must return to his wife immediately. Lida Baarova was never to be seen in Berlin again. Her last movie for UFA was Preussische Liebegeschichte (Prussian Love Story) in 1938. She returned to Prague that autumn, just as a far more tragic event befell her country as a result of the Munich agreement.

  A frenzy of gossip had spread from Babelsberg back to the capital. Berliners of all political persuasions were fascinated by the tale of the Reichsminister’s thwarted love affair. Goebbels, who had been one of Hitler’s closest friends, now found himself distanced from his beloved leader. The two of them only really became close again during the final days in Berlin in April 1945, when Goebbels proved himself to be the sole leading Nazi prepared to die with his Führer. Not only that, he and Magda were ready to kill all of their six idealized children to save them from the horrors of a non-Nazi world. Goebbels never saw Lida Baarova again, but he had kept a photograph of her hidden in his desk until just before his decision to destroy the whole family. It was one of the last things he burned at Schwanenwerder as the Red Army approached the outskirts of Berlin.

  A curious part of the relationship between politics and culture is the way that artists and writers generally achieve a far greater significance in a dictatorship than in a democracy. They are either demonized as traitors - Mandelstam remarked that poetry was nowhere so highly valued as in Russia, where people were shot for it—or, if compliant, seen as a status symbol for the regime, bolstering the vanity of the tyrant. Stalin, for example, spent almost as much effort in persuading the writer Maxim Gorky to return to the Soviet Union from his exile in Italy as he had in forcing Trotsky to leave.

  Gorky and Lenin had been very close before the revolution, but Lenin had forced his increasingly outspoken friend to leave the country. ‘If you won’t go, then we’ll have to send you,’ Lenin had told him in October 1920. Gorky had finally left a year later. Although strongly on the side of the revolution, he had been a fearless critic of the Bolshevik suppression of other parties. His great achievement was to save the intelligentsia of Petrograd from starvation or arrest by the Cheka. Gorky’s pronouncements from abroad on Bolshevik tyranny were one of the most painful thorns in the side of t
he regime. Yet when wooed by Stalin, who begged him to put his great art at the service of the Russian people, Gorky found it hard to refuse. He returned for the first time in 1928, not realizing that the OGPU was infiltrating and bribing his entourage. Yagoda, the terrifying chief of the OGPU, had been ordered by Stalin to stay close to Gorky.

  In 1932, Stalin ordered a massive celebration to honour Gorky’s forty years as a writer. Countless streets, factories and collective farms were named after him; even the city and region of Nizhny Novgorod. The main park in Moscow became Gorky Park, and the Moscow Art Theatre had his name attached, despite a reminder to Stalin that Chekhov was the playwright most associated with it. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Stalin retorted. ‘Gorky is a vain man. We must bind him with cables to the party.’

  Gorky seems to have mislaid all the intellectual honesty he had shown in his earlier years. Above all, he failed to perceive a truth which the optimistic Stanislavsky had taken a decade to recognize. ‘Revolution,’ wrote Stanislavsky, ‘violates art, stuffing it with sharpness of form and content’, an observation as true of the National Socialist revolution as it was of the Communist. Stalin’s cruellest humiliation for Gorky in that year of his celebration was to make him approve a far more intensive stage in this process.

  On 26 October 1932, a party was organized in the Moscow mansion on the Boulevard Ring which Stalin had presented to him. The gathering was a curious mixture of Kremlin leaders and around fifty members of the Soviet literary elite. Politically unreliable writers and poets, such as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak and Isaac Babel had been deliberately excluded. Food and drink were served on tables covered in white tablecloths and the chandeliers were dazzlingly bright. After a variety of speeches, Comrade Stalin himself spoke. He expounded the doctrine of what was to be called Socialist Realism and announced that writers should be ‘engineers of the human soul’, and added that the production of souls was more important than the production of tanks. Socialist Realism should depict ‘the heroic present in brighter tones and speak of it in a more elevated and dignified manner’. In other words, it meant that all artists and writers were to be conscripted into the service of Stalinist propaganda. Even Goebbels himself would not have dared go so far. Gorky said nothing.