The Mystery of Olga Chekhova Read online

  Musicians at this stage were under less pressure to conform than writers, yet Lev Knipper, who ten years before had taken such pride in controversial experimentation, was now receiving a great deal of approval.

  He was obviously treated more seriously by the OGPU. Lieutenant Colonel of State Security Maklyarsky had taken over as his controller from Major Ilin. Other officers were also involved in his work, including Lieutenant Colonel of State Security Marsia. With such backing, Lev enjoyed a great deal of travel at this time in his guise as musical adviser to the political directorate of the Red Army. In 1932 he had been ‘unexpectedly asked to join a team of actors and go with them as an amateur instructor through Siberia and down the Amur to Sakhalin and back to Vladivostok’.

  He certainly made use of the experience. The following year, his Third Symphony, known as ‘The Far Eastern Symphony’, was performed for the first time in the Central House of the Red Army and highly praised. These could be dangerous times for a composer. In 1934, Stalin famously walked out of the first performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. This triggered an immediate attack by Pravdaunder the heading ‘Nonsense instead of Music’. Lev, on the other hand, was taking no chances with the avant-garde. In 1934, he worked on his Fourth Symphony, a work that was politically irreproachable. The original idea had been a set of four symphonic marches set in the civil war, but the final version took a more narrative form in honour of a Komsomol member who was a hero of the time. Some twenty years later, it was turned into an opera called The Komsomol Soldier.

  Whatever Lev’s work for the OGPU at this stage, it is striking how hard the former White Guard who had fought on the other side was trying to redeem his past. It is impossible to say whether this was out of a new attempt to convince himself of the rightness of the Soviet regime or because he sensed the looming Terror. He was clearly trying to persuade himself that somehow he had been reborn. ‘I am thinking about you, “Aunt who’s given birth to her nephew”,’ he suddenly wrote to Aunt Olya. ‘I think back to the years of my “birth” - 1919—1922.’

  The great success of his Fourth Symphony in the Soviet Union was assured by a musical theme which later became known as the song ‘Polyushko polye’ - roughly translated as ’My Field, My Sweet Field‘. Even its usually less than modest composer was astonished by the effect it had. ’I didn’t realize then that I had discovered a pearl,‘ he wrote later. While working on the symphony, he had asked the poet Viktor Gusev to write a song to accompany this particular tune. In a very short time it was being sung all over the Soviet Union.

  Lev was amused and complimented to hear that everyone imagined it to be a traditional folk song. But the scale of his ambition was revealed a few years later, when his young cousin Vova, the son of the opera singer Vladimir Knipper, asked why he did not write any more songs. ‘Songs don’t live long,’ Lev answered, ‘and I want to write things which last for ever.’

  Lev was away from Moscow a great deal in the early 1930s. He travelled in Buryat Mongolia and with Gusev on a ship called the Paris Commune. He spent time afloat with the navy, running musical master classes on warships and even torpedo boats. But whenever he could, he returned to the Caucasus for rock climbing. He composed a symphonic poem after looking out from the Caucasian mountains, thinking of the civil war.

  Sometimes his wife, Lyuba, and their little son, Andrei, accompanied him. But Andrei’s happiest memories of childhood came from living in Aunt Olya’s apartment at 23 Gogolevsky bulvar. The little boy loved the improvised parties when people dropped by. But this was not to last once the cycle of arrests and forced denunciations began.

  In the summer of 1936, the rising of Nationalist generals in Spain led by General Franco began the Spanish Civil War. Stalin was loath to become involved, even though a Popular Front government was being attacked. Trostky condemned his inaction from abroad and a furious Stalin was forced to react. News of International Brigade volunteers encouraged Vadim Shverubovich, Lev’s friend from the ‘years of his birth’, to put his name forward. Vadim, Kachalov’s son, could not resist a war, but since he had been on the wrong side in the last one it was not entirely surprising that the OGPU should treat his application with deep suspicion. He belatedly understood that the Soviet definition of a ‘volunteer’ was not the same as in other countries. The only Soviet citizens being sent to Spain were designated Red Army officers and members of the OGPU with the task of eliminating Trotskyists abroad.

  Another of Lev’s adventure-loving friends did, however, go to Spain. Paul Armand, a colourful Lithuanian who had saved himself from starving in Paris by becoming a pickpocket, was sent as part of the small Soviet tank force. Their T-26 tanks helped smash the Nationalist attempts to encircle Madrid in the autumn of that year. For conspicuous if not foolhardy bravery, he received the gold star of Hero of the Soviet Union. But like other veterans of the war, Armand was to suffer on his return to Russia. Influenced by Stalin, the OGPU had started to suspect almost anyone, including their own colleagues in the Inostrannyi Otdel, or Foreign Intelligence Department, of being tainted with treason simply for having had contact with foreigners.

  In that autumn of 1936, Olga Chekhova, to the surprise of all her family, concluded her own foreign alliance. At this time, a year after she had been appointed Staatsschauspielerin, or ‘Actress of the State’, by the Nazi regime, she had just finished filming Willi Forst’s Burgtheater. ‘Our Olga has made up her mind to get married by Christmas,’ her sister, Ada, wrote to Aunt Olya. ‘I still can’t quite get used to it in my mind, but it’s more than likely to happen. After two “mad” weeks in Berlin, Olga took off for Brussels. The “fiancé” is Belgian, almost a millionaire, forty-one years old, very good-looking. Maybe it will all turn out well this time. He produces a good, very special, impression, has a huge place in Brussels, and no end of money.’

  Olga Chekhova’s wedding to her Belgian businessman, Marcel Robyns, took place at the registry office in Berlin-Charlottenburg on 19 December 1936. Olga wore a fur coat and her silver-haired bridegroom wore a black silk top hat. The reception took place at the Hotel Bristol. Olga Chekhova may have been marrying a foreigner, but she had been reassured on one point. On the day before the wedding, Hitler had invited her to a small breakfast reception in the Reichschancellery. During their conversation, he gave her permission to retain her German nationality. This may well have been at Goebbels’s instigation. He had made plain his determination to help the month before in his diary. ‘I will do it gladly,’ he wrote. ‘She is a charming woman.’

  Olga’s sister, Ada, went to Brussels to stay with the newly married couple a month later, in January 1937. Reading between the lines of Ada’s letter to Aunt Olya in Moscow, all was not well with the marriage from the start. One suspects that Marcel Robyns had simply wanted to acquire a trophy wife, while Olga had sought security away from the hectic world of Babelsberg. All she found was a sense of claustrophobia. From being the central figure in the Knipper matriarchy in Berlin, she suddenly found herself expected to play a very subsidiary role entertaining his boring business associates.

  The apartment on the Avenue des Nations in Brussels was very modern in the Art Deco style. Even the dining plates were made out of black glass. Yet Olga lacked her ‘own little corner, where one could sit cosily’. The couple had four servants and, in true Belgian style, the food was munificent. ‘There are always people in the house—all of them businessmen. Conversations are in French, German, English, Dutch, Flemish, and Russian.’ Ada now had very mixed feelings about her new brother-in-law. ‘He is a very good and decent man, looks extremely well, very pampered, but he is a hard, dry businessman. One feels quite uneasy in his company, and somehow it’s not comfortable here in spite of all the external beauty. Olga cheered up when I arrived. She wants to go to Berlin with me for a couple of weeks - she is better off there.’

  Marcel Robyns came as often as he could to Berlin to bask in the reflected glory of his wife, especially during the great succes
s of her role in the play Der Blaufuchs (The Blue Fox). Olga’s friends dubbed him ‘Herr Tschechowa’ behind his back. She and her family began to be increasingly irritated by his presence. He then brought his own family to stay at Olga’s apartment at 74 Kaiserdamm.

  ‘We have had guests staying for three weeks,’ Ada wrote to Aunt Olya. ‘Olga’s husband, his mother, and his daughter with a governess. We had to employ a cook, and I slept in a corner in Mother’s room, Olga was feeling nervous and always escaped from the house, as every evening she is performing, with a stunning success, in Der Blaufuchs. The theatre is always full, Olga is spoken about as a remarkable actress. And our Belgians have turned the whole household upside down. To make things worse, Maman [Robyns] does not speak a word of German, and Marcel is afraid to go out on his own. It’s a mystery to me why Olga married him, as she has to pay for everything with her own money.’

  Another thought crossed Ada’s mind. ‘I’ve been thinking that maybe you don’t really want to receive letters from us any more,’ she wrote in the same letter. The show trials in the Soviet Union and the atmosphere of Stalinist xenophobia had been reported in the German press. It would not be long before the two sides of the Knipper family, the German and the Russian, would be split by greater events.

  15. The Great Terror

  It may seem strange that the Knipper family correspondence between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union should have been able to continue until the end of 1937. But there can be little doubt that the NKVD was far more thorough in its censorship of letters and the examination of parcels than the remarkably idle Gestapo.

  Olga Chekhova had clearly enjoyed playing ‘the American uncle’ with her presents from abroad in the early 1930s. She had sent her young cousin Vova (the son of her Uncle Vladimir) a series of gifts: a German alphabet when he was a baby, then a sweater, then a suit. Finally, she sent him a gnome with eyes which lit up with a crackle when you pressed a button. She also sent Lev’s son, Andrei, a sailor suit, as if the Tsarist fashion for dressing children remained de rigueur in the Soviet Union.

  Vova asked his father who had sent him the gnome. ‘Papa flew into a fury and talked loudly for a long time, saying that they were going mad in Germany.’ He showed Vova a photograph of a beautiful woman wearing a white summer dress and told him that she was his cousin and an actress in the movies. Vova’s father then hid the gnome and the photograph of Olga Chekhova in the bottom drawer of his desk and ordered Vova not to say anything to anybody about the present or about the members of the family in Germany. The Knippers in Moscow had been getting increasingly nervous since 1934. They were not only of German origin, they were also members of the closely watched artistic community.

  The dragooning of artists for political purposes in the Soviet Union involved measures against any recalcitrants. Action against ‘counter-revolutionary writers’ who rejected Socialist Realism began comparatively gently, then intensified along with the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938.

  During the night of 16 May 1934, soon after the poet Anna Akhmatova reached the apartment of Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, three OGPU operatives burst in. (The OGPU became the NKVD two months later.) They examined every scrap of paper and took every book to pieces. The object of their search was a copy of a poem about Stalin which Mandelstam had recited to friends. One of them must have been an informer. The OGPU officers never found the poem, but Mandelstam was forced to write it out for them at the Lubyanka, with the introductory confession: ‘I am the author of the following poem of a counter-revolutionary nature.’ Its most dangerous line referred to Stalin’s ‘large laughing cockroach eyes’.

  At first Mandelstam was sent into internal exile. Perhaps Stalin did not want to attract too much controversy. But a second arrest and condemnation to the labour camps left him, a sick man, with no hope of survival. He died on 27 December 1938 in a transit camp outside Vladivostok. He was buried in a mass grave for Gulag prisoners. In a final, unintentional insult, the NKVD even spelt the writer’s name wrong on the death certificate.

  The event which provided the rationale for Stalin’s purges took place on 1 December 1934 when Sergei Kirov, the chief of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was assassinated. This was Stalin’s equivalent of the Reichstag fire. All civil liberties, notional though they had been already, were suspended. The NKVD started to work night and day as the witch-hunt against Trotskyist saboteurs widened to include almost anyone with foreign contacts. Soviet authorities later admitted that between 1935 and 1940, 19 million people were arrested, of whom over 7 million died, either in the Gulag or by execution.

  I .Victory celebrations in Red Square, 9 May 1945

  2. The searchlights and fireworks of victory night, 9 May 1945.

  3. Anton Chekhov reading The Seagull to the Moscow Art Theatre. 1898: (rear left) Nemirovich-Danchenko; (central group) Olga Knipper-Chekhova (Aunt Olya), Stanislavsky. Chekhov and Lilina (Stanislavsky’s wife): (far right) Meyerhold.

  4. Stanislavsky. Gorky and Lilina. Yalta. 1900.

  5. Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper-Chekhova.

  6. Konstantin and Lulu Knipper in the Caucasus soon after their marriage.

  7. The Knipper children in 1904: Lev, Ada and Olga (right).

  8. A rather larger Lulu Knipper, with Olga (behind),Ada and Lev on Konstantin’s lap.

  9. The Cherry Orchard, with Vasily Kachalov as Trofimov and Olgal Knipper-Chekhova as Ranyevskaya.

  10. Konstantin Knipper in front, with Aunt Olya holding her beloved nephew Lev, young Olga (with Ada just behind) and Kachalov.

  11. Lubyanka Square in Moscow before the First World War.

  12. The future Olga Chekhova with a dog, c. 1913.

  13. Lev Knipper in cadet uniform, 1912.

  14. Cousins and friends in 1914: (back row) Misha Chekhov. unidentified, Volodya Chekhova; (front) Stanislavsky’s son Igor. Ada and Olga,

  15. Members of the bourgeoisie trying to sell their possessions to survive. 1918.

  16. Red troops on an armoured train in the civil war.

  17. Olga Chekhova assaulted by a Red Guard in the controversial silent movie Der Todesreigen (Dance of Death, 1922).

  18. Olga with Oskar Homulka (right) in Brennende Grenze (Burning Frontiers. 1926), the film in which Hitler so admired her.

  19. Olga, the rising star in Germany, with her Talbot convertible and chauffeur.

  20. Olga the star of the first Moulin Rouge (1928).

  21. Olga Chekhova directing her ex-husband Misha Chekhov in Der Narr seiner Liebe (The Fool of Love, 1930).

  22. Left: in Die Nacht der Eintscheidung (The Night of Decision,1931) with Conrad Veidt. later famous as Major Strasser in Casablanca.

  23. Olga in Liebelei (1931) by Max Ophüls.

  24. Olga in Der Favorit der Kaiserin (The Empress’s Favourite, 1936) with Ada, her daughter by Misha Chekhov (right), and Adele Sandrock (left)

  25. Top left: Lev Knipper. Lyuba and their son Andrei. 1931.

  26. Top right: Lev Knipper in Red Army uniform. 1936.

  27. Left: Lev Knipper, composer and NKVI) agent, 1938.

  28. Olga Chekhova’s wedding to Marcel Robyns, Berlin. December 1936. Her sister Ada (left). her new mother-in-law and her daughter. Ada (front right).

  29. Olga celebrates New Year 1938 surrounded by friends from the Babelsberg film studios.

  30. Olga and Willi Forst in Bel Ami (1939).

  31. Olga Chekhova with Hitler.

  32. Olga’s lover Jep, the Luftwaffe fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain.

  33. Ribbentrop’s reception, May 1939: (front row) Göring. Annelise von Ribbentrop, Hitler and Olga Chekhova. Field Marshal Keitel is behind Hitler.

  34. Olga with Wehrmacht troops in Paris. October 1940.

  35. Olga visits a Luftwaffe fighter wing in September 1940, during the Battle of Britain.

  36. Mariya Garikovna. Lev’s fellow NKVD agent and second wife.

  37. Lev and his fellow composer Prokofiev. 1941.

  38. Red Army troops
march past Stalin in Red Square on their way to fight the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow, 7 November 1941.

  39. Lev in Teheran in the grounds of the Soviet embassy, 1942.