The Mystery of Olga Chekhova Read online

  40. Olga with Rudolf Prack in Der ewige Klang (The Eternal Time. 1944). One of the very last films produced by the Nazi film industry.

  41. Abakumov, the chief of SMERSh, receives the Order of Kutuzov 1st Class on 21 April 1945, just before he has Olga flown back to Moscow from Berlin.

  42. Lev and Aunt Olya soon after the war.

  43. Lev climbing again in the Caucasus after the war.

  44. Olga Chekhova, along with Konrad Lorenz, receives the Cross ot the Order of Merit in 1972.

  In Moscow, the executions took place in specially constructed cellars with sloping concrete floors which could be hosed down. Bodies were burned in the ovens of the Donskoi monastery in central Moscow and ash covered the whole area as if from a reactivating volcano. Thousands of others were driven out in covered trucks to Butovo, where KGB officers later built their dachas. ‘The execution squads worked in a terrible hurry, day and night, the shots drowned out by the deafening noise of the running engines. People were lined up above a previously dug trench and shot ... They filled in the pit, levelled off the earth and prepared another trench.’ In a typical touch of the Soviet ‘security organs’, orchards were planted over the graves to hide their crimes, and so that the citizens of Moscow could benefit in ignorance from these enemies of the people.

  The main frenzy of denunciations, false accusations and forced confessions of the Great Terror was known in Russia as the ‘Yezhovshchina’, after the diminutive NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Stalin had put this wildly unstable character in charge of what became known as the ‘mincing machine’. He was given every encouragement, only to be punished later for all the ‘excesses’. Stalin brought in his fellow Georgian Lavrenty Beria as Yezhov’s deputy in July 1938, then crushed Yezhov at the end of the year.

  An imperceptible hint of the horrors to come from Nazi Germany reached Aunt Masha in Yalta in the summer of 1935. A postcard arrived from Berlin showing Olga Chekhova in one of her roles. On the other side, Olga’s sister, Ada, asked Masha to send a ‘certain document’ as soon as possible.

  The document in question, a deposition finally signed in Yalta on 14 August 1935 by Aunt Masha and her brother Mikhail Chekhov, testified that the Chekhov family was entirely of Russian Orthodox descent. This was because Olga Chekhova’s daughter, Ada, was at risk. Misha’s mother, Natalya Golden, had been Jewish. Olga Chekhova had decided to act quickly, having perhaps heard at some propaganda ministry reception of the forthcoming Nuremberg Laws, which were announced at the Nazi Party rally in September.

  Aunt Masha and her brother were prepared to perjure themselves in a good cause. ‘There were not any persons of non-Christian faith in our family, either on our father’s or our mother’s side,’ they wrote. ‘Our late brother Alexander Pavlovich Chekhov was married to a resident of Moscow, Natalya Alexandrovna Galdina, Russian and Orthodox Christian.’ Misha’s mother, with her name changed from Golden to Galdina, became a Gentile posthumously. The registration fee was two roubles.

  Apart from a small group in the Kremlin, hardly anybody in the Soviet Union knew of Hitler’s racist theories. ‘Fascism’ was never explained in anything other than the most misleading generalities. It was, according to Stalinist definition, the most extreme form of capitalism and thus the Antichrist to Communism. Yet Stalinism was to produce its own version of xenophobia. Foreign Communists sheltering within the Soviet Union, especially Germans, Poles and Yugoslavs, were at great risk. Meanwhile, Soviet citizens of German origin, like the Knippers, risked becoming the Jews of Stalinist totalitarianism. Lev Knipper was later to be accorded a special role in the filtration process.

  During the Great Terror, Lev, like hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, was clearly going through a personal and political crisis. He was trying desperately to convince himself of the rightness of the Stalinist purges, even when surrounded by the madness of arrests and denunciations all around him. We have no proof that he was directly involved in such NKVD work himself, yet he knew many of those who were arrested, especially in the purges in the Crimea, where many of Aunt Olya’s friends disappeared.

  The first hint within the family of Lev’s political harshness had emerged suddenly during a New Year party, almost certainly for 1937, at 23 Gogolevsky bulvar. Aunt Olya asked young Vova Knipper to call everyone to the table. ‘Gospoda!’ he called out, meaning ladies and gentlemen. Lev interrupted him. ‘Volodya, ladies and gentlemen are long gone to the bottom of the Black Sea and fish are feeding on them.‘ Those present were clearly shocked at this remark coming from a former White Guard who had himself escaped across the Black Sea.

  ‘Really?’ said Aunt Olya, clearly not agreeing with Lev. ‘Gospoda, will you please come to the table?’

  In early April 1937, not long after the second wave of show trials, Lev wrote a striking letter to Aunt Olya. ‘My life has become a lot more complicated, confused, and harder than it was before, when I still had many illusions of youth, self-importance, young unspent strength and boiling energy which covered up for everything else. And now the time has come to pay the bills. And it’s turned out that I’ve accumulated next to no interest on my capital, and that I will have to pay from the reserve.

  ‘When I was twenty-three, a new life began for me, thanks to you ... I was somehow careless about everything - like a bird which knows nothing of tomorrow, like a creature who, it seemed to me, was “lucky” in its life. And really, I’d soared over dozens of my colleagues, like a rocket. I won’t say it was undeserved. My talent isn’t a minor one, I possess a huge supply of energy, and my will for life is also not small ... Selfishness and a somewhat exaggerated self-assurance are the reasons for my loneliness. And now, thirty-nine years old, I am facing myself, absolutely alone in all senses. And this is the most terrible of all. With all the force of my brain, I desire to be a true Bolshevik, and for this I lack knowledge. This has impeded my development as a composer in the last three to four years ... Nothing can ever remove my feeling of guilt towards the party and the Soviet regime about the years of the civil war. Because every time someone mentions, in any connection, “White Guardist” in my presence, it’s like a knife in my flesh, and I always think they’ve said it about me. This is the hardest trauma in my life, and there’re only two ways to cure it - either the party would accept me in its ranks, or death will get me. I am not afraid of it, and I’ve thought of it frequently in the last five to six years.’

  We do not have Olga Knipper-Chekhova’s reply to her nephew, but she was clearly quite angry, especially about one part of the letter, when Lev wrote: ‘What had I got from life before the age of twenty-four? Nothing. Or rather, negative values only. I blame no one for that.’ Considering everything that she had done for the sick child and all the encouragement she had given him, growing up in a highly musical family, she found his remarks about ‘negative values’ ungrateful to say the least. Above all, she must have hit the mark by suggesting that he was desperately trying to persuade himself of these doctrines rather than believing in them naturally.

  His reply can hardly have soothed her feelings. ‘You see, my dearest Aunt Olya, politics is one of the reasons which make the two of us unable to talk to each other from soul to soul. And the reason for this is that for me politics is something deeply personal, lyrical, exciting. I am fighting for the Soviet regime (and therefore I love it, and mistakes are painful for me).’ The ‘mistakes’ he referred to were presumably the millions of false accusations of the Great Terror. But Lev was unrepentant. ’For me, my personal life, my creative work, absolutely everything is intertwined with the issues of the party life. You don’t want to believe in this, you think that I want to “be this way”, rather than I already am this way.‘

  He went on to reject ‘absolute’ human values, dismissing them as ’intelligentsia ethics‘. Lev had imbibed the essential ruthlessness of Leninism. ’More than anything else, I can’t stand people who use “intelligentsia principles” and “humanity” to justify a general, deeply anti-Soviet behaviour.


  ‘I need to learn what sort of a person one has to be to become, in this decisive moment of the fight, part of the millions giving all of themselves (not from the brain, but from the heart) to the future of humankind.

  ‘By the way,’ he added at the end, ‘all that I’ve written above about “negative values” is not related to you at all. On the contrary, I consider you one of the most positive factors, and this makes me love and respect you even more. However, your attitude towards people around you (though not towards yourself) sometimes makes you draw very erroneous conclusions, and this makes me angry, when you, clever woman, want to overlook so many things. By the way, could you tell Masha that Rekst has been fired, and his case has been handed over to the investigative organs. I think he is in trouble. I said so to Masha a month ago.’ It is very hard to know how far Lev wrote these letters conscious of the NKVD censor, who would read them, and yet if he had, he surely would have seen that the very nature of his argument with Aunt Olya could put her at risk. Unless, of course, Lev had so immersed himself in Stalinist brutality that even the ‘aunt who gave birth to her nephew’ might have to be seen as an incidental casualty in the great struggle.

  Lev’s first cousin Vova Knipper had a friend who was a barber in the proezd Serova near the Lubyanka. Most of his clients were NKVD officers. When the barber’s shop opened at eight in the morning, NKVD interrogators, in a nervous state with heavy stubble, turned up in either military uniform or civilian clothes. They wanted a shave and a face massage to freshen up after a hard night’s work beating confessions out of their prisoners. They asked for bloodstains to be daubed from their tunics and trousers with eau-de-Cologne. Some were so exhausted that they would fall asleep in the chair, and the barber found it hard to wake them up afterwards. But those who stayed awake talked compulsively about their work. The hairdresser warned Vova about the need to keep his mouth shut at all times. ‘We’re all in a trap,’ he warned.

  Aunt Olya herself was only too well aware of the dangers of the age. She and Kachalov went with a touring group of the Moscow Art Theatre to Paris in August 1937. The great international exhibition there was turned into a symbolic struggle between Fascism and Communism as the Spanish Civil War still raged. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia competed to provide the most impressive pavilion. Picasso finished his painting of Guernica to conjure up the Luftwaffe’s barbarity of aerial warfare for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic. Even the visit of the Art Theatre formed part of the propaganda war. Attacks in Paris on the show trials in Moscow had encouraged the Soviet authorities to send the Art Theatre there to give an impression of political freedom. Yet the members of the theatre were closely watched by NKVD agents, whom they dubbed ‘archangels’.

  A Russian émigré in Paris called Leo Rabeneck, who had helped Olga Knipper-Chekhova in 1904 as Anton Chekhov was dying at Badenweiler, spotted her one evening. She was sitting at a table in a restaurant with two men. As soon as she recognized him, she looked down at her plate. Rabeneck realized that something was wrong and kept his distance. The next morning he ran into Kachalov on the Champs-Elysées and told him what had happened. ‘She was sitting with two archangels,’ Kachalov replied. ‘How could she speak to you? They watch us here. They don’t allow us to fraternize with émigrés.’

  What is much more surprising is that Aunt Olya was apparently allowed to stop off with her namesake niece in Berlin on the way back to Moscow. According to Vova Knipper, Aunt Olya claimed later that Olga, to her horror, threw a party to which Nazi leaders came. But this sounds more like family folklore. Both women would surely have been much more circumspect at such a time.

  Olga Chekhova claimed after the war that she was hardly a favourite with the Nazi regime, because she was never invited to the small, intimate parties of only twenty or thirty people. This was partly true, but also disingenuous. On a number of occasions, she seems to have dropped in to see Goebbels to talk of her ‘worries and joys’ or ’professional concerns‘, as the Reichsminister recorded in his diary, repetitiously adding that she was ’eine charmante Frau‘.

  Yet the fact remained that Nazi leaders did not entertain in the same way as the theatrical community. Olga Chekhova was naturally not a habituée of the Reichschancellery or the Berghof above Berchtesgaden, because she never belonged to the exclusively Nazi inner circle of the leadership. But it was hardly surprising that the Soviet embassy saw her as the ‘prima donna of the Nazi film industry’, because she was invited to the major receptions which received great publicity.

  ‘From 1936 I had a lot of invitations,’ she later acknowledged, ‘because from that year on I had a great success on the stage and all the foreigners who came to visit Berlin were brought to see my performances as if it were a zoo.’ Yet Olga also sought peace and quiet away from her smart apartment at 74Kaiserdamm, which no doubt reminded her too much of her second failed marriage.

  Marcel Robyns does not appear to have accompanied her to any of the Berlin parties after 1937, mainly because an exasperated Olga had packed him off back to Brussels. By September 1938, she had decided to divorce him. ‘Well, that’s life!’ Goebbels noted in his diary. The marriage had lasted just over two years and then only in name. Olga, realizing she had made a major mistake, sought consolation in the arms of a younger and far more amusing man, the actor Carl Raddatz, with whom she had filmed Befreite Hände. Fair-haired, with unconventional good looks, the pipe-smoking Raddatz was a frequent visitor to the Knipper family dacha out at Gross Glienecke. This simple, single-storey wooden house west of Berlin was some way across the Havel from the Goebbels villa at Schwanenwerder. It offered great peace and Olga used the apartment on the Kaiserdamm less and less. The other big advantage of the dacha was that it was an easy drive from Babelsberg.

  In May 1939, Olga Chekhova saw a lot of Goebbels. On 4May, he came to see her at the theatre in Aimée. ‘The piece was not up to much,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘but la Tschechowa played wonderfully. So full of charm and grace.’ He went round afterwards, laughed and chatted with her and Raddatz for a long time and went to bed late. It must have been a great success, because Olga invited him to Sunday lunch at Gross Glienecke ten days later. It was ‘a beautiful, sunny May Sunday’, and the Reichsminister drove with pleasure through ‘awakening Nature’ on the way there. He recorded that he had ’laughed and chatted all afternoon‘, adding, ’That does so much good after so much work.‘

  Also that May, Joachim von Ribbentrop gave a lavish garden reception for the diplomatic corps. Olga was seated in the front row next to Hitler. The photograph was widely published, and rumours of it spread back to Moscow, to the great unease of the Knippers still there.

  According to Olga, she danced that evening with Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and foreign minister, and he asked her to play Anna Karenina in Italy. She claimed that, as she left, she heard Goebbels saying to his wife that she and Contessa Attolico, the wife of the Italian ambassador, should keep the Italians in the little saloon, as they are ‘poking their noses everywhere’.

  The following month, the Nazis held eight days of celebrations in honour of the Yugoslav regent, Prince Paul, whom they were trying hard to woo. Hitler began with a banquet at the Reichschancellery and five hours of Wagner’s Meistersinger. Goebbels gave a party at his country house forty miles north of Berlin. Ribbentrop then gave one at Potsdam. But the most extravagant of all parties was of course given by Goring, who organized a huge candlelit reception in Schloss Charlottenburg with everyone in the period dress of Frederick the Great. Costumes were not hard to obtain, since the king was the favourite subject of Nazi movies. ‘After supper I sat in the garden with the royal couple,’ Olga recorded later, ‘and we spoke about my films and my guest appearances.’ She claimed that her presence had been specially requested because they had seen her films and the regent’s wife, Princess Olga, who was half-Russian, wanted to meet her.

  There has been a certain temptation in the former Soviet Union to overstate the role of Olga Chekhova at th
is time. Some sources claim that she stayed in touch with Moscow through ‘our people in Scandinavia’, but this is most unlikely. Others say that she lost touch with Moscow from 1937 as a result of the purges of the Foreign Intelligence Department of the NKVD, yet she was not a regular agent, like Zarah Leander. Almost certainly, contact through Lev became far too dangerous at this time.

  Her role, if called upon, was to establish contact with German generals and officials who were against the idea of a war with Russia. This was indeed a high priority for Stalin at the time. He knew that, after his purge of the Red Army, he must buy time before taking on the Wehrmacht. British weakness over Czechoslovakia convinced him that he could not possibly rely on the Western democracies. With true Stalinist paranoia mixed with outrageous falsehood, the Kremlin convinced itself that this appeasement was part of a British and French secret plan to encourage Hitler to attack the Soviet Union.

  After the conclusion of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact in August 1939, the Kremlin decided to show the German military attaché their arms factories in the Urals to convince him that the Wehrmacht would have to fight a long, hard war if it did attack. And after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, when the Red Army occupied the eastern part of the country, Beria ordered that Prince Janusz Radziwill should be brought straight to the Lubyanka. Beria interviewed him in person and, when Radziwill agreed to work for him, he said to him: ‘Prince, people like you will always be needed in this unstable world.’ Radziwill was sent back to his estates in Poland with full honours. He was to go to Germany to contact his great shooting companion Hermann Goring, to persuade him against the idea of invading the Soviet Union.