The Mystery of Olga Chekhova Read online

  17. Moscow 1941

  An unexpected declaration of war is bound to produce a sense of shock, yet no country was as psychologically unprepared as the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Stalin, the great trickster, had refused to believe warnings of Hitler’s betrayal.

  Ordinary Russians, persuaded by countless newsreels and radio programmes about their country’s industrial and military might, never believed that the Germans would dare attack. But once the truth sank in, the Russian people reacted far more rapidly than their leaders. There were queues of volunteers within hours of Molotov’s wooden announcement on Radio Moscow. Stalin was too traumatized to speak.

  Some of the improvisation might have appeared ridiculous to a professional eye, but there can never be any doubt about the determination to defend the Motherland. Even the Moscow Art Theatre put itself on a war footing. Classes in civilian anti-aircraft defence were held in the theatre’s ‘red corner’, the obligatory Communist shrine with a bust of Lenin. Olga Knipper-Chekhova, at the age of seventy-two, lectured new-comers on how to deal with incendiary bombs: ‘One has to take it by the fins,’ she told them, ‘and throw it out of the window into the sand [piled outside]. It is very simple.’

  Popular belief in the might of the Soviet state was soon shaken when it became clear that the Germans had not been thrown back at the frontier. The Wehrmacht was advancing with great speed. One army group was heading for Leningrad, another was pushing through Belorussia on the road to Moscow and a third was driving into the Ukraine. ‘This,’ wrote Lev, ‘was when we really started to learn the geography of our country from the names of villages and towns which we had hardly known before and which were like burning scars on the body of the Motherland.’

  When war broke out, Lev had been in the central Caucasus, training Red Army soldiers in mountain warfare at a camp named ‘Rot Front’, in honour of German Communists. They had been scaling a peak, and on returning to their camp on 23 June, the day after the invasion, they had expected their comrades there to come out to welcome them. But the faces of those they encountered gave the first intimation of the disaster which had befallen the country. ‘Don’t be surprised if you find out I am at the front,’ Lev immediately wrote to Aunt Olya. ‘This is my greatest desire.’ But Lev, to his evident frustration, was ordered to stay there and continue training his men.

  In July 1941, a few weeks after the invasion, Magda Goebbels rang Olga Chekhova to invite her to a Sunday lunch out at Schwanenwerder. A ministry car would be sent to fetch her. There were about thirty-five people at the lunch, a mixture of actors, diplomats and officials from the propaganda ministry.

  Goebbels was exultant at the rapidity of the Wehrmacht advance. He was convinced that the capture of Moscow was a foregone conclusion. Goebbels turned to Olga Chekhova and, according to her account, the following conversation took place.

  ‘We’ve got a Russian expert here, Frau Chekhova. Don’t you think, Madam, that this war will be finished before winter comes and that we will celebrate Christmas in Moscow?’

  ‘No,’ she claims to have replied.

  ‘Why not?’ Goebbels demanded.

  ‘Napoleon saw what the space of Russia was like.’

  ‘There’s a huge difference between us and the French,’ Goebbels smiled. ‘We’ve come to Russia as liberators. The Bolshevik clique is going to be overthrown by the new revolution.’

  ‘In the face of new danger, Russians will show solidarity as they have never done so before.’

  Goebbels leaned forward slightly and said coldly: ‘I wonder, Madam. Does this mean that you do not believe in German military power? You are predicting a Russian victory.’

  ‘I am not predicting anything, Herr Minister. You just asked me whether our soldiers will be in Moscow by Christmas and I just expressed my opinion, which may prove right or wrong.’

  Goebbels, she wrote later, gave her a long suspicious stare. There is no mention of this exchange in the Goebbels diaries, and it has proved impossible to verify. It may well have been what she would like to have said.

  It looked as if Goebbels would be proved right. Smolensk had fallen, and Field Marshal von Bock’s Army Group Centre, with 1.5 million men, appeared unstoppable. On 22 July, Moscow was bombed for the first time. The Luftwaffe followed up the attack on the two following nights. The windows of apartments, including those of 23 Gogolevsky bulvar, were blasted in and dogs went wild in terror, but there was comparatively little structural damage.

  Food was already in short supply. Vladimir Knipper as an opera singer received a free lunch of soup and potatoes each day at the Central House of Workers in the Arts. His son, Vova, depended more and more on the contents of the little billycan in which his father brought the meal to share with him. Vova’s ration was only q.oo grams of bread, and yet he had been drafted already into digging anti-tank ditches outside Moscow. Their dog was the first to succumb to the combination of stress from the air raids and starvation. Vladimir Knipper was also having to borrow money from Aunt Olya, who continued to act with uncomplaining generosity as the family banker. In the middle of that terrible summer for the Soviet Union, Aunt Olya and her great friend Sofya Ivanovna Baklanova came to say goodbye to Vladimir Knipper and his son, Vova. A group of actors from the Moscow Art Theatre was being evacuated from the capital to the Caucasus. Conversation was halting. Aunt Olya suggested that he and Vova should come with them, but Vladimir, apparently sad and nervous, said that he could not leave his books and piano.

  Aunt Olya wrote once a week back to Moscow. On 15 August, she described how they were living in a train parked beside a huge pear orchard, with the snow-capped peaks of the Caucasus range in the distance. She could think only of home. A week later, she asked Vladimir to check on other members of the family to see how they were.

  In September, she told Vladimir that two of the leading members of the Moscow Art Theatre group, Tarasova and Moskvin, were trying to leave for Moscow. She was clearly upset and jealous. ‘They have been asked by the theatre to come back and we are just “Firsovs”.’ Firsov was the old servant forgotten and abandoned at the end of The Cherry Orchard.

  The only consolation for her was a visit from Lev, who had come up from his mountain-warfare training camp. But her great friend Sofya was clearly uneasy about Aunt Olya’s surrogate son. ‘We are at a complete loss as to what we should do,’ she wrote to Vladimir Knipper. ‘Many Moscow Art Theatre people are already going back. Lyova is going back to the mountains. Lyova is still the same. There is a lot in him that isn’t clear to me. Olga Leonardovna doesn’t know anything about Andryusha and we are worried.’

  They were right to be concerned about Lev’s young son, Andrei. He and his mother, Lyuba, were almost starving in Tashkent and Lev did not reply to their pleas for help. When Vova Knipper asked him a month later for news of Andrei, Lev was clearly embarrassed. He tried to pretend that the situation with Mariya Garikovna made it very hard for him to stay in touch with Lyuba.

  Personal suffering attracted little attention at this moment of supreme danger for the Motherland. Operation Typhoon, the German assault on Moscow, was launched on 30 September 1941. Guderian’s tanks dashed forward on the southern flank and entered the centre of Orel, overtaking streetcars whose occupants had no idea that the enemy was upon them.

  On 5 October, a Soviet reconnaissance aircraft spotted a twelve-mile-long column of German armour on the Yukhnov road, no more than eighty miles from Moscow. The news caused such disbelief in the Kremlin that Beria wanted to arrest the air force officer concerned for ‘provocation’. Two more aircraft were sent up and their pilots confirmed the news. There was panic in the Kremlin. Stalin gave the order to the commander of the Moscow military district to mobilize everything he had. He did not know that Hitler had already claimed that the victory was won and had sworn a Cartha ginian fate for Moscow. The city was to be razed to the ground and the site flooded to create a huge lake.

  Field Marshal von Bock’s panzer forces achieved a stunning double
encirclement at Bryansk and another round Vyazma. They destroyed 1,242 Soviet tanks and cut off 665,000 Soviet soldiers. These captured Red Army men were destined for terrible suffering, in most cases death through starvation and disease, in German prisoner of war camps. One of them was Kachalov’s son, Vadim Shverubovich, the White Guard who had become Lev’s companion in exile. The forty-year-old Vadim, having been prevented from volunteering for the Spanish Civil War, was now one of 4 million people to come forward to join the opolchentsy home guard. These scandalously ill-armed forces were thrown into utterly hopeless attacks against Wehrmacht and SS divisions and suffered terrifying casualties. Many of the men were still in civilian clothes and risked being shot out of hand as partisans.

  Vadim and his comrades had exhausted themselves trying to find a way out of the German encirclement. They woke up one morning, stiff from an early frost and snowfall, to find German soldiers standing over them. They were marched to a camp near Yukhnov and began to experience the horrors of capture on the eastern front. They received no shelter, little drinking water and hardly any food. From time to time food was thrown over the fence, and the guards laughed to watch them fight each other in their desperation to grab morsels from the mud. With no huts, tents or latrines, the conditions were unspeakably squalid. Soon real winter arrived, and ‘they were left to die in the snow’.

  One morning, Vadim Shverubovich woke up to find himself surrounded almost entirely by corpses. He realized that he too was going to die if he continued to lie there. Some instinct of self-respect made him decide to shave. In his pouch he had, like most Red Army soldiers, a small piece of broken mirror and a rusty razor. He had no soap, of course, so he used spittle. A German officer observed this curious act amid such appalling surroundings. He called out as a joke: ‘Cream, powder, mass agee?’ Shverubovich looked up at him. The German officer ordered him to stand to attention. Shverubovich did as he was told.

  ‘Do you speak German?’ the officer asked.

  ‘Yes, I do.’ His German was in fact excellent.

  ‘Do you want to work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Translate for the others. I want to know who else can work.’

  Shverubovich translated and several men hauled themselves to their feet.

  ‘If you want us to work,’ Shverubovich said, ‘you should first feed us.’ They were given some soup. Almost immediately Shverubovich felt his strength returning.

  Vadim’s father, Kachalov, who was with Aunt Olya in the Caucasus, received with great self-control the news that Vadim was missing. Aunt Olya could imagine only too well what he must be suffering. She knew what it would have meant to her if Lev had been posted missing.

  On 14 October, the SS Das Reich and the 10th Panzer Division reached the Napoleonic battlefield of Borodino. Memories of 1812 and Napoleon’s entry into Moscow were rife, but many drew the wrong conclusions. On the same day, the ist Panzer Division seized the town of Kalinin, with its bridge over the Volga, and severed the Moscow-Leningrad railway line.

  On the evening of 15 October, foreign embassies and government departments were told to prepare to leave the city. Orders were issued for the evacuation to Kuibyshev, 500 miles to the east. Even Lenin’s mummified corpse was removed secretly from the mausoleum on Red Square and sent east in a refrigerated railway car. Government files were destroyed in huge bonfires in the courtyards of ministries. There was a smell of burnt paper as charred fragments floated over the centre of the city, rather as the human ashes from the Donskoi monastery had done during the purges four years earlier. ‘We were walking on black snow,’ Vova Knipper wrote later.

  There was indeed an echo of the purges, as the execution squads in the Lubyanka and other NKVD prisons worked overtime shooting prisoners to prevent them falling into the hands of the Germans.

  Around the city, steel hedgehogs were set up to block roads against enemy armour, and tens of thousands of ill-equipped civilians were marched out to dig more anti-tank ditches. Word spread that Moscow was about to be abandoned to the enemy and large parts of the population became panic-stricken. Families stormed the city’s eastern railway stations, especially the Kazansky station, desperate for a place on what they thought might be the last train out before the Germans encircled the city. People had barely left their apartments before neighbours and block supervisors began looting them.

  Even government officials who were supposed to stay behind deserted their posts to escape the city. On 16 October, Aleksei Kosygin, the deputy chairman of Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars, entered its headquarters to find the place abandoned. A few sheets of paper were blowing around in the draught, and once or twice a telephone rang, but the person at the other end rang off as soon as he answered it. Eventually one caller asked quite brazenly whether Moscow would be surrendered.

  Stores of alcohol as well as food shops were stormed and there was much drunkenness on the streets. Wild rumours described the drop of German paratroopers on Red Square. Natalya Gesse, a friend of the physicist Andrei Sakharov, was nearly lynched as she hobbled along on crutches after an operation. People were convinced that she had broken her legs when coming down by parachute. Other panic-mongers claimed to know on the best authority that Stalin had been arrested in a Kremlin coup. A rumour, which in this case proved accurate, ran round the city that huge demolition charges were being laid in the Metro ‘for well-known reasons’. Most people still feared to voice openly the idea of Moscow falling to the enemy. The crime of defeatism was dealt with by firing squad. Yet the panic in the Moscow Conservatoire had been such that Vova’s father had seen fellow teachers openly burning their Communist Party cards, an act which could carry the death penalty.

  On 19 November, Beria sent in several regiments of NKVD troops to restore order through summary executions. Anyone suspected of desertion, looting or even drunkenness after the storming of alcohol outlets was seized and put up against a wall without the slightest pretence of an investigation.

  In this atmosphere of collapse and despair, the seventeen-year-old Vova found that his girlfriend, Margo, had fallen for a lieutenant colonel of NKVD troops with a bull-like neck who was old enough to be her father. Vova, on entering her apartment, discovered her sitting on his lap. She slipped off when Vova burst in and hurriedly said that they had just returned. ‘Nikolai is hunting for deserters,’ she added, as if that was an explanation for her conduct. As Vova stormed out, he passed Margo’s mother in the corridor. She turned her head away in embarrassment. Vova left the building in tears. Margo’s attachment to such a man at such a moment was part of the desperate sauve-qui-peut atmosphere.

  Vova must have been frightened, bearing a German name at this moment of pitiless struggle. Daily bulletins from Informburo were attached to trees and walls. On one of them he was shaken to see an excerpt from a letter taken off the body of a German soldier called Hans Knipper. And a schoolfriend of his, a Volga German about to be transported to Siberia, came to see them in despair. Vova’s father, Vladimir, advised him to volunteer for the army to save himself from an exile of forced labour which would be as bad as the Gulag, but Vova’s friend replied that the description ‘German’ was stamped on his papers and they would not accept him in the army. Those of German origin were implicitly categorized as potential enemies of the state. The NKVD had not wasted time assembling records on every Soviet citizen of German descent, some 1.5 million people. Local NKVD departments ’from Leningrad to the Far East’ began a programme of arrests immediately after the Wehrmacht invasion. Yet no member of the Knipper family was touched.

  Other Germans in Moscow were also in a strange position, but for different reasons. In the same building as the Knippers lived the family of Friedrich Wolf, the famous German Communist playwright, who had left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933. They were part of the so-called ‘Moscow emigration’ of foreign Communists seeking sanctuary and would have faced instant execution at Nazi hands if the city fell. Vova used to act as a roof-top fire-wa
tcher, ready to deal with incendiary bombs, along with Wolf’s two sons, Markus and Koni. Markus later became the chief of East German intelligence and the original of Karla in John Le Carre’s novels, and his younger brother, Koni, became a film-maker, writer and the president of East Germany’s academy of arts. During air raids, Vladimir Knipper and Friedrich Wolf sat in the cellar, chatting together in German. ’People sitting round us,‘ wrote Vova, ’turned to look at the two of them with anger and fear. There they were in the centre of Moscow arguing about something in the enemy’s language.‘

  To Vladimir and Vova’s surprise, Lev suddenly turned up at their apartment just after they had received an anxious letter from Aunt Olya asking for news of him. Despite the desperate situation, Lev still had ‘an energetic sporty gait, his left eyebrow was always raised’. He was accompanied by his new wife, Mariya Garikovna, whom Vova remembered as ‘a very beautiful Armenian woman with long strong legs’. Lev talked to Vladimir and Vova about the threat to Moscow and offered to organize their evacuation. He asked Vova to come into the adjoining room with him, which was Vova’s bedroom. Lev looked at the photo of his girlfriend, Margo, and guessed that she was the reason why Vova did not want to leave Moscow. ‘Well, you should remember,’ Lev told him, ‘that you’re a Knipper and you’ll have lots of such girls.’ The seventeen-year-old Vova did not know how to reply. ‘I was in awe of Lyova,’ he wrote later. ‘He lived a strange, different life. He disappeared from Moscow when everyone else was still there and then reappeared on the coldest of winter days with the deepest of suntans. He often smiled, showing his strong teeth, slightly yellowed by tobacco. At that time in the war I did not like him very much.’

  His father, on the other hand, was touched by Lev’s visit. His nephew had brought them some real coffee, which was unobtainable in Moscow, and Vova began to grind it. ‘Ah,’ sighed Vladimir, ‘the air smells of peacetime.’