The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (11 page)

‘I have been suffering for a month in Borzhomi,’ Aunt Olya wrote to Masha, ‘unable to make up my mind whether to go to the west or not. I don’t think that I have shed so many tears in my life. I did not want to give the others my consent and I have been expecting from moment to moment to receive a summons back to Moscow ... We had a crazy day. We had been sitting together from morning to night and could not decide what we had to do ... How I want to go to Moscow! How tired I am of wandering!’

But with no guarantee from the authorities permitting their free return, even Stanislavsky realized that it was still far too dangerous to intervene on their behalf. The decision of the Kachalov group went against Aunt Olya’s longing to return at any price, but she understood Kachalov’s need to secure a safe-conduct for Vadim, who as a White Guard could easily face a death sentence despite his youth. ‘So it seems as if we’re almost certainly leaving, Masha,’ she continued her letter. ‘We’ll travel via Sofia, the Slav countries, Prague - then maybe Berlin, Paris? ... Masha, try to sense it when we set off across the Black Sea. My God, how revolting and shameful it is to go abroad!’

The dinner parties of the two aunts in Moscow for all their young nephews and nieces must have felt like part of a previous and completely separate life. The last performance of the Kachalov group before departing into European exile was
The Cherry Orchard.
The play’s note of valediction haunted her more than ever. Just before leaving she wrote a farewell letter to Stanislavsky. “‘Our life in this house is over”, as they said in
The Cherry Orchard.
And God knows where we will be united again and how we will find each other.’

Lev, once again, was on her mind. In her letter to Masha, she remonstrated with her once again for not having told her of his visit. ‘You don’t understand what a joy it would have been for me to hear that Lev is alive.’ But any news of him was by now nearly a year old, a time during which hundreds of thousands of people had died from war, disease and starvation.

Despite his later claim to have deserted from the White Army, Lev had in fact remained with Baron Wrangel’s forces in the Crimea after the terrible evacuation of Denikin’s men from Novorossiisk in March. Wrangel knew that he had neither the men nor the popular support on the mainland of southern Russia to risk an offensive. But in June, when the Poles forced the Red Army on to the defensive with their attacks, he decided to sally forth from the Crimean peninsula. His army managed to seize a large part of the Tauride provinces, but hopes of reuniting the Don and Kuban regions with the White cause were vain. In October, the Soviet regime concluded a ceasefire with the Poles. This allowed them to bring vastly superior forces south-eastwards against Wrangel. The Whites, who had only 35,000 men facing Red armies 130,000strong, were forced to retreat rapidly back into the Crimea. All Wrangel could hope to do was to hold them back at the landbridge to the mainland, the Perekop isthmus, and prepare for evacuation.

Once again the White currency collapsed in value as civilians scrambled for places on the ships. But Wrangel’s withdrawal was at least far better organized, mainly thanks to the geography of the Crimea and the determination of the rearguard to hold the Perekop defence line. Altogether 126 ships, British, French and White Russian, took part in the evacuation, ferrying 150,000 people across the Black Sea to Constantinople and the Bosphorus.

Britain and France arranged for the remains of Wrangel’s army to be housed on the Gallipoli peninsula, the site of Britain’s painful military disaster five years before. The defeated Turks were not of course consulted. Wrangel’s men remained in uniform and in their regiments. The evacuation had forced them to leave horses and artillery in the Crimea, but they had been allowed to retain side arms and personal weapons. Once they were settled in their extremely primitive billets - the headquarters of the Nikolaevskoe military college was a commandeered mosque - Wrangel ordered that military training should recommence on 21 January 1921 to maintain morale. But this mainly consisted of endless parades, either to celebrate regimental days or in honour of visiting White Russian dignitaries.

Lev was evidently among those young officers who wanted to leave, but it was not easy. A special commission considered the applications of those wishing to be dismissed because of illness or injury. Those who fell into this category were moved to a camp for refugees. Those who wanted to quit the army for other reasons encountered various obstacles. A common practice was to stop giving them their rations, taking away their warm clothes and blankets. Lev wanted to leave, but without money he did not stand a chance. He feared that if he stayed, he would die. His only hope was Aunt Olya, but he had no idea where she was.

Lev was indeed fortunate that his aunt had not been able to return to Moscow as she had hoped. The Kachalov group had been in Constantinople but encountered no success in arranging a season of performances. The shortage of money had forced them to move from a modest hotel to a virtual dosshouse, before taking ship for the Balkans.

Aunt Olya’s brother, Konstantin Knipper, was much luckier in his attempts to return to Moscow. After the collapse of Admiral Kolchak’s forces, he somehow managed to get back from Siberia with his wife and Olga’s child. The importance of his skills as a railway engineer saved him. The Bolshevik government was prepared to make temporary concessions to get the right expertise at that time, and repairing the railroad system was vital if the starving cities were to be fed. On their return to the family apartment at 23 Prechistensky bulvar, Olga’s little daughter did not recognize her mother after so long. She refused to allow Olga to kiss her or to hold her hand, because she did not consider her to be her ‘real mother’.

This was to be the last time that Olga ever saw her father. She was thinking of leaving Russia, at least for a while. In those ‘hunger years’, survival itself was degrading. Most young actresses were forced to resort to part-time prostitution and venereal disease was rife. Olga wanted to try her luck in Berlin, leaving her daughter, Ada, once again with her mother. She was greatly encouraged in this plan by Ferenc Jaroszi, the Austro-Hungarian cavalry captain described by Misha. He and other members of the family were certain that she married him. Olga applied for a six-week exit permit. Later, in a typical example of compulsive embroidery for her movie memoirs, she claimed in one volume that permission had been given by Lunacharsky himself, thanks to the intervention of Aunt Olya (this was most unlikely, since she was still abroad as an illegal émigrée); and elsewhere that her exit pass had been signed by Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya.

According to her own account, the twenty-three-year-old Olga set out in January 1921 from Moscow’s Belorussky station looking like a young peasant woman. Her head was wrapped in a large headscarf and she wore valenki felt boots and a bulky overcoat. Her few belongings were stowed in a bag made out of an old piece of carpet. She claimed to have concealed her most valuable item, a diamond ring to turn into cash in Berlin, under her tongue while pretending to be semi-mute. She would have been arrested if the ring had been found at one of the many control points. The export of jewellery was strictly forbidden to prevent ‘former people’ taking anything of value out of the Soviet Republic, where all such items were now forfeit to the state. Passengers were searched at the Belorussky station by Red Guards in their strange
budyonovka -
pointed hats with earflaps, shaped like an Asiatic helmet, but with a large red star on the front.

But the date which Olga Chekhova gives for her departure seems highly unlikely. In her letter of 11 September 1920, Aunt Olya wrote to Masha: ‘They have written to me that my Olya has gone abroad with a new husband.’ This would indicate, when one considers the bad communications, that Olga had left for Berlin in August 1920at the latest. Olga Chekhova’s claim that she thought that she was leaving Soviet Russia for just six weeks is also unconvincing. But she could never have foreseen the manner of her only return to the city, when, at the end of April 1945, she was to be flown back from Germany by special aeroplane on the orders of the chief of SMERSh.

Both brother and sister had, within a few months of each other, become émigrés, one of the key words in the Bolshevik lexicon of hate. Lev ranked even higher in the order of enmity as a ‘White Guardist’. Yet both became valued agents of the Soviet intelligence services at a key moment in history.

10. The Far-Flung Family

In that time of civil war and chaotic communications, it seems miraculous that any letters managed to reach their intended recipient. Yet Lev, stranded and penniless on the Gallipoli peninsula with a miserable mass of other White officers from the Wrangel army, somehow made contact with his exiled Aunt Olya, touring in the Balkans with the Kachalov group. As soon as she heard of her favourite nephew’s plight, she immediately sent money and told him to join her.

Aunt Olya had the funds to send to him only because a Russian émigré organization, planning to start a movie studio in Milan, had paid the Kachalov group a large advance to take part in an adaptation of a novel by Knut Hamsun. The project collapsed, but the group did not have to pay back anything. They had by then reached Bulgaria, and this financed their first foreign season in the capital, Sofia.

Vadim Shverubovich later described the complications of touring abroad. The group had brought
The Three Sisters
into their repertoire in Sofia and they needed a band to play the Skobelev March when Masha is saying goodbye to Vershinin in the last act, the most moving scene of the whole play. A Bulgarian military band was found, but the bandmaster, cor seted with gold braid and sporting a huge moustache, did not know the Skobelev March, so he launched his men into a thumping Prussian alternative. Aunt Olya, whose definitive version of Masha had always been played with the Skobelev, ‘rushed towards the orchestra pit, looking like some wounded bird in Masha’s long black dress’. She screamed at the bandsmen and fled to her dressing room, completely distraught. Aunt Olya, like Masha in
The Three Sisters,
was pining for Moscow. She was close to nervous collapse, longing for a message from Stanislavsky to say that the authorities had forgiven them and that they were needed back at the Art Theatre.

The Kachalov group proceeded north-westwards through the Balkans to the newly created kingdom of Yugoslavia. Aunt Olya wrote to Stanislavsky from Zagreb, describing their celebration of the New Year of 1921, according to the old Russian calendar. ‘We lit candles in a fir tree, and several of the young ladies told fortunes. Then everyone got carried away with memories of the theatre. A lot of stories were told. We spoke a lot about you and the performances, marvelled at them, and remembered Anton Pavlovich, and I recounted his last days in Badenweiler. It was quiet and everyone softened. Our performances are going well. The Croats are in love with us. If we have succeeded and if we are popular is all thanks to you and Vladimir Ivanovich [Nemirovich-Danchenko]. You are with us always and everywhere, invisible and untouchable but inseparable from us. We always talk of you at rehearsals. How would you have done this or that and what you would have said.’

When Lev joined them in Zagreb, his gratitude to his saviour was so great that Kachalov called Olga Knipper Chekhova ‘the aunt who gave birth to her nephew’. Lev adopted the remark and it became a catch-phrase in their relationship. He continued on with the group and became friends with young Vadim Shverubovich, whose life was also to take some strange and dangerous turns. The two young men and their likely fate at the hands of the Cheka if they returned home greatly complicated the return to Moscow for which Aunt Olya so yearned.

While Aunt Olya dreamed of returning to Moscow, her niece Olga had abandoned it. If one leaves aside the questions of date and her relationship with the Hungarian cavalry captain, Ferenc Jaroszi, the basis of Olga’s version may still have elements of truth. She claims to have been the only young woman on a train full of German, Austrian and Hungarian prisoners of war. The journey from Moscow in that January of 1921 via Riga to Berlin was long and exasperatingly slow. At the Schlesischer Bahnhof, a schoolfriend from Petersburg came to meet her.

The schoolfriend utterly failed to recognize the figure bundled in overcoat and boots until Olga took off her headscarf. With words of sympathy for the exhausted and famished traveller, she insisted on taking her to a nearby Café-Konditorei for coffee and cakes with whipped cream.

‘Are you staying for good?’ the schoolfriend asked.

‘No, six weeks.’

The coffee and cakes were too much for a stomach reduced by the hunger years in Moscow. She was violently sick and remained unwell for several days.

Olga’s schoolfriend found her a room in a dilapidated house in Gross-Beeren-Strasse. The place, run as a pension, belonged to the widow of an officer killed in the war. Olga, despite her claims that the family had spoken German at meals on alternate days, hardly spoke the language at all. Her friend told the maid to keep bringing her camomile tea. After a few days, Olga recovered and the two young women went to a jeweller to sell the ring supposedly smuggled under her tongue. (In another version of her own story it was sewn into her overcoat.) The jeweller named a price which made her friend go pale. Olga, who did not understand his exact words, realized that he was offering far less than it was worth. The two of them rose to leave. Finally, he improved his offer with a lot of protestations about the difficult times. Olga accepted and went straight to buy some proper shoes to replace her felt boots.