The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (18 page)

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 the 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.

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
Pravda
under 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 child
hood 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.’