The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (28 page)

Miklashevsky was determined to kill his traitor uncle, but the NKVD had given him a higher priority. He was to pretend to defect to the Germans, saying that he wanted to join his uncle. Two other Soviet agents were instructed to join Miklashevsky in Berlin and await instructions. It appears that Lev and Mariya Garikovna were given the task by General Sudoplatov of ‘defecting’ via a new route, and then persuading Olga Chekhova to use her contacts and influence to get them into a position to assassinate Hitler in a suicidal attack. Although Olga must have expected some sort of approach at this critical period, she cannot have had any idea ’that her connections might be used for assassination plans‘.

Lev’s first visit to Iran was quite brief. He flew down, accompanied by Colonel of State Security Maklyarsky. It was presumably a reconnaissance. The Kremlin’s interest in Iran at that time was considerable. With a young Shah precariously on the throne, the political situation had echoes of the late-nineteenth-century cloak-and-dagger ‘Great Game’ against British influence in the region. Lev apparently carried United States dollars for his mission hidden in the false bottom of a large tin of caviar.

Not long before, the Comintern chief, Georgi Dimitrov, wrote to Stalin on the situation in Iran. ‘I don’t think it expedient in the circumstances to restore the Communist Party there (as fascists would use it to scare the bourgeoisie). Communists must work within the People’s Party and pursue their own line... I also think that it is not expedient to send a delegate from the Iranian Communists, as this would be used by our enemies in Iran. Instead we should probably send one of our own men there, a suitable one who could work under a legal cover and who could help our comrades in Iran.’

Lev, although highly suited for such a role, was not to be a ‘legal’, which meant working from within the Soviet embassy. He was to be an ‘illegal’, preparing his move with Mariya Garikovna from outside. The only cover was his work as a composer. He was there to research Iranian folk music and establish cultural contacts. It was thought that his defection to the Germans from within the embassy would have provoked far greater suspicion. But late that year, after Lev and Mariya Garikovna had returned to Iran for ‘defection to Turkey and then via Bulgaria to Germany to join Olga there’, the whole project, ‘although endorsed by Beria and Merkulov, was cancelled by Stalin’.

Stalin had suddenly recognized the implications of the dramatically changed situation. The German Sixth Army had been encircled at Stalingrad with deep, tank-led thrusts far in its rear. Zhukov and Vasilevsky’s restructuring of the Red Army had proved its worth. It was capable not just of heroic defence, but also of outwitting and outfighting the supposedly unbeatable Wehrmacht. The oil supplies of the Caucasus would soon be restored, and the United States was providing massive support in the form of Lend-Lease steel, vehicles and food.

Hitler could no longer defeat the Soviet Union in such circumstances and his own downfall was virtually inevitable. But Stalin now feared the consequences of an assassination. With Hitler out of the way, the Western Allies might make peace with a new regime and leave the Soviet Union to fight on alone. For Stalin, who judged others by himself, the temptation seemed far too great for Roosevelt and Churchill to leave the Soviet Union and Germany to fight it out to the end. Hitler, who had sworn Stalin’s defeat and destruction, now seemed to be his best guarantee of survival.

It was easy for the NKVD’s First Directorate to warn Lev Knipper and Mariya Garikovna in Iran that the whole operation had been cancelled, but how Igor Miklashevsky was contacted is still not clear. Miklashevsky did, however, succeed in killing his traitor uncle in Berlin.

Aunt Olya, meanwhile, had fallen ill and recovered, but Nemirovich-Danchenko was now so unwell that he could not be moved. She and Kachalov, who still feared that his son, Vadim Shverubovich, had died, insisted on staying with Nemirovich-Danchenko, while the rest of the Moscow Art Theatre group left for Saratov. On 11 August, she had received a letter from Andrei asking where his papa was. Lev, however, on the way back to Iran, was himself passing through Saratov, where he saw the group’s performance of The Seagull.

Aunt Olya was still very concerned for her sister-in-law, Aunt Masha, cut offin the Crimea several hundred miles behind German lines at Stalingrad. She had received some food supplies from friends just before the Germans captured most of the Crimea at the end of October the previous year. But the terrible siege of Sevastopol had continued until May 1942.

Masha, the staunch defender of her brother’s memory and the Chekhov house-museum, did everything she could to prevent the Germans from occupying the house. ‘On one occasion,’ wrote a niece, ‘a German officer turned up, a Major von Baake. He had a look at the house and demanded to be quartered in Anton Pavlovich’s study and bedroom. Mariya Pavlovna would rather have died than give in. She had a long conversation and persuaded him that those rooms were relics. She was allowed to lock them up. The Herr Major lived in the dining room and his men on the ground floor. He only stayed for one week, and when leaving, he wrote on the door that the house was his, and this was why no Germans were quartered there afterwards.’

Masha survived only by selling her own clothes and possessions in order to buy food. Like most of the people in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, she lived on the edge of famine. A little assistance of an unusual sort did, however, arrive at the Chekhov museum from an unexpected source. Aunt Masha received a picture postcard of Olga Chekhova from Berlin, with a message of greetings on the back from her sister, Ada. It was accompanied by two canvas bags filled with chocolates and biscuits.

There were unfounded rumours after the war that Olga Chekhova had exerted her great influence in Nazi circles to protect the museum. There was even one story that she had flown to Yalta to visit it in an aeroplane lent to her by Hitler.

One good reason why these stories of Olga Chekhova’s extraordinary influence could never have been more than wishful thinking lay with Hitler himself. In an act of conspicuous self-denial, he had put all contact with movie stars and movies aside. ‘I can’t watch films while the war is on,’ he told Eva Braun after she tried to coax him back to his favourite pastime, ‘when the people have to make so many sacrifices and I must make such grave decisions. I must also save my sensitive eyes for reading maps and reports from the front.’ Only Goebbels continued to take an interest in the UFA studios at Babelsberg. The minister for propaganda realized only too well, now that the war had turned against Germany, that escapism was needed as well as exhortation. This did not, of course, stop film stars from being roped into patriotic public messages. Newsreel footage showed some stars bicycling to work, the actor Heinz Rühmann arriving in a pony trap and Olga Chekhova on foot. She was furious to have been denied the use of her automobile.

The most revealing incident had come during Goebbels’s notorious speech on 18 February 1943 at the Berlin Sport palast, following the defeat at Stalingrad, when he had screamed at the audience, ‘Do you want total war?’ And they had bayed their reply. Newsreel cameras picked out various celebrities in the audience, who had been encouraged to attend by the propaganda ministry. Olga Chekhova was glimpsed briefly, hiding her head in her hands, as if in disbelief. This was not shown in the final Deutsche
Wochenschau
version.

In fact, Olga Chekhova was so much out of things that she would not have been of much use to Lev and Igor Miklashevsky if they had persisted in their assassination missions. She almost certainly had as little idea as the average Berliner of Hitler’s whereabouts. He seldom left his gloomy
Wolfsschanze
headquarters in East Prussia and any movements were kept completely secret.

Olga Chekhova may have had little contact with the Nazi leadership at this time, but people still believed that she did. Vadim Shverubovich, acting as an interpreter in his prison camp, suddenly saw in a magazine a photograph of her in some movie role. Although slightly younger, Vadim had known her quite well in Moscow before the revolution because of his father’s close friendship with Aunt Olya. ‘Oh, that’s Olenka Knipper,’ he said without thinking to the German officer for whom he worked. ‘I know her well.’

The officer was genuinely impressed. The photographs of Olga Chekhova with Hitler had created a strong impression of her influence in Germany too. He said to Vadim, one does not know how seriously: ‘Let me tell that to the chiefs and you’ll be in Berlin tomorrow.’

Vadim, suddenly alarmed, begged him to forget what he had just said. He knew instinctively that if he went to Berlin, he would never see Moscow again. Curiously, another Olga Chekhova myth arose after the war when it was claimed that she had arranged Vadim’s escape. He did escape later, but it had nothing to do with her.

The war had completely cut the Berlin Knippers off from any news of the Moscow side of the family. Olga had no idea that her Uncle Vladimir, the one sent to fetch her back by Aunt Olya on the night of her elopement with Misha, had died on 12 November 1942. Nor did she know that Misha himself, now based in the United States, was making a movie in Hollywood called The Song
of
Russia. This Louis B. Mayer production might best be described as Hollywood’s attempt at a second front in solidarity with the Soviet Union. The wonderfully implausible story has Robert Taylor as an American conductor visiting ‘a collective farm where the peasants sing, smile and dance all day’. He then falls in love and marries ‘a lovely Soviet peasant’, the screen daughter of Misha. The Germans invade and the collective farmers resist heroically to the strains of Tchaikovsky. The script was indeed not up to much, but the two writers on it were treated very unfairly. When the movie was examined by the Committee on Un-American Activities after the war on the grounds that it was pro-Communist, Louis B. Mayer and Robert Taylor pointed the finger of political blame at the two scriptwriters and they were both blacklisted.

For his part, Lev was unaware of their mother’s death in Berlin on 9 May 1943. The indomitable ‘Baba’ had succumbed to a combination of age and incessant smoking, not to mention the massive and relentless air raids of the US Air Force by day and the RAF by night.

To avoid the worst of the bombing, Olga decided to abandon her Kaiserdamm apartment in west Berlin and move out permanently to her dacha at Gross Glienecke, close to the UFA studios at Babelsberg. She brought with her the large stained-glass panel of the Knipper arms, that rather pretentious extravagance which she had commissioned some years before.

Lev returned to Moscow in 1943. He and Mariya Garikovna moved back into 23 Gogolevsky bulvar, despite the fact that his ex-wife Lyuba had returned from Tashkent and was living there once more with Andrei. Relations between them, however, were much easier, for Lyuba had now found a new man, a conductor, and the misery of 1941 was mostly forgotten.

According to Lev’s liaison officer, Colonel Shchors, General Sudoplatov and General Kobulov visited the apartment, bringing supplies completely unobtainable in the shops, such as ‘wine, different kinds of sausage, apples, oranges, canned milk’. This would indicate that even if Lev’s immediate family had no more than suspicions about his work before the war, they must have known for certain that he was working for the NKVD by 1942 at the latest.

Lev returned to Iran from time to time, still under the cover of his musical activities. But in 1944 he was attached as a political officer - again with his Walther pistol—to either the 2nd or the 3rd Ukrainian Front, advancing into Romania. He still loved climbing, so he organized the ascent of a peak in the Carpathians.

The rapid advances of the Red Army also meant that the Crimea had finally been liberated. Aunt Olya, to her great relief, received word that her sister-in-law was alive. Another example of Olga Chekhova myth-making in the Soviet Union also occurred after the Red Army liberated Yalta on 16 April 1944. A military interpreter told Vova Knipper following the war how he had entered liberated Yalta with the troops and on the first day went to see Mariya Pavlovna Chekhova at the Chekhov house-museum. He claims to have seen the photograph of a beautiful woman on her table and asked who she was. ‘This is Olga Chekhova, the cinema actress,’ Mariya Pavlovna had replied, according to him. ‘I don’t know whether the museum would have survived if it were not for her.’

This story is doubly dubious in the circumstances. The museum had survived almost unscathed, but Aunt Masha, who had been stricken with typhoid, was so weak when the Red Army arrived that she could not walk or even stand up. She simply sat there crying.

Vova himself, now just eighteen, had meanwhile been called up and was serving on the Kalinin Front. He had received letters from Aunt Olya, who was sorry for him, particularly after the death of his father, and she looked after him during a twenty-four-hour leave in Moscow. He had fallen asleep from exhaustion on Aunt Olya’s bed soon after arriving. He woke briefly to see her ironing his uniform, which she had just washed for him.

The rapid advance of the Red Army in the south also meant that many prisoner of war camps had to be moved further westwards. Vadim Shverubovich found himself transferred to a camp in southern Austria, not that far from the Italian border. He managed to escape with an Italian prisoner and cross the border through the mountains. It was a terrible journey, for they had no boots, only scraps of cloth bound round their feet. On the Italian side, they sought shelter in the house of a village priest.

German troops, alerted of their escape, came to the priest’s house, but they did not believe that the men could have made it over the mountains already. They just told the priest to keep his eyes open for them. ‘They will be here tomorrow or the day after.’ It was dangerous for the priest to shelter them any longer, so they were passed on down a chain to the Italian resistance.