The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (10 page)

Nemirovich-Danchenko’s continuing disagreements with Stanislavsky made decision-making exceptionally hard. He felt, with a good deal ofjustification, that Stanislavsky was a hopeless idealist. In his view, the Moscow Art Theatre had to cut back to survive. Stanislavsky’s grandiose plans, including the main theatre and its offshoot studios, had even extended to opening a provincial theatre network. But the argument was soon resolved from above. In December, the whole profession was reorganized under state control. The Art Theatre, along with its former imperial counterparts, became an ‘Academic’ theatre of the Soviet state, and was subsidized accordingly.

Stanislavsky, despite Nemirovich-Danchenko’s suspicions, believed far more passionately in the theatre than in himself. He did everything he could to make sure that other members of the Art Theatre had food and lodging, yet when the local Bolshevik housing committee evicted him from his own house, he told nobody at first. Stanislavsky, who bent over backwards to avoid criticizing the revolution, made no complaint, just as he had never protested when the family factory and all his other wealth were confiscated. He apparently wept in private at the loss of his home, yet made no attempt to contest the eviction order. Fortunately word reached Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, who went straight to Lenin.

Lenin had become a great admirer of the Moscow Art Theatre. After all his years of exile, he took every opportunity to catch up on its productions, especially Chekhov’s
The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya.
He was also deeply impressed by Stanislavsky’s performance as General Krutitsky in Ostrovsky’s
Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man.
‘Stanislavsky is a real artist,’ Lenin wrote afterwards. ‘He transformed himself into the General so completely that he lived his life down to the smallest detail. The audience don’t need any explanations. They can see for themselves what an idiot this important-looking general is. In my opinion this is the direction the theatre should take.’ Lenin had little time for Lunacharsky’s doctrine of Proletkult.

The most scathing critic of Chekhov and Stanislavsky at this time was the Futurist poet Mayakovsky, who described their theatre as ‘putrescent’ and satirized it with lines about ’Auntie Manya, Uncle Vanya, sitting on the sofa whining‘. Yet Mayakovsky would be one of the casualties of the brave new world which he had so gladly welcomed. ’We interpreted Mayakovsky’s suicide,‘ the writer Isaac Babel told his NKVD interrogators before he was executed, ’as the poet’s conclusion that it was impossible to work under Soviet conditions.‘

The early autumn of 1919 proved the critical moment of the Russian Civil War. Admiral Kolchak’s forces advancing from Siberia had started to disintegrate under pressure from the Red Army in front and from peasant revolts in the rear, provoked by the Whites’ looting and brutality. But the southern front still struck fear into the Bolsheviks. By the end of August, General Denikin’s White forces had captured almost all the major cities of the Ukraine. Deep cavalry raids by Cossack commanders such as General Mamontov seized key cities on the road north, including Voronezh on the upper Don.

General Denikin had laid down the plan of attack in his ‘Moscow Directive’. On 14 October, one of his armies captured Orel, just 250 miles from Moscow, and stood ready to threaten Tula, the Soviet Republic’s centre of arms manufacture. At the same time, General Yudenich’s army, advancing out of Estonia, had reached the outskirts of Petrograd, ‘the cradle of the Revolution’. In Moscow, escape plans were made for leading Bolsheviks, with the issue of false passports and Tsarist currency. In the Crimea, the upper- and middle-class refugees from the north were convinced that the Bolshevik nightmare was almost over and that they would soon be able to go home. In that early autumn of 1919, the promenade in Yalta was once again full of ladies and girls in long white dresses, with parasols and large straw hats, and even the odd small dog, just as it had been in Anton Chekhov’s day.

9. The Dangers of Exile

The collapse of the White armies in the autumn of 1919 was sudden, catastrophic and largely of their own making. They had utterly alienated the peasantry in their rear by arrogance, brutality, looting, rape and the execution of hostages in villages where men evaded conscription. As the Whites advanced on Moscow, even those who loathed the Bolsheviks began attacking their lines of communication, especially in the Ukraine. The White generals had also alienated all those peripheral nations who wanted to loosen their links to Russia. These diehard imperialists banned the speaking of Ukrainian and refused the slightest degree of independence to their Cossack allies.

Denikin’s armies, some 150,000 strong at the start, became increasingly short of supplies. Men had to be sent back to guard the rear from partisan attacks, and at the front their ill-fed conscripts deserted in large numbers. The situation was even more disastrous on their flank, where the Cossack Army of the Don began to melt away. Its advance had already been greatly slowed by the wagon trains of booty acquired on the way. The Cossacks, who saw no reason why they should fight for an ungrateful Russia, wanted to return to the Don steppe with their ill-gotten loot. They utterly failed to foresee the vengeance which the Reds would exact on their villages once the Whites were defeated.

The ranks of the Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were swelling that autumn due to a change of policy. The Kremlin leadership had offered an amnesty to deserters. By mid-October they outnumbered the Whites on the southern front. They were also helped by the fact that the peasants, who hated them, loathed the idea of a White victory even more. Those who now worked the land seized from the
barins
feared the loss of all their gains in the revolution.

The Reds concentrated their efforts on the defence of Tula and its arms factories. At the same time they prepared their counter-attack, a strike at the flank of the Volunteer Army marching on Tula. This was carried out by the Bolshevik Praetorian Guard, the division of Latvian Riflemen. The Red cavalry, an arm which the Bolsheviks had lacked until then, was thrown against the Cossacks. Meanwhile, just as Petrograd was about to fall to Yudenich’s army, Trotsky rushed to the city. In a whirlwind of energy, he revived its defence with rousing speeches and ruthless executions.

The Whites collapsed on all fronts. Kolchak’s forces abandoned Omsk in November and, within two months, Admiral Kolchak himself would be handed over to the Reds for execution. The pattern of total disintegration, moral as well as military, was repeated in the south. The
sauve-qui-peut
was rendered even more despicable by massacres of Jews in the retreat. The Whites had become obsessively anti-Semitic, convinced that all Jews must somehow be tainted with Bolshevism simply because Trotsky and a number of other leading commissars were Jews.

The utter corruption and selfishness of most of the Whites had been revealed in the speculation and looting which lay behind their crusade to save Russia. Such self-defeating short sightedness also contributed to the British government’s decision in November to withdraw all support. The nobility and middle class sheltering in the south were thrown into panic. Everyone tried to exchange their Don roubles for foreign currency only to find that they had become worthless virtually overnight. Nobody wanted them. Panic spread as fast as the epidemic of typhus passed on by the lice-ridden troops as they fell back.

Olga’s brother, Lev Knipper, who was also lice-infested, was extremely fortunate not to have contracted typhus. He appears to have been better nourished than many, which may have increased his resistance to the disease. Although deprived of a balanced diet, he and his fellow officers had acquired a life-saving source of eggs and lived off
gogol-mogol-
a Russian version of eggnog. He also managed to keep up his spirits at a time when many officers, especially the wounded and ill, had started to shoot themselves. No officer dared to be taken alive by the victorious and avenging Reds. Lev was also fortunate to be part of the forces which withdrew into the easily defended Crimea.

Those forced back into the neck of the Caucasus faced a terrible experience. The scenes at the end of that winter as fear-stricken White refugees fled to the port of Novorossiisk on the Black Sea provide some of the most painful descriptions in modern history.

Unaware of the collapse of Denikin’s armies, the Kachalov group had sailed from the safety of the Crimea to Novorossiisk. They were on their way to perform at Rostov-on-Don. There, they found filth, chaos and railways in a state of virtual collapse. The only place left to sleep was on the platform.

Rostov, like most of the region, was suffering a typhoid epidemic and the theatre in which they were supposed to perform had become an improvised hospital. They found another building in which to put on
The Cherry Orchard.
This persistence was partly due to professional pride, but also to financial need at a time of exponential inflation as the Don rouble crashed. Aunt Olya must have wondered constantly about Lev during that disastrous winter and whether their paths had crossed without them knowing it. Yet it was Vasily Kachalov and his wife who experienced a miracle. Quite by chance, a man appeared at one of their performances to tell Kachalov that his son, Vadim Shverubovich, was lying sick with typhus in the railway station.

Vadim was close to death when they found him and brought him back to less squalid surroundings. They brought a doctor, who provided them with medicine and some carbolic acid to clean and sterilize his skin. The doctor warned them that Vadim was approaching the crisis in his fever. During that night, Vadim’s mother knew that the crisis must have arrived as his temperature dropped rapidly. She poured what she thought was the medicine down his throat, but in her flustered state she had picked up the carbolic acid. It began to burn his insides. Somebody found some milk once they realized what had happened and that soothed the delirious boy a little. And they then gave him the right medicine. Kachalov maintained his self-control with irony. ‘You know, this has the air of a rather vulgar melodrama,’ he announced. ‘A mother, who has been waiting desperately for her son, poisons him on the very first night of his return. This just isn’t possible in real life.’ They nursed Vadim back to health, but even after all his experiences, the boy did not want to let go of his pistol.

As the Red armies advanced in February 1920, the Kachalov group had only one route of escape left. It lay south across the Caucasus. They moved first to Ekaterinodar, but that, they realized, would also be attacked before long. Fortunately, the director of the State Theatre in Tiflis, capital of the now independent Georgian Republic, had studied with the Moscow Art Theatre and was delighted to provide an official invitation.

To get to Tiflis they had to return to Novorossiisk in a goods train. They hoped to find a boat there to take them down the Black Sea coast to Georgia. Vadim Shverubovich, now fully recovered, described Aunt Olya in a coal wagon, sitting erect on a suitcase, reading a book in a gilt morocco binding, oblivious to the dirt, the bitter wind and the sound of gunfire in the distance. Novorossiisk was already filling rapidly with refugees and no ship’s captain was keen to take a company of actors with their costumes and props, however much they pleaded. Finally, the master of an Italian steamer took them on as deck passengers and they escaped the growing horrors of the port.

In the course of the next two weeks, abandoned weapons and the corpses of White officers and civilians, killed in their thousands by typhus, cold and starvation, marked the route to Novorossiisk. Survival depended upon getting on one of the French or British ships in the harbour before the Reds surrounded the town and bombarded the port. Some 50,000 troops were evacuated by the end of March 1920, but a further 60,000 military personnel and countless civilians were left behind once the Red forces arrived and brought up artillery. Allied warships fired salvoes of covering fire as the last ships hauled in their gangplanks. Thousands of screaming people on the quayside, including mothers with babies, begged the ships’ crews to save them. Cossacks shot their horses down by the harbour as if this would somehow oblige the foreign ships to take them away. Scores committed suicide, either throwing themselves into the icy water or blowing their brains out.

The arrival of the Kachalov group in Georgia, and the welcome accorded them in the delightful city of Tiflis, made their recent experiences seem like a bad dream. It was spring and the Georgians were generous with their excellent food and wines. Aunt Olya was suffering badly from arthritis, especially in her hands. This had not been helped by months of living off horsemeat and no vegetables. The contrast with Bolshevik Russia made Georgia seem a paradise, but she was again afflicted by an acute homesickness for the Art Theatre in Moscow and a longing to revisit her husband’s grave in the Novodeviche cemetery. Tiflis had many Russian refugees, and their performances at the State Theatre were eagerly attended. But the Kachalov group knew that they could not stay, nor could they return northwards through the Caucasus. Terrible reprisals were being exacted by the victorious Red Army on the villages of the Terek, Kuban and Don Cossacks.

The hospitable Georgian authorities even arranged for the group to spend a long summer holiday at the Georgian spa of Borzhomi. There the Georgian government put them up in the Likani Palace, a summer retreat built for the Tsar’s brother Grand Duke Michael in Riviera Muscovite style, with many neo-classical and Italianate touches. It later became one of Stalin’s country houses and he spent some of the happiest times there with his wife, Nadya, before she committed suicide.

For the Kachalov group, their large and empty lodgings provided an awkward splendour, but at least they were left alone to discuss their future. They had to choose between exile and a very uncertain return to Bolshevik Moscow. It was hard, especially for those who found themselves in a minority, because the one thing that they all agreed on was that they could only survive together.