The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (22 page)

34. Olga with Wehrmacht troops in Paris. October 1940.

35. Olga visits a Luftwaffe fighter wing in September 1940, during the Battle of Britain.

36. Mariya Garikovna. Lev’s fellow NKVD agent and second wife.

37. Lev and his fellow composer Prokofiev. 1941.

38. Red Army troops march past Stalin in Red Square on their way to fight the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow, 7 November 1941.

39. Lev in Teheran in the grounds of the Soviet embassy, 1942.

40. Olga with Rudolf Prack in
Der ewige Klang (The Eternal Time.
1944). One of the very last films produced by the Nazi film industry.

41. Abakumov, the chief of SMERSh, receives the Order of Kutuzov 1st Class on 21 April 1945, just before he has Olga flown back to Moscow from Berlin.

42. Lev and Aunt Olya soon after the war.

43. Lev climbing again in the Caucasus after the war.

44. Olga Chekhova, along with Konrad Lorenz, receives the Cross ot the Order of Merit in 1972.

In Moscow, the executions took place in specially constructed cellars with sloping concrete floors which could be hosed down. Bodies were burned in the ovens of the Donskoi monastery in central Moscow and ash covered the whole area as if from a reactivating volcano. Thousands of others were driven out in covered trucks to Butovo, where KGB officers later built their dachas. ‘The execution squads worked in a terrible hurry, day and night, the shots drowned out by the deafening noise of the running engines. People were lined up above a previously dug trench and shot ... They filled in the pit, levelled off the earth and prepared another trench.’ In a typical touch of the Soviet ‘security organs’, orchards were planted over the graves to hide their crimes, and so that the citizens of Moscow could benefit in ignorance from these enemies of the people.

The main frenzy of denunciations, false accusations and forced confessions of the Great Terror was known in Russia as the ‘Yezhovshchina’, after the diminutive NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Stalin had put this wildly unstable character in charge of what became known as the ‘mincing machine’. He was given every encouragement, only to be punished later for all the ‘excesses’. Stalin brought in his fellow Georgian Lavrenty Beria as Yezhov’s deputy in July 1938, then crushed Yezhov at the end of the year.

An imperceptible hint of the horrors to come from Nazi Germany reached Aunt Masha in Yalta in the summer of 1935. A postcard arrived from Berlin showing Olga Chekhova in one of her roles. On the other side, Olga’s sister, Ada, asked Masha to send a ‘certain document’ as soon as possible.

The document in question, a deposition finally signed in Yalta on 14 August 1935 by Aunt Masha and her brother Mikhail Chekhov, testified that the Chekhov family was entirely of Russian Orthodox descent. This was because Olga Chekhova’s daughter, Ada, was at risk. Misha’s mother, Natalya Golden, had been Jewish. Olga Chekhova had decided to act quickly, having perhaps heard at some propaganda ministry reception of the forthcoming Nuremberg Laws, which were announced at the Nazi Party rally in September.

Aunt Masha and her brother were prepared to perjure themselves in a good cause. ‘There were not any persons of non-Christian faith in our family, either on our father’s or our mother’s side,’ they wrote. ‘Our late brother Alexander Pavlovich Chekhov was married to a resident of Moscow, Natalya Alexandrovna Galdina, Russian and Orthodox Christian.’ Misha’s mother, with her name changed from Golden to Galdina, became a Gentile posthumously. The registration fee was two roubles.