The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (25 page)

Photographers and newsreel cameras recorded the arrival of the guests and their reception by Molotov. At some stage, Olga Chekhova was drawn aside, perhaps by a junior member of the embassy staff, to be introduced to Merkulov. This was not dangerous, even if a Gestapo agent had been watching. In German eyes, it would have been perfectly normal for a Russian to want to meet a member of the Chekhov family. And it presumably became much easier for them to talk undisturbed, since just after glasses were raised for the first toast, air-raid sirens warned of another bombing raid by the Royal Air Force.

According to Berezhkov, the Nazi leaders made straight for the door to be driven to their air-raid shelters round the corner in the Wilhelm Strasse. The Soviet embassy had its own torture chamber for interrogating suspect members of the staff and the Soviet community in Berlin, yet it lacked an air-raid shelter, even though Britain and Germany had been at war for over a year. It was almost as if Stalinist conspiracy theories did not allow them to believe that the perfidious British were dropping real bombs.

Although the idea ‘was not to use [Olga Chekhova] as a rank and file informer’, she certainly appeared to be in a good position to assist the two main priorities for Soviet intelligence. The first was Stalin’s insistence that they must discover ‘Hitler’s source of strength’ within his own country. How had he managed to achieve such a following and such power? The other, as already mentioned, was to identify influential people in Germany who opposed the idea of an attack on the Soviet Union. Certain members of the old school, such as the German ambassador in Moscow, Count von der Schulenberg, strongly believed in Bismarck’s dictum that Germany should never attack Russia. It was hoped that Olga Chekhova, like Prince Janusz Radziwill, could help in this way. What they could have achieved in practical terms is hard to imagine, and in any case Soviet intelligence had almost certainly over-estimated the effectiveness of Olga Chekhova’s contacts, probably as a result of seeing the photograph of her seated next to Hitler. Rumours had circulated in limited circles in Moscow that she virtually acted as Hitler’s hostess on occasion.

For Olga Chekhova at least, the meeting with Merkulov offered reassurance that her family was safe in the Soviet Union. It is said that Merkulov almost certainly brought a message from Lev to reassure her that her family was protected.

Olga Chekhova returned to France the following month to see Jep again. In Paris on 23 December, she received a large Christmas parcel from Hitler, passed on to her via the German embassy there. It contained a card showing the Führer’s portrait and signed by him with a dedication, together with cakes, chocolate, nuts and gingerbread, as if she were a soldier at the front. As she was about to return to Germany and hoped to smuggle large supplies of expensive scent and other presents back, she threw out all the little delicacies and refilled the package with her forbidden luxuries. At the frontier, the customs officer and frontier guard insisted on searching the large, heavy package. But when they came across Hitler’s Christmas card, with the handwritten dedication, ‘Frau Olga Tschechowa in sincere admiration and veneration, Adolf Hitler’, they leaped to attention with their right arms thrust out in the Nazi salute and cried,
‘Heil Hitler!’

For the Knippers left in Moscow, this was a time of great anxiety. If war broke out with Germany while the other half of the family in Berlin was associating with the Nazi elite, they would be in a very dangerous position. By the time the rumours of Olga in Berlin reached her Uncle Vladimir, the story went that Hitler had actually introduced her to Molotov as his hostess. Soon after, a small truck with an antenna revolving on top was spotted driving slowly along Gogolevsky bulvar. The Knippers immediately thought that it was spying on them.

‘We’ve got to look after ourselves,’ Vladimir Knipper explained, more to himself than to his son, Vova. ‘They were sweet girls [Olga and Ada], but we had to stop corresponding. It’s crazy, but that’s what one has to do nowadays.’

Only Lev seemed unaffected by these fears. If anything, he seems to have rediscovered his confidence on his return from the mission in Poland in the spring of 1941. Much of this may of course have been due to his relationship with Mariya Garikovna, whose extrovert nature complemented his character and if anything encouraged him to relax.

Sources disagree on when they met. Some people do not think that their relationship began until 1941. Former Lieutenant Colonel of State Security Shchors, who was later the liaison officer between Lev and General Kobulov, even believes that Mariya Garikovna was selected as Lev’s fellow agent and that they were ordered to marry. This was apparently a common practice at the time and few objected. ‘Well,’ said Shchors, ‘I have heard about a man who, on a similar occasion, demanded a medical certificate proving that his bride was a virgin. But usually everything was all right.’ Shchors himself never set eyes on his wife before she turned up at his apartment with a new passport in the name of Natalya Shchors. Now they have been together for sixty years. So he does not imagine that Lev would have objected.

Vova Knipper, then just about to finish high school, remembered the telephone ringing in their apartment. He answered it and recognized Lev’s voice.

‘Who’s that? Is that young Knipper? Is your father at home?’

Half an hour later Lev appeared. Vova admired his much older first cousin enormously. ‘I tried to learn to walk like he did with springy steps like tennis masters should,’ he wrote later. ‘He had played for the main Red Army team and was champion in the Crimea, but Lyova’s chief passion was for mountains. At this time he was an instructor for the Red Army in mountain warfare.’

Vova was at a very impressionable age, as he admitted. He had naively refused to believe that prostitutes existed under Soviet society, so schoolfriends dragged him off to watch them hanging around the square in front of the Bolshoi Theatre, just a few hundred yards from the Kremlin. But he was not blinded by his hero-worship for Lev. He sensed that there was something deeply unsettling about him.

17. Moscow 1941

An unexpected declaration of war is bound to produce a sense of shock, yet no country was as psychologically unprepared as the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Stalin, the great trickster, had refused to believe warnings of Hitler’s betrayal.

Ordinary Russians, persuaded by countless newsreels and radio programmes about their country’s industrial and military might, never believed that the Germans would dare attack. But once the truth sank in, the Russian people reacted far more rapidly than their leaders. There were queues of volunteers within hours of Molotov’s wooden announcement on Radio Moscow. Stalin was too traumatized to speak.

Some of the improvisation might have appeared ridiculous to a professional eye, but there can never be any doubt about the determination to defend the Motherland. Even the Moscow Art Theatre put itself on a war footing. Classes in civilian anti-aircraft defence were held in the theatre’s ‘red corner’, the obligatory Communist shrine with a bust of Lenin. Olga Knipper-Chekhova, at the age of seventy-two, lectured new-comers on how to deal with incendiary bombs: ‘One has to take it by the fins,’ she told them, ‘and throw it out of the window into the sand [piled outside]. It is very simple.’

Popular belief in the might of the Soviet state was soon shaken when it became clear that the Germans had not been thrown back at the frontier. The Wehrmacht was advancing with great speed. One army group was heading for Leningrad, another was pushing through Belorussia on the road to Moscow and a third was driving into the Ukraine. ‘This,’ wrote Lev, ‘was when we really started to learn the geography of our country from the names of villages and towns which we had hardly known before and which were like burning scars on the body of the Motherland.’

When war broke out, Lev had been in the central Caucasus, training Red Army soldiers in mountain warfare at a camp named ‘Rot Front’, in honour of German Communists. They had been scaling a peak, and on returning to their camp on 23 June, the day after the invasion, they had expected their comrades there to come out to welcome them. But the faces of those they encountered gave the first intimation of the disaster which had befallen the country. ‘Don’t be surprised if you find out I am at the front,’ Lev immediately wrote to Aunt Olya. ‘This is my greatest desire.’ But Lev, to his evident frustration, was ordered to stay there and continue training his men.

In July 1941, a few weeks after the invasion, Magda Goebbels rang Olga Chekhova to invite her to a Sunday lunch out at Schwanenwerder. A ministry car would be sent to fetch her. There were about thirty-five people at the lunch, a mixture of actors, diplomats and officials from the propaganda ministry.

Goebbels was exultant at the rapidity of the Wehrmacht advance. He was convinced that the capture of Moscow was a foregone conclusion. Goebbels turned to Olga Chekhova and, according to her account, the following conversation took place.

‘We’ve got a Russian expert here, Frau Chekhova. Don’t you think, Madam, that this war will be finished before winter comes and that we will celebrate Christmas in Moscow?’

‘No,’ she claims to have replied.

‘Why not?’ Goebbels demanded.

‘Napoleon saw what the space of Russia was like.’

‘There’s a huge difference between us and the French,’ Goebbels smiled. ‘We’ve come to Russia as liberators. The Bolshevik clique is going to be overthrown by the new revolution.’

‘In the face of new danger, Russians will show solidarity as they have never done so before.’

Goebbels leaned forward slightly and said coldly: ‘I wonder, Madam. Does this mean that you do not believe in German military power? You are predicting a Russian victory.’

‘I am not predicting anything, Herr Minister. You just asked me whether our soldiers will be in Moscow by Christmas and I just expressed my opinion, which may prove right or wrong.’

Goebbels, she wrote later, gave her a long suspicious stare. There is no mention of this exchange in the Goebbels diaries, and it has proved impossible to verify. It may well have been what she would like to have said.

It looked as if Goebbels would be proved right. Smolensk had fallen, and Field Marshal von Bock’s Army Group Centre, with 1.5 million men, appeared unstoppable. On 22 July, Moscow was bombed for the first time. The Luftwaffe followed up the attack on the two following nights. The windows of apartments, including those of 23 Gogolevsky bulvar, were blasted in and dogs went wild in terror, but there was comparatively little structural damage.

Food was already in short supply. Vladimir Knipper as an opera singer received a free lunch of soup and potatoes each day at the Central House of Workers in the Arts. His son, Vova, depended more and more on the contents of the little billycan in which his father brought the meal to share with him. Vova’s ration was only q.oo grams of bread, and yet he had been drafted already into digging anti-tank ditches outside Moscow. Their dog was the first to succumb to the combination of stress from the air raids and starvation. Vladimir Knipper was also having to borrow money from Aunt Olya, who continued to act with uncomplaining generosity as the family banker. In the middle of that terrible summer for the Soviet Union, Aunt Olya and her great friend Sofya Ivanovna Baklanova came to say goodbye to Vladimir Knipper and his son, Vova. A group of actors from the Moscow Art Theatre was being evacuated from the capital to the Caucasus. Conversation was halting. Aunt Olya suggested that he and Vova should come with them, but Vladimir, apparently sad and nervous, said that he could not leave his books and piano.

Aunt Olya wrote once a week back to Moscow. On 15 August, she described how they were living in a train parked beside a huge pear orchard, with the snow-capped peaks of the Caucasus range in the distance. She could think only of home. A week later, she asked Vladimir to check on other members of the family to see how they were.

In September, she told Vladimir that two of the leading members of the Moscow Art Theatre group, Tarasova and Moskvin, were trying to leave for Moscow. She was clearly upset and jealous. ‘They have been asked by the theatre to come back and we are just “Firsovs”.’ Firsov was the old servant forgotten and abandoned at the end of
The Cherry Orchard.

The only consolation for her was a visit from Lev, who had come up from his mountain-warfare training camp. But her great friend Sofya was clearly uneasy about Aunt Olya’s surrogate son. ‘We are at a complete loss as to what we should do,’ she wrote to Vladimir Knipper. ‘Many Moscow Art Theatre people are already going back. Lyova is going back to the mountains. Lyova is still the same. There is a lot in him that isn’t clear to me. Olga Leonardovna doesn’t know anything about Andryusha and we are worried.’

They were right to be concerned about Lev’s young son, Andrei. He and his mother, Lyuba, were almost starving in Tashkent and Lev did not reply to their pleas for help. When Vova Knipper asked him a month later for news of Andrei, Lev was clearly embarrassed. He tried to pretend that the situation with Mariya Garikovna made it very hard for him to stay in touch with Lyuba.

Personal suffering attracted little attention at this moment of supreme danger for the Motherland. Operation Typhoon, the German assault on Moscow, was launched on 30 September 1941. Guderian’s tanks dashed forward on the southern flank and entered the centre of Orel, overtaking streetcars whose occupants had no idea that the enemy was upon them.

On 5 October, a Soviet reconnaissance aircraft spotted a twelve-mile-long column of German armour on the Yukhnov road, no more than eighty miles from Moscow. The news caused such disbelief in the Kremlin that Beria wanted to arrest the air force officer concerned for ‘provocation’. Two more aircraft were sent up and their pilots confirmed the news. There was panic in the Kremlin. Stalin gave the order to the commander of the Moscow military district to mobilize everything he had. He did not know that Hitler had already claimed that the victory was won and had sworn a Cartha ginian fate for Moscow. The city was to be razed to the ground and the site flooded to create a huge lake.