The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (26 page)

Field Marshal von Bock’s panzer forces achieved a stunning double encirclement at Bryansk and another round Vyazma. They destroyed 1,242 Soviet tanks and cut off 665,000 Soviet soldiers. These captured Red Army men were destined for terrible suffering, in most cases death through starvation and disease, in German prisoner of war camps. One of them was Kachalov’s son, Vadim Shverubovich, the White Guard who had become Lev’s companion in exile. The forty-year-old Vadim, having been prevented from volunteering for the Spanish Civil War, was now one of 4 million people to come forward to join the opolchentsy home guard. These scandalously ill-armed forces were thrown into utterly hopeless attacks against Wehrmacht and SS divisions and suffered terrifying casualties. Many of the men were still in civilian clothes and risked being shot out of hand as partisans.

Vadim and his comrades had exhausted themselves trying to find a way out of the German encirclement. They woke up one morning, stiff from an early frost and snowfall, to find German soldiers standing over them. They were marched to a camp near Yukhnov and began to experience the horrors of capture on the eastern front. They received no shelter, little drinking water and hardly any food. From time to time food was thrown over the fence, and the guards laughed to watch them fight each other in their desperation to grab morsels from the mud. With no huts, tents or latrines, the conditions were unspeakably squalid. Soon real winter arrived, and ‘they were left to die in the snow’.

One morning, Vadim Shverubovich woke up to find himself surrounded almost entirely by corpses. He realized that he too was going to die if he continued to lie there. Some instinct of self-respect made him decide to shave. In his pouch he had, like most Red Army soldiers, a small piece of broken mirror and a rusty razor. He had no soap, of course, so he used spittle. A German officer observed this curious act amid such appalling surroundings. He called out as a joke: ‘Cream, powder, mass agee?’ Shverubovich looked up at him. The German officer ordered him to stand to attention. Shverubovich did as he was told.

‘Do you speak German?’ the officer asked.

‘Yes, I do.’ His German was in fact excellent.

‘Do you want to work?’

‘Yes.’

‘Translate for the others. I want to know who else can work.’

Shverubovich translated and several men hauled themselves to their feet.

‘If you want us to work,’ Shverubovich said, ‘you should first feed us.’ They were given some soup. Almost immediately Shverubovich felt his strength returning.

Vadim’s father, Kachalov, who was with Aunt Olya in the Caucasus, received with great self-control the news that Vadim was missing. Aunt Olya could imagine only too well what he must be suffering. She knew what it would have meant to her if Lev had been posted missing.

On 14 October, the SS Das Reich and the 10th Panzer Division reached the Napoleonic battlefield of Borodino. Memories of 1812 and Napoleon’s entry into Moscow were rife, but many drew the wrong conclusions. On the same day, the ist Panzer Division seized the town of Kalinin, with its bridge over the Volga, and severed the Moscow-Leningrad railway line.

On the evening of 15 October, foreign embassies and government departments were told to prepare to leave the city. Orders were issued for the evacuation to Kuibyshev, 500 miles to the east. Even Lenin’s mummified corpse was removed secretly from the mausoleum on Red Square and sent east in a refrigerated railway car. Government files were destroyed in huge bonfires in the courtyards of ministries. There was a smell of burnt paper as charred fragments floated over the centre of the city, rather as the human ashes from the Donskoi monastery had done during the purges four years earlier. ‘We were walking on black snow,’ Vova Knipper wrote later.

There was indeed an echo of the purges, as the execution squads in the Lubyanka and other NKVD prisons worked overtime shooting prisoners to prevent them falling into the hands of the Germans.

Around the city, steel hedgehogs were set up to block roads against enemy armour, and tens of thousands of ill-equipped civilians were marched out to dig more anti-tank ditches. Word spread that Moscow was about to be abandoned to the enemy and large parts of the population became panic-stricken. Families stormed the city’s eastern railway stations, especially the Kazansky station, desperate for a place on what they thought might be the last train out before the Germans encircled the city. People had barely left their apartments before neighbours and block supervisors began looting them.

Even government officials who were supposed to stay behind deserted their posts to escape the city. On 16 October, Aleksei Kosygin, the deputy chairman of Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars, entered its headquarters to find the place abandoned. A few sheets of paper were blowing around in the draught, and once or twice a telephone rang, but the person at the other end rang off as soon as he answered it. Eventually one caller asked quite brazenly whether Moscow would be surrendered.

Stores of alcohol as well as food shops were stormed and there was much drunkenness on the streets. Wild rumours described the drop of German paratroopers on Red Square. Natalya Gesse, a friend of the physicist Andrei Sakharov, was nearly lynched as she hobbled along on crutches after an operation. People were convinced that she had broken her legs when coming down by parachute. Other panic-mongers claimed to know on the best authority that Stalin had been arrested in a Kremlin coup. A rumour, which in this case proved accurate, ran round the city that huge demolition charges were being laid in the Metro ‘for well-known reasons’. Most people still feared to voice openly the idea of Moscow falling to the enemy. The crime of defeatism was dealt with by firing squad. Yet the panic in the Moscow Conservatoire had been such that Vova’s father had seen fellow teachers openly burning their Communist Party cards, an act which could carry the death penalty.

On 19 November, Beria sent in several regiments of NKVD troops to restore order through summary executions. Anyone suspected of desertion, looting or even drunkenness after the storming of alcohol outlets was seized and put up against a wall without the slightest pretence of an investigation.

In this atmosphere of collapse and despair, the seventeen-year-old Vova found that his girlfriend, Margo, had fallen for a lieutenant colonel of NKVD troops with a bull-like neck who was old enough to be her father. Vova, on entering her apartment, discovered her sitting on his lap. She slipped off when Vova burst in and hurriedly said that they had just returned. ‘Nikolai is hunting for deserters,’ she added, as if that was an explanation for her conduct. As Vova stormed out, he passed Margo’s mother in the corridor. She turned her head away in embarrassment. Vova left the building in tears. Margo’s attachment to such a man at such a moment was part of the desperate
sauve-qui-peut
atmosphere.

Vova must have been frightened, bearing a German name at this moment of pitiless struggle. Daily bulletins from Informburo were attached to trees and walls. On one of them he was shaken to see an excerpt from a letter taken off the body of a German soldier called Hans Knipper. And a schoolfriend of his, a Volga German about to be transported to Siberia, came to see them in despair. Vova’s father, Vladimir, advised him to volunteer for the army to save himself from an exile of forced labour which would be as bad as the Gulag, but Vova’s friend replied that the description ‘German’ was stamped on his papers and they would not accept him in the army. Those of German origin were implicitly categorized as potential enemies of the state. The NKVD had not wasted time assembling records on every Soviet citizen of German descent, some 1.5 million people. Local NKVD departments ’from Leningrad to the Far East’ began a programme of arrests immediately after the Wehrmacht invasion. Yet no member of the Knipper family was touched.

Other Germans in Moscow were also in a strange position, but for different reasons. In the same building as the Knippers lived the family of Friedrich Wolf, the famous German Communist playwright, who had left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933. They were part of the so-called ‘Moscow emigration’ of foreign Communists seeking sanctuary and would have faced instant execution at Nazi hands if the city fell. Vova used to act as a roof-top fire-watcher, ready to deal with incendiary bombs, along with Wolf’s two sons, Markus and Koni. Markus later became the chief of East German intelligence and the original of Karla in John Le Carre’s novels, and his younger brother, Koni, became a film-maker, writer and the president of East Germany’s academy of arts. During air raids, Vladimir Knipper and Friedrich Wolf sat in the cellar, chatting together in German. ’People sitting round us,‘ wrote Vova, ’turned to look at the two of them with anger and fear. There they were in the centre of Moscow arguing about something in the enemy’s language.‘

To Vladimir and Vova’s surprise, Lev suddenly turned up at their apartment just after they had received an anxious letter from Aunt Olya asking for news of him. Despite the desperate situation, Lev still had ‘an energetic sporty gait, his left eyebrow was always raised’. He was accompanied by his new wife, Mariya Garikovna, whom Vova remembered as ‘a very beautiful Armenian woman with long strong legs’. Lev talked to Vladimir and Vova about the threat to Moscow and offered to organize their evacuation. He asked Vova to come into the adjoining room with him, which was Vova’s bedroom. Lev looked at the photo of his girlfriend, Margo, and guessed that she was the reason why Vova did not want to leave Moscow. ‘Well, you should remember,’ Lev told him, ‘that you’re a Knipper and you’ll have lots of such girls.’ The seventeen-year-old Vova did not know how to reply. ‘I was in awe of Lyova,’ he wrote later. ‘He lived a strange, different life. He disappeared from Moscow when everyone else was still there and then reappeared on the coldest of winter days with the deepest of suntans. He often smiled, showing his strong teeth, slightly yellowed by tobacco. At that time in the war I did not like him very much.’

His father, on the other hand, was touched by Lev’s visit. His nephew had brought them some real coffee, which was unobtainable in Moscow, and Vova began to grind it. ‘Ah,’ sighed Vladimir, ‘the air smells of peacetime.’

Vladimir, with his bad legs and a horror of abandoning his books, declined Lev’s offer of evacuation. And so did Vova, who still longed for Margo. She had rung him to make an emotional confession. Nikolai, the giant of an NKVD officer, had now started beating her up. Margo even admitted that she had been excited at first when he had offered her rides in the
Voronok -
the type of camouflaged vehicle in which the NKVD secretly transported its prisoners.

Vova was not the only one to be unsettled by Lev. Mariya Garikovna went with Lev to see off a close friend of hers at a railway station. In tears, Mariya Garikovna murmured to her evacuee friend, indicating Lev: ‘I am afraid of him.’ This may well have been because Lev was even more ready to die in the defence of Moscow than she was. Lev, after that time during the Great Terror when he was trying to conquer any lingering moral scruples with belief in the Soviet Motherland, was now in a mood of exultant self-sacrifice.

The true reason for Lev’s reappearance in Moscow with Mariya Garikovna was indeed extraordinary. At the end of that first week of October, Stalin had made it abundantly clear to his close entourage, most notably Beria, that they faced annihilation and must react with total ruthlessness. The enemy’s rear was to be harassed by partisan attacks. All houses capable of offering shelter to German soldiers as winter approached were to be destroyed, whatever the suffering this entailed for Russian civilians trapped behind German lines. Above all, the partisan war was to be extended to vengeance operations with special stay-behind groups. Beria appointed General Pavel Sudoplatov to be the chief of the Special Tasks Group of the NKVD, in addition to his other responsibilities.

‘In October of 1941,’ wrote General Sudoplatov, ‘when Moscow was under serious threat, Beria ordered us to organize an intelligence network in the city to be activated after its capture by the Germans. We also created an autonomous group which was to eliminate Hitler and his close associates if they turned up in Moscow after its capture. This operation was to be carried out by composer Lev Knipper, brother of Olga Chekhova, and his wife Mariya Garikovna.’ As well as his immediate controller, Colonel of State Security Mikhail Maklyarsky, Lev also reported to one of Beria’s deputies, Commissar of State Security Bogdan Kobulov. As a security precaution, the NKVD chiefs had moved from the Lubyanka to a training school for fire-fighters next to the Comintern headquarters.

Lev and Mariya Garikovna were far from alone in this underground resistance operation, even though their mission was the most ambitious. ‘General Sudoplatov mobilized all his officers to take different posts,’ recorded Zoya Zarubina, who was the NKVD liaison officer with Lev and Mariya Garikovna. ‘I remember myself, I had two different passports, living in two or three different places at the same time, just to make sure. In one place I was registered with my baby, in the second I was just a student.’ Lieutenant Colonel of State Security Shchors, who also liaised with Lev, was responsible for sabotaging the city’s water supply if the Nazis came and his agent-wife was their radio operator. There were at least a dozen ‘battle groups’, each operating individually on a cell basis. They were provided with safe-houses, secret arms dumps and instructions on dead-letter drops. Sudoplatov’s officers were to direct an unusual mixture of volunteers, including ‘key figures among [the] Russian intelligentsia, who were important agents for [the NKVD]’.

Zarubina made contact with Lev and Mariya Garikovna as instructed. By a strange coincidence, she had known the exotic Mariya Garikovna from China, where she had been with her parents, both famous members of the OGPU and NKVD. She greatly admired Mariya Garikovna, not just for her elegance, beauty and intelligence, but also because she was such a brilliant agent, using her charm with devastating effect. Lev, on the other hand, she found introverted, but he was clearly very competent and energetic, even though he said little. Zoya Vasileevna Zarubina had been recruited in 1941, partly for her own foreign languages, but also because she could hardly have been better connected in NKVD circles. Her father, Vasily Mikhailovich Zarubin, had been the illegal
rezident
in Germany, Scandinavia and later Washington. Her stepmother, who worked with him, was Lisa Gorskaya, another famous OGPU and NKVD agent. Zarubina’s stepfather was Nahum Eitingon (alias General Kotov), the organizer of Trotsky’s assassination, director of partisan operations in Spain against Franco, and now Sudoplatov’s deputy.