The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (31 page)

20. Return to Berlin

On Beria’s orders, Olga Chekhova was flown back to Berlin in the last week of June. Her lover, Albert Sumser, described her as looking exhausted and shaken. Those weeks in the snakepit of Soviet intelligence had clearly been a considerable nervous strain, especially since SMERSh was not to know about her relationship with Beria and Merkulov. It would also have been a very unpleasant shock for her if she had heard from Beria or Merkulov about Lev and the plan to use her in the assassination attempt. Her family and everything that she had ever worked for would have been destroyed in such a desperate attempt. One wonders how much this affected her relationship with Lev. They never saw each other again, and it appears, despite some remarks she made at the end of her life, that they did not communicate.

The proof of the importance which Soviet intelligence accorded to Olga Chekhova comes in a letter from General Vadis, by then the chief of all SMERSh groups in Germany, to Abakumov, just after her return to Berlin. Vadis reported on everything that they had done for her. ‘According to your instructions, on 30 June 1945, Chekhova, Olga Konstantinovna, together with her family and her belongings, was moved from the place Gross Glienecke to the eastern part of Berlin, the town of Friedrichshagen, where she was given a house in Spree Strasse No. 2. The move was carried out using the resources of the counter-intelligence department SMERSh of the Group of Soviet Occupation Troops in Germany.’

The large house into which Olga Chekhova was moved had been carefully chosen, and one suspects that she had a decisive voice in the matter. Built between the wars, with heavy tiles and a rough stucco finish, it was in many ways a far more spacious version of her dacha at Gross Glienecke. It too had a private, peaceful setting, looking out across water, with its own wooden jetty and heavy willows. The only sound was of ducks quacking gently. The previous occupant had been moved out by a detachment from the 11th NKVD Rifle Brigade.

‘After the move,’ Vadis continued, ‘we satisfied the following of Chekhova’s requests, either directly or through the military commandant. 1. Cleaning and partial repairs of the house have been performed. 2. Two cars belonging to Chekhova have been repaired. 3. Chekhova has been supplied with food (two months’ rations). 4. Food ration cards provided for the whole family. 5. A supply of milk has been organized. 6. Coal has been purchased for heating. 7. She has been given money, 5,000 Marks. 8. Guards have been placed on the house: three soldiers from the 17th (NKVD) Independent Rifle Battalion.’

The only one of Olga’s demands which they refused was that she should be provided with an escort of soldiers whenever she went visiting friends or her dressmaker, to make sure that Soviet soldiers did not steal her car. Although she seemed unconcerned about such a conspicuous indication of her relationship with the Soviet authorities, they wanted to be more discreet. ‘We don’t give her an escort, using well-founded pretexts,’ Vadis explained.

There was absolutely no restriction on her movements. She was visiting the western sectors of the city just as much as the Soviet zone, where she paid courtesy calls on the Red Army commandant and other officials. (In her memoirs she even tries to pretend that she was not living in the Soviet sector.) The report ended: ‘Chekhova has expressed great satisfaction with our care and attention. Signed Vadis.’

Olga Chekhova was careful not to make any comment to SMERSh officers on her future plans. Her daughter, however, made polite noises about wanting to go and live and work in the Soviet Union, but their main preoccupation at the time was trying to find out what had happened to Ada’s gynaecologist husband, Wilhelm Rust, who was thought to be a prisoner of war with the British. On 24 July, Willi Rust suddenly turned up at the house at Spree Strasse. General Vadis was instinctively suspicious, presumably because Rust had been released fairly rapidly by the British. ‘He was being kept in a prisoner of war camp in Denmark,’ Vadis reported to Abakumov, ‘where he continued to work as a doctor. Apparently, at his own request, he was transferred to another camp in the town of Braunschweig. He was provided with necessary documents, an ambulance with medical supplies and a medical assistant who was also a prisoner of war. Under the pretext of moving to the new place of work in the zone of Berlin occupied by English troops, Rust arrived at Chekhova’s house in the ambulance. While travelling in occupied German territory, he was stopped several times by English and Soviet patrols, which let him proceed after checking his documents and the vehicle . . . The circumstances of Rust’s return to Berlin arouse suspicion and demand thorough investigation. I need your instructions. Vadis.’

The Soviet military authorities must also have offered Olga Chekhova their postal facilities. Ada had been able to send the parcel of dresses to Moscow and now Olga Chekhova, who had presumably seen a photograph of Aunt Masha in some Soviet publication, sent her another postcard of herself: ‘Dear Aunt Masha, Judging by your photographs, you have remained the same, and this is why I have also decided to become a vegetarian. Kisses your [Olga].’ Whether or not the two aunts had recovered from their fright by this stage is unknown, but they must have remained uneasy until the award of the Order of Lenin was announced.

Olga Chekhova still managed to surprise her protectors, even though it would appear from several reports that the Spree Strasse house must have been bugged by SMERSh or the NKVD before she was moved there; and one also wonders to whom her Russian maid, Nadia, reported. Despite such surveillance, SMERSh suddenly woke up to the fact that there was another person living in the Spree Strasse house for whom they had not accounted. This, according to the report to Abakumov in Moscow, was ‘someone called Sumser, Albert, born 1913, German teacher at the academy of physical education in Berlin, champion in field and track athletics, who lives with Chekhova and has intimate relations with her’. The fact that Bert Sumser had been with the household all along appears to have escaped their attention.

Very soon after Willi Rust returned late in July, Olga Chekhova made a quick trip to Vienna. Travel was not easy at the time, but no doubt General Vadis arranged her journey down there. On her return, she wrote Aunt Olya a letter which was intercepted by the NKVD and ended up in the KGB archive. ‘My dear and dearest Aunt Olya, finally I can write to you. I was stuck in Vienna. Now I’m back here organizing my new home. [Ada] and her husband and Ver ochka are living with me. Dr Rust has started to work here in the hospital. Today I visited Ada [her sister] and Marina and laughed until I cried when I saw how Ada milked her cow. They’ve got quite a household now.’ It is hard to imagine Ada also acquiring the very rare luxury of a cow without Olga’s help, since almost all livestock had been seized by the Red Army. The idea of them each having their own household cow was perhaps prompted by Olga’s memory of Chaliapin’s cow, which had kept her daughter alive in Moscow during the first winter of the revolution.

‘You’re so mobile,’ she continued in her letter to Aunt Olya, ‘that it won’t be a problem for you to come and visit. We are all so looking forward to seeing you. You know all the events of the last years from Ada and [Olga’s daughter Ada] and Marina. Poor Mama did not survive to see the victory of Russians, to which she had been looking forward so much. I can’t tell you much about myself, because the move has exhausted me completely. Simonov has visited us and told us a lot about Lev.’

Konstantin Simonov, the novelist and poet, who later became a great friend of Marshal Zhukov, reached Berlin as a war correspondent at the very end of the fighting. One longs to know what he told them about Lev, and this reference may have been the reason why this particular letter was intercepted.

Olga Chekhova had other visitors, including Western journalists. SMERSh operatives carefully noted their comings and goings. General Zelenin, who took over from General Vadis as head of SMERSh in Germany, reported to Abakumov that she had been visited by an American, a Dr Gun. Dr Nerin E. Gun was a journalist who had recently been liberated from Dachau by US Forces. He later produced a biography of Eva Braun and on these visits was no doubt getting Olga Chekhova’s reminiscences of the Nazi leadership. Other visitors, including a French general, were congratulating her on her aunt receiving the Order of Lenin. The British commandant, on the other hand, was given a conspicuously cold reception when he invited her to dinner.

Olga Chekhova cannot have felt any better disposed to the British when, on 14 October, a London Sunday newspaper, the People, published a sensational article about her entitled ‘The Spy Who Vamped Hitler’. The author of this piece, Willi Frischauer, poured forth every rumour about her. ‘Olga Tschechova
[sic],’
it began, ‘famous German stage and screen actress, now lives in a castle on the eastern outskirts of Berlin, fêted by the Russians ...’ It claimed that during the war she had a room reserved for her at Hitler’s field headquarters ‘wherever he went’. Hitler was ‘casting his covetous eyes upon her’ and her allure was so effective, the article claimed, that Nazi leaders almost queued up to ask her to persuade the Führer to do this or that. She was portrayed as a ’Polish’ Mata Hari and Madame de Pompadour rolled into one. According to Frischauer, her chauffeur was her courier. He rushed off after each meeting with her little notebook, and the details written with her diamond-studded pencil were on their way to Moscow. The inventions and inaccuracies were flagrant, but the article set off a media storm.

Olga Chekhova heard of the article the following day and marched into General Zelenin’s office. He reported the whole scandal to Abakumov and included a letter which she wrote to Abakumov on 18 October. This made no mention of the row and was clearly intended to win his support: ‘Dearest Vladimir Semyonovich, I take this opportunity to send you my heartfelt greetings and my gratitude for everything. I am giving a lot of performances both for our people [sic] and for Germans glorifying Russian literature. I so wanted to see you in my house and if you do come over again, please do visit me. I had a letter from the Crimea from Olga Leonardovna ...’

‘Chekhova is extremely worried by the publication of this article,’ Zelenin reported to Abakumov in a covering letter. He also included a copy of the interrogation of a childhood acquaintance of hers, a White Russian called Boris Fyodorovich Glazunov, accused of being part of ‘the intelligence organ Zeppelin’. SMERSh, in true Stalinist fashion, suspected everyone and often beat confessions of anti-Soviet conspiracies from any of the usual suspects, of whom the first were Russian émigrés.

Less than a month later, on 14 November,
Kurier,
a German-language newspaper in the French zone of Berlin, recycled stories from the
People
article, and claimed that Olga Chekhova, the movie star, ‘the Queen of Nazi society’, had received a major decoration from Stalin for her intelligence services during the war.

Olga was furious. A young German woman had spat in her face in the street and called her a traitor. She went straight to Red Army headquarters at Karlshorst and demanded that the Soviet authorities act at once.
Kurier
was forced to print the following statement on 19 November. ‘The information bureau of the Soviet Military Administration has informed us that it has been authorized to announce the following:

The article reprinted in
Kurier
from
Mainzer Anzeiger
about the German actress Olga Chekhova does not reflect the true facts. The truth is that the Praesidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR on 22 September 1945 decorated not the German actress Olga Chekhova but the Russian actress Olga Leonardovna Knipper- Chekhova on her seventy-fifth birthday. Olga Chekhova in turn wrote us a letter from which we would like to quote the following:

1. I never received such a high Russian decoration, particularly from Generalissimo Stalin himself. So far I have not had the honour of meeting Generalissimo Stalin. Olga Chekhova, Anton Chekhov’s widow, who is my aunt, received the medal on her seventy-fifth birthday.

2. . Ex-foreign affairs minister Ribbentrop met me only at official receptions. I never met foreign affairs minister Count Ciano. I never entered the Führer’s headquarters and I did not even know where it was.

3. . I know nothing of my influence on Hitler because, like my colleagues, I saw him only at official receptions and I hardly spoke to him. This is why there is confusion about my influence on Hitler in various military and business circles.

4. . It is also incorrect that a general whom I knew asked me to intervene with Hitler to ask for the production of special guns.

5. It is also incorrect that the Gestapo arrested my driver in the last few days of the war. I have not had a driver for six years. I could not have a driver because Dr Goebbels, for propaganda purposes, took away my car four years ago so that the people would see that even celebrities had to walk. So now you see what great influence I had on Hitler.‘

Kurier
finished its grovelling apology with a tribute to ‘Frau Chekhova, whom we respect very much’.

This time General Serov, the NKVD chief in Germany, reported the whole matter to Beria, sending copies for Abakumov and Beria’s deputy, Merkulov. ‘With regard to Olga Chekhova’s visit to Moscow in May this year, English newspapers were also publishing different rumours about her connections with Russian intelligence. I put this to you and it is for you to come to a decision and give orders. Signed Serov.’ Beria scrawled across his copy: ‘Comrade Abakumov, what do you suggest should be done about Olga Chekhova?’ It was a Delphic remark, yet when he signed it and wrote the date—22.11.45 - a stamp appeared immediately underneath: ‘Taken under control. Secretariat of the NKVD of the USSR’.

When this copy of the report reached Abakumov, he added his own instruction: ‘Comrade Utekhin. Provide a reference on all materials concerning Chekhova. 22.11.45’. General Utekhin of the 4th Department was SMERSh’s most feared mole-hunter. Did Abakumov suddenly wonder whether he had been taken in by a double agent? Her friendship with Glazunov of the so-called Zeppelin Group clearly rang alarm bells. But it would appear that Beria intended to keep Olga Chekhova in place and unharmed, ready for use at a later date, this time against the Western Allies.