The Mystery of Olga Chekhova by Antony Beevor
It is certainly true that, for Stalin, the interrogation of all those close to Hitler was a very high priority. Stalin was still obsessed with his enemy and the source of his power over the German people. The copy of Olga Chekhova’s handwritten deposition, which the KGB released to Vova Knipper just as the Soviet regime was collapsing, tends to support this. Yet this deposition is far from complete and in any case it was written for SMERSh military counter-intelligence, not for the Foreign Intelligence Department of the NKVD, or Beria’s innermost circle. The KGB, not for the first or last time, was shamelessly playing games with a highly selective release of material.
Yet even the limited selection of material made available is enough to demonstrate that Olga Chekhova was taken extraordinarily seriously by the chiefs of Soviet intelligence—one suspects far too seriously. This is amply confirmed by the VIP treatment accorded to her on her return to Berlin some eight weeks later.
During her time in the Moscow apartment after the first safe-house, Olga Chekhova pretended to keep a diary and hide it. She must have known that her SMERSh guardians would find it and read it secretly. ‘All that Olga Chekhova wrote,’ Sergo Beria surmised years later, ‘was clearly written for Abakumov’s men to read. Apparently, Abakumov’s men really believed that the woman could be naive enough to keep a diary while living in a safe-house of military intelligence.’ Olga Chekhova, a ‘talented actress’, he concluded, ‘was not and could not have been a naive person’. An excerpt from her supposedly secret diary was quoted in another document by Major General Utekhin, the head of SMERSh’s foreign counter-intelligence. ‘Rumours circulating about me are worthy of a novel,’ Olga Chekhova scribbled. ‘Apparently, there’s information about me being intimate with Hitler. My God, I laughed a lot about it. How come and what are all these intrigues about? Incredible and mean slander! When one’s conscience is clear, nothing can affect one. And how wonderful it is to speak the truth. Time will show whether they will believe me or not.’
An even more bizarre event took place in Moscow while Olga Chekhova was there under SMERSh protection. Aunt Olya received a telephone call from a Red Army officer whom she did not know, to say that he had brought a parcel for her from Berlin. She asked a friend of the family called Sofya Stanislavovna Pilyavskaya to go and fetch it. Aunt Olya must have been uneasy at anything coming from Berlin after sighting her niece at the end of the victory performance of The Cherry Orchard.
The parcel which she fetched was addressed to ‘Olga Knipper-Chekhova’. Aunt Olya opened it, read the accompanying letter and suddenly exclaimed in alarm: ‘It isn’t for me!’ The parcel contained evening dresses and the letter was from Olga Chekhova’s daughter, Ada, who had sent on these extra clothes, assuming that her mother had been taken back to the Soviet Union to perform in some guest performances at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Aunt Olya rang Kachalov to tell him what had happened and ask him if he knew anything about an invitation to her niece to perform in the Soviet Union. Kachalov was a friend of the military governor of Berlin, the very popular General Berzarin, and managed to put a call through to him. To his consternation, Berzarin was most unwelcoming and abrupt. ‘I know nothing about Olga Chekhova, and don’t call me any more, forget about it.’
A very confused and alarmed Aunt Olya felt that she had even more reason to hasten down to the Crimea. She wanted, with Aunt Masha, to burn all the letters and postcards from their nieces in Germany.
Aunt Olya, despite the holiday in her beloved Crimea, soon fell seriously ill. Whether or not it was hastened by nervous exhaustion and the strain of recent times, it is impossible to tell. Lev was with her, and when Vova Knipper wrote to Aunt Olya from Moscow about his engagement to Margo, it was Lev who replied.
‘Dear Vova,’ he wrote. ‘I read your letter out to Aunt Olya. She’s been in bed since the 6th. Her seventy-fifth birthday on the 22nd was a sad day. And she had an operation on the 23rd. For two weeks her temperature ranged between 38 and 39 degrees. Now she’s feeling better after the operation. We think that she’ll be out of the hospital by the 30th. We are very happy for you. We are glad that Margo’s family has received you so warmly. This means that you won’t be so lonely in Moscow at the start of your stay there. It’s good that you have completed your studies. Nowadays one does need an education, especially if one wants to be an actor. By the way, I did not know that you were interested in this profession. It is hard work. You have to work hard on yourself. Masses of reading, thinking, and most important for any artistic profession are inner discipline, self-control, and an ability to withstand failures, which are usually much more numerous than successes, even for talented actors. But you saw how your father could work. And Aunt Olya is still working. Knippers are hard-working and they persevere in achieving their goals. Well, that’s enough moralizing. I will be in Moscow around 10 October and Aunt Olya later, when she’s feeling better. She sends her kisses. I shake your hand. Say hello to Margo for me because I do not know their telephone number in Moscow. Yours Lev Knipper.’
Aunt Olya may have had an additional reason for not wanting to reply in person. She had apparently heard unsettling rumours that Vova had not acquitted himself well during the war and an air of disgrace hung over him within the family. But there was at least one major reassurance for her at this time. On the occasion of her seventy-fifth birthday on 22September, the veteran actress received the Order of Lenin on the instructions of the Central Committee. Apart from the prestige attached to the award, it was a clear signal that the Knipper family was not under threat from the NKVD.
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
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
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.