The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

by Antony Beevor

  Olga realized during the course of that tumultuous year of two revolutions that she would have to leave her increasingly unbalanced husband. In May, Misha had to abandon rehearsals of The Seagull due to nervous depression exacerbated by drinking.

  It appears that Olga had left Misha shortly before Volodya’s suicide, but this is not entirely certain. There is as little common ground in the accounts of the end of their marriage as there was about its beginning. Misha wrote later that Olga had been lured away by an adventurer called Ferenc Jaroszi, an officer of the Austro-Hungarian army who had been a prisoner of war in Russia. ‘He was,’ according to Misha, ‘an adventurer of the sort about which my father had recounted many fascinating stories. Elegant, good-looking, charming and talented as he was, he had at his disposal a great inner strength, which made him irresistible.’ Misha claimed that when Olga came into the room - ‘already in her overcoat’ - to say goodbye that December, she remarked: ’How ugly you look! Well, be happy. You’ll soon forget it.‘ She then, apparently, gave him a friendly kiss and left. Not once in his memoirs does Misha mention their daughter.

  Olga’s account is that she simply could not put up with Misha’s drunkenness and obsessions any longer. Her adolescent infatuation for him had clearly turned as much to pity as to anger. She moved her possessions and the baby to the Knipper family’s apartment in Moscow at 23 Prechistensky bulvar. But having made the decision to leave, she knew that she could not survive on the small sums of money her mother secretly sent her in defiance of Konstantin Knipper, who was still furious with his favourite daughter. The rampant inflation of the time made each batch of banknotes increasingly worthless. And city-dwellers, even when in possession of money, found that food was increasingly hard to come by. People began to live off barter and contacts. Olga claimed that her daughter’s life was saved during that winter of 1917—18 by the great singer Feodor Chaliapin, who gave her milk from the cow which he had brought into Moscow for his family’s use.

  The shock of being poor for the first time in her life was considerable, and undoubtedly created Olga’s determination and ambition for the future. Since she could no longer depend on Misha, she had to forge her own career. Her paintings would not provide a secure income, so she worked for a wine merchant as an office assistant. She also claimed to have carved chess pieces from wood to sell, but perhaps she borrowed this idea from Misha, who used to make them when in his lowest depths of depression.

  7. Frost and Famine

  Lenin’s dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in the first week of January 1918 condemned Russia to the most terrible civil war in history. The Bolsheviks, to their fury, had received no more than 24 per cent of the total vote in the country’s first free elections. Lenin was determined to suppress any opposition to his new ministerial committee, the Sovnarkom - an acronym for the Council of People’s Commissars. Yet the most immediate threat to the new regime came not from the outraged opposition parties but from a major German advance. The Kaiser’s general staff finally decided to exploit the disintegration of the Russian army and the collapse of Trotsky’s delaying tactics at the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations. Petrograd was threatened in February, so the capital of the new Soviet Republic was moved to Moscow. The Bolshevik leadership took over the Kremlin, from the state apartments to the servants’ bedrooms.

  Olga’s parents had also left an increasingly dangerous Petrograd to join her and her sister Ada in Moscow at 23 Prechistensky bulvar. The Knipper family, with the exception of Lev, who was down in the south with his artillery unit, lived together there for a short time with Aunt Olya. Not long afterwards, the Knipper parents set off for Siberia, which Konstantin knew well from his work on the railways. Olga’s mother offered to take her little girl with them away from Moscow. She stood a far better chance of escaping starvation in the countryside.

  There was a huge exodus from Moscow as well as Petrograd during that winter. Tens of thousands of industrial workers, finding themselves without food and without work in the expropriated factories, returned to their peasant roots to escape starvation. Members of the nobility and the professional and merchant classes fled the city in various stages of disguise. Some hoped to find refuge on their estates, convinced that their peasants really cared for them. Most were bound for the less revolutionary south of Russia, especially the Crimea and the Don Cossack capital of Novocherkassk, where opposition to the Reds began to consolidate in the form of the Volunteer Army, manned almost entirely by embittered Tsarist officers. Travelling for the first time in their lives with the common people, the dispossessed refugees were shocked to encounter such a visceral hatred for the old order. It was this incoherent anger and desire for revenge which had led to the wanton destruction by peasants of works of art and books in the country houses which they stormed. The Bolsheviks did not hang back from exploiting to the utmost a deep desire among the poor for class warfare. ‘Death to the Bourgeoisie!’ was a truly popular slogan.

  Olga stayed behind in Moscow with Ada. The remains of the winter in early 1918 were still cruelly cold. There was no coal. Foraging for firewood was outlawed, but almost everyone was desperate enough to take the risk of being shot by Red Guard patrols to bring home boughs from a tree or planks from a step. The two sisters were reduced to burning their father’s books from his library in a little iron stove. In an attempt to retain some body heat at night, Olga and Ada even built a tent out of a Persian carpet over a mattress on the bedroom floor to keep them warm.

  Although much of Olga’s time had to be spent searching for food, her ambitions to become an actress had not slackened. She claimed later to have joined a cabaret-theatre group called Sorokonozhka, or ‘The Little Centipede’, because there were only twenty members and they possessed but forty feet. Most surprisingly of all, considering the circumstances of the time and her total lack of experience, she had been given a part in a silent movie, Anya Kraeva. Two other parts followed, one in Cagliostro and the other in The Last Adventure of Arsène Lupin. These may seem unexpected titles for Year Zero of the Leninist revolution, but the semi-amateur movie-makers seem to have been left to their own devices by the new Bolshevik authorities.

  Theatres, on the other hand, were much more closely controlled. The Moscow Art Theatre soon had to search for a repertoire more attuned to the new era, just as Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko had to forget their earlier enthusiasm for Kerensky, who had fled into exile following the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd. In fact the tall and distinguished Stanislavsky now strode down Moscow streets with his fur coat thrown wide open to show a large red bow, demonstrating his revolutionary loyalty. The actors and stage crew of the Moscow Art Theatre became state employees on pitiful salaries and answerable to People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky.

  Bolshevik agitprop groups brought factory workers into the much larger Solodovnikovsky Theatre, just across the road, where Stanislavsky and his colleagues performed as part of a programme, designated ‘Proletkult’, to bring culture to the factory floor. This organization, promoted so strongly by Lunacharsky, was designed through groups of actors, musicians and singers to create a cultural revolution for the working class, just as the encyclopédistes had produced one for the bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France. Lenin, however, was privately scathing about such efforts, partly because his own tastes owed more to the ancien régime, but also because he knew perfectly well that this was not real proletarian culture. At best, it was simply an attempt to force-feed the masses on high-minded political correctness. At worst, it was an excuse for cultural nihilists, such as Futurists like Mayakovsky, to call for the destruction of all traditional art works as a shock tactic of cultural liberation.

  Some of these workers gaped in bewilderment at the Moscow Art Theatre production or simply ignored the proceedings and just ate, drank, smoked and chatted together. Others, however, shuffled their feet in irritation at what seemed to them a sympathetic portrayal of bourgeois life. Many yelled their opinions. On some occa
sions, the noise and behaviour struck Stanislavsky as so unseemly that he went front of stage to remonstrate with the audience. The Moscow Art Theatre, which had appeared so revolutionary when it began in 1898, now looked dated, if not reactionary. It was a depressing twentieth anniversary for those who, in Stanislavsky’s phrase, ‘always served beauty and nobility’. But he also acknowledged rather abjectly that ‘we have become the representatives of experience; we have been placed as conservatives with whom it is the holy duty of the innovator to struggle. One must have enemies to attack.’

  They were indeed bewildering times. ‘Masha my dearest,’ Aunt Olya wrote to her sister-in-law in February 1918, ‘I so want to write to you and I don’t know where to start. There are so many things, new and alien, things that one needs time to grow accustomed to. One’s soul needs to digest them and they keep on coming at you. If Anton were alive, he would be wonderful making out what is what ... From the outside our life still looks the same. I go to rehearsals and to performances.’ Yet nothing was really the same.

  No theatre, in that time of total poverty, had any heating. Everyone kept on their overcoats. The audience’s heads were huddled into their shoulders, the women’s wrapped in scarves, the men’s with fur or cloth shapkas pulled down. The cast, who had to take off their overcoats and hats just before they went on stage, became severely chilled and most fell ill. Many of the costumes had been stolen, and the shortage of wigs meant that Olga Knipper-Chekhova - Aunt Olya - had to dye her hair, which was now quite grey.

  The intellectual debates of the early years in the Moscow Art Theatre were now a distant memory. Exhaustion from malnourishment made it hard to concentrate and to act. It often seemed as if the only subject of conversation was food, and where you might find the basic necessities. Horsemeat and dogmeat became vital commodities. Aunt Olya was beside herself with happiness when she obtained an egg, the first she had seen in three months. The revolution in the countryside, with the burning of manor houses which had begun a couple of months after the abdication of the Tsar, had drastically reduced food production. It was to be made far worse when Lenin launched a civil war against the peasantry to force them to hand over their grain to the starving cities. The Bolshevik leaders had a profound contempt for the rural population: what Trotsky famously labelled as the Russia of ‘icons and cockroaches’. But the peasants hid their grain and the Red ‘food brigades’ resorted to terror and torture in an attempt to force them to hand it over. Soon the new Soviet government was having to put down far more peasant rebellions than any Tsar had faced in modern memory. Even the supposed backbone of the movement, the industrial proletariat, was coming out on strike against Leninist authoritarianism and their declining living standards.

  Aunt Olya was one of the few members of the Moscow Art Theatre who did not fall ill, but she was utterly dejected by ‘the devastation and neglect, the filth and chaos, in which we are living’. Decidedly unpolitical, she could not see the point of the appalling sacrifices to be made in the name of the new order. ‘It’s not revolution that one wants,’ she had written at the time of the 1905 uprising, ‘but freedom, room to move, beauty, romanticism’, and she deeply regretted the victims ‘who belonged neither to one party nor the other’.

  There was no middle-ground. You either supported the Bolsheviks or you were an ‘enemy of the people’. The population now inhabited a world dominated by commissars in black leather jackets and caps, establishing a discipline of terror at the point of their Mauser pistols. They even became known as ‘the leather coats’.

  The fate of a human being became utterly arbitrary. In the People’s Courts, if the accused had uncalloused hands, he risked an immediate death sentence, whatever the crime. It was also dangerous to have lent anyone money. A debtor could denounce a creditor as ‘a blood-sucking bourgeois’. But nothing was as sinister as the new Cheka - the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage - which could define whatever it liked as a capital crime and carry out executions on the spot. It was the forerunner of the Stalinist NKVD, which was to play a considerable part in the lives of the Knipper family.

  Class war meant encouraging the total subjugation of the burzhooi, a term which encompassed the nobility as well as the bourgeois. They were put to work cleaning streets and clearing snow to humiliate them, just as the Nazis did to the Jews less than two decades later. The pleasure for the overseers was to force their former social superiors to accomplish the most menial tasks, then watch those unused to manual labour as they were reduced to a clumsy exhaustion.

  As unproductive workers, burzhooi were allowed only the most minimal rations. Purely to survive, remnants of the nobility and middle classes were reduced to standing in flea markets, where they tried to barter any possession from icons and bibelots to redundant Tsarist uniforms and diamond rings, in the hope of a small bag of flour or a fragment of a loaf of sugar. Within a year or so, when the civil war further disrupted the food supply, well-brought-up young ladies were reduced to prostituting themselves. A couple of years later it was estimated that 42 per cent of Moscow’s prostitutes came from wealthy families ‘ruined by the revolution’, a social category defined in a revealing Soviet euphemism as ‘former people’. Several of these young women became the mistresses of leather-jacketed leaders of the new Bolshevik order. The moral disintegration became almost total.

  Privilege had not been abolished. A new form had appeared, as Aunt Olya described in another letter to her sister-in-law. ‘I was playing patience late into the night, looking up from time to time at the row of brightly lit confiscated mansions on the opposite side of the bulvar and the reflection of brightly lit windows in the liquid mud. It was rather like being in Venice.’ The young commissars had wasted little time in expropriating the grand houses of those they had dispossessed in a show of high moral outrage. ‘I have received violets in a letter from Gurzuf [the little house in the Crimea given to her by Anton Chekhov],’ she went on. ‘Such a touching impression in this time of devastation and chaos and hopelessness and dirt in which we are now living.’

  The flight of the upper and middle classes from Moscow encouraged the local Bolshevik ‘building committees’ to reallocate accommodation. Since most of their members came from the former servant class, they relegated property owners to cellars or attics, and took the best rooms for themselves and their friends. Revolution in their view meant literally turning the social order upside down. They were now the new masters.

  Olga and Ada soon found more and more strangers billeted on them, with four or five people to a room. The house was also used as a billet for soldiers and the sisters seem to have narrowly escaped rape at the hands of two sailors. ‘Every day, my sister Ada and I,’ wrote Olga later, ‘were prepared for the worst.’

  The following winter of 191 8-19 was also cruel. There was no fuel for heating inside the houses, so the water pipes froze. The two sisters cleaned their faces with wood ash and cooked frozen potatoes on a small wood-burning stove, known as a burzhuika because it was supposed to be like a fat-bellied bourgeois. People chopped up the last of their furniture to provide fuel for their stoves. Very few books were left and hardly a tree remained standing in the city. Not only was there no water available from taps, but the sewerage system had frozen solid, producing unimaginably squalid conditions. The courtyards behind houses had to be used as open-air lavatories. Not long afterwards, Moscow suffered a cholera epidemic.

  That winter was a time of even greater famine in the cities than the previous one. So many horses had been slaughtered for meat that carts and drozhkys were hauled by women and children. ‘Sugar is seventy-five roubles per pound,’ Aunt Olya wrote to Aunt Masha in the Crimea. ‘Butter is 100 to 120 roubles per pound. They are eating horsemeat everywhere and sell dogmeat as well.’ Hardly anybody could afford such prices.

  Her niece, Olga Chekhova, bundled in old clothes and a headscarf to keep warm and to avoid looking like a bourgeois, set off by train for Kostroma on t
he Volga to barter valuables in exchange for potatoes and flour. Hundreds of thousands from the city were attempting to do the same. It was known as ‘bagging’, from all the bags they carried to fill with food.

  Olga suffered the usual squalor of travel at that time in cattle wagons, with only a hole in the floor for a lavatory and insect-infested straw to sleep on. Once they reached Kostroma, she had to evade patrols of Red Guards, and when she finally made a deal with a local peasant, he fell through the ice with the sledge bearing all the provisions she had purchased. Whether or not this was strictly true, she returned to Moscow empty-handed. It would have been a desperate venture in any case, because almost any woman alone was likely to be robbed.

  The desperation, especially among demobilized soldiers and deserters, was so great that more and more resorted to robbery. To venture into the street after nightfall was considered extremely dangerous. Rumours multiplied people’s fears. One of the most bizarre was that Russian soldiers had captured special German boots with springs in the soles to help them leap over trenches. And at night, dressed in white, they jumped in the street as high as the first floor of houses, causing people to faint in fright, and they then robbed them.

  While everybody else suffered, Misha Chekhov, with characteristic perversity, had found 1918 an improvement on the year before. During the depression which followed Volodya’s death, he had vowed to give up the theatre. He also resolved never to commit suicide himself. Having spent much of the winter at his writing table scribbling down nightmare descriptions, such as the state of a man crushed by a tram, his nervous state improved during the spring of 1918.