The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

by Antony Beevor

  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.

  On 19 October, Lev wrote to his surrogate mother, Aunt Olya. This letter, churning with mixed feelings of sadness and fierce joy at his mission, is undoubtedly the most emotional and spontaneous of his life.

  ‘The city has produced a very strange impression on me,’ he wrote. ‘It’s a mixture of “Feast during a plague” [by Pushkin] and the well-known play by Hemingway [The Fifth Column (1937), set in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War]. I am feeling odd, too, like a bird sitting on a branch, knowing it might have to take off at any second ... And it’s not even so frightening to die. There are at last some powerful things in which I believe and which have helped to stiffen my spine ... I am Russian, Russian to the marrow in my bones. I’ve realized that I love my ridiculous, idiotic, uncultured and dirty Motherland, love her with a tender Levitan love, and it’s a pain to me to see her big, beautiful body violated. [Levitan, a great friend of Anton Chekhov, was the painter of wonderfully spiritual landscapes of Russia.] I know for sure what I will be fighting for and what, if needed, I will die for. And it’s only now, grey-haired and balding, that I have begun to understand many things. But it’s too late. I might die with the curtains of my soul still shut, with twilight in it, while there’s so much sun around, so much joy, and so much of that most important thing that justifies life and which I have never had—love. Some people weep from happiness, and I weep for happiness. It will never come my way. And it’s my own fault... Don’t worry about me: I am not going to sell my life cheaply.’

  The mission assigned to Lev and Mariya Garikovna was indeed special, and it went beyond Sudoplatov’s terse description in his book. They had a second role beyond that of the other stay-behind groups. ‘They were being prepared for a certain assignment to be sent to Germany to make contact with Olga,’ Zarubina recounted with professional reticence, even more than sixty years after the event. ‘The assignment was not very pleasant.’

  This medium-term plan was for Lev and Mariya Garikovna to ‘falsely defect’ to the Germans if they found the opportunity. Otherwise, they would fight in the same way as the other ’battle groups‘. Lev had eleven men, including a radio operator. They were equipped with ’remote control grenades, explosives, ammunition, everything that he needed for an active assault‘. Their chief priority was to assassinate Hitler and any other Nazi leaders who came to Moscow to savour their triumph. Lev, with his Aryan looks, perfect German and mastery of its regional accents, could easily pass for a German officer. But assuming that he and Mariya Garikovna did manage to stage a defection, Lev was to claim that, as an artist and a German persecuted for his origins, he longed to work with the ’liberators’ of the Soviet Union and rejoin his sister, Olga, in Berlin. The triumphant Germans would find it entirely natural that someone like Lev should hate Stalinism, so the security screening process was unlikely to be especially arduous. And his sister’s well-known acquaintance with the Führer and some of the Nazi elite should help to confirm his good intentions.

  Others sources, however, insist that Lev’s task was to go no further than Turkey. His mission was to assassinate Franz von Papen, the German ambassador there. Papen was the politician who had allowed Hitler to come to power.

  The panic of early and mid-October turned to mass courage in early November. Radio Moscow had broadcast Stalin’s decision to stay in the city. On the eve of the anniversary of the revolution, Stalin made a powerful speech. ‘If they want a war of extermination,’ he declared, ‘then they shall have one!’

  The next day, 7 November, the annual parade on Red Square took place on Stalin’s insistence. Beria and Molotov had been appalled at the threat of air attack, but Stalin ordered in all available anti-aircraft batter
ies and insisted on a fighter umbrella over the city. His idea, designed mainly for newsreels around the world, was that reinforcements for the Moscow front should march through Red Square, past the saluting base on Lenin’s (now empty) mausoleum, and march on westwards towards the enemy.

  The key elements in the battle for Moscow were the rapidly deteriorating weather, which was bound to favour the better-prepared Red Army, and Stalin’s secret reinforcements from the Far East. Stalin, finally convinced by signal intercepts that the Japanese were indeed about to attack the Americans and not the Soviet Union (he had not trusted the reports of their brilliant spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge), could now bring his Siberian armies westwards. Soon Soviet ski-troops were making surprise attacks on the German rear. Large cavalry formations mounted on shaggy Cossack ponies appeared out of forests to sabre the German supply personnel in their dumps. But the main battle was a frozen, bloody stalemate either side of the Minsk chaussé, the main road into the capital. The temperature had dropped to minus 20 centigrade and the ground was like iron.

  Bock’s army commanders, General Guderian and Field Marshal von Kluge, planned to withdraw without telling Hitler. Then General Zhukov sprang his surprise on 5December, two days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. All the Siberian divisions and reserve tank units, of which the Germans had no idea, were launched in a series of counterattacks. The Germans were forced to fall back rapidly to avoid encirclement. Moscow was saved.

  The great plan to kill Hitler in Moscow in fact proved a double miscalculation on the part of Stalin, Beria and General Sudoplatov. The city never fell and Hitler, they discovered after the end of the war, never had the slightest intention of visiting Moscow, even in the cursory manner of his early-morning tour of Paris in the summer of 1940. Both Lev and Mariya Garikovna nevertheless received medals from the NKVD for the defence of Moscow. Aunt Olya, hearing of the great battle for Moscow, was torn apart by worry. On 6 December, the day of the greatest Soviet counter-attack, she sent a telegram from Tbilisi to Lev at 23 Gogolevsky bulvar: ‘Lyova my darling I am thinking of you please please write I am so worried kisses Olga.’

  Lev Knipper, a Russian of pure German blood, had become passionately devoted to the cause of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War. His sister, Olga Chekhova, on the other hand, appears to have become more and more Germanic, whatever she might have been prepared to do to help her relatives in the Soviet Union.

  Her wartime passion for Jep, her lover in the Luftwaffe, and his for her, seems to have developed into a real telepathy, although they were usually several hundred miles apart. He claimed in his letters that he could hear her voice on the wind. He also recounted his dreams. In his favourite one, he had been forced to bale out by parachute over England. He found himself coming down in the small, overgrown park of a country house. And in this house, which had thick walls, he found her there all alone. The two of them knelt before the fire and she told him that he would find great peace in this place. He had wanted the dream to continue, but it had ended there.

  Their separation was made unbearably poignant for him whenever he saw her picture in the newspapers or heard her on the radio. The local cinema near their air base in northern France sometimes showed movies which she had made. In March 1941, he had again been to see Befreite Hände- dubbed into French as Les mains libres—in a small local cinema. He simply wanted to feast on images of her even though it was very strange to watch her with a Frenchwoman’s ‘darker, veiled voice’ issuing from her mouth on the synchronized soundtrack. The fact that Olga’s co-star in the movie, Carl Raddatz, had been her lover at the time either does not appear to have bothered him or he did not know.

  His greatest comfort when flying his Messerschmitt fighter was a small case she had given him with a photograph of her. It became a form of talisman for him. ‘The case with the little photograph gives me such great happiness,’ he wrote to her, ‘because I can always take it with me. Whenever I feel like it, I can look at it thousands of metres over England, knowing that it will share the same fate as me—burnt with me or taken into a prisoner of war camp, or frozen with me in the icy sea.’

  He seems to have known that he was going to die, and she must have expected it too, especially after the dream he had recounted. In December 1941, at the same time as Lev emerged unscathed from the battle for Moscow, Jep was shot down over England, no doubt still carrying her photograph in its little case.

  18. A Family Divided by War

  The battle for Moscow may have been the real turning point of the war, but few Muscovites experienced many immediate benefits, save one. Vova Knipper saw the carcasses of horses killed in the fighting on their way to the slaughterhouses in open trucks, with their legs in the air.

  Vova still survived on the billycan of soup which his father brought back from lunch at the Central House of Workers in the Arts. His father usually poured some of his own soup into his son’s plate. ‘I looked down ashamed,’ wrote Vova, ‘because I did want more.’ The main course consisted of some kasha, reheated on their little burzhuika stove, and a couple of kotleta, meatballs made from unidentifiable animals, but now probably from the Cossack mounts of the two cavalry corps which had been savaging the German rear. The freezing temperatures had kept the meat fit for human consumption.

  After the successful defence of the city, Vova and his father were at least reassured that the restaurant for Workers in the Arts would not be closed, as they had feared during the panic in October. Yet Vova still found that he was so weak from lack of food that journeys on foot took almost twice as long as in peacetime. He often had to sit and rest. On one occasion he watched girls in steel helmets and Russian army boots launching barrage balloons into the evening sky.

  Aunt Olya, meanwhile, fretted in Tbilisi, just as she had in 1920 during the civil war. On 27 December she wrote to her brother, Vladimir: ‘Lyova has disappeared. I am so worried. My life now consists of waiting.’ But before Vladimir could reply to tell her that Lev had been in Moscow, she saw him herself. ‘Lyova suddenly turned up for the New Year with his new wife,’ she wrote again. ‘Well, so what? If they love each other, why shouldn’t they live together? The news about Lyova getting married has had a great effect on me. His letter arrived at the end of December. I was very upset at first, but then felt calmer when I met her. She’s sweet, well-brought up and unpretentious in her manner.’

  When it became clear in the first week of December that the Germans no longer stood any chance of taking Moscow, Lev and Mariya Garikovna received new orders. They travelled south-eastwards via the new government centre at Kuibyshev. There Lev heard the first part of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, which the composer had started writing in Leningrad during the siege. Lev described the route as ‘like stations of the cross of evacuees - how can one forget the lampposts with notes attached to them from which human grief was crying at you—mothers looking for children, wives for husbands and brothers for their sisters?’

  In Tbilisi, Prokofiev showed him the new pieces which he had so far composed during the war, but the most important event there had been for Lev to introduce Mariya Garikovna to Aunt Olya. The two of them moved on to Tashkent on 10 January 1942. Tashkent was where Lev’s ex-wife and son were stranded, without money and close to starvation, yet Lev never visited them.

  He must have avoided them out of what one can only conclude was a callous moral cowardice. He consoled himself with the idea that he had dedicated to his son ‘some short children’s pieces for string and wind instruments’.

  Lyuba and Andrei had been helped by Lev’s friend Paul Armand, the Lithuanian free-spirit. Although a Hero of the Soviet Union from his bravery in the Spanish Civil War, Armand was consistently rejected when he tried to volunteer for the front. This may well have been the result of his arrest by the NKVD in 1938. He remained in a base unit in Tashkent, where he passed part of his rations to Lyuba and Andrei. Armand’s requests for frontline service were finally permitted late that year after the Germans reached S
talingrad. He was killed there by a sniper’s bullet.

  Aunt Olya, meanwhile, went with the other members of the Moscow Art Theatre group down to Yerevan in Armenia. Her hands crippled with arthritis, the seventy-three-year-old actress found travelling over the rutted roads of the Caucasus both exhausting and excruciatingly painful. But her main concern at this time was the fate of her sister-in-law Masha in Yalta, which had been captured by the Germans in October 1941. ‘I shudder to think about what has become of Mariya Pavlovna,’ she wrote on 14 January 1942, just before she left for Yerevan.

  Her other concern was for Lyuba and Andrei in Tashkent. She sent them money and tea and bacon lard when she replied to Lyuba’s ‘very agitated letter’. She told Vladimir that she had assured Lyuba that her feelings for her were not affected by Lev’s new situation, ‘but she had to find a new way of leading her life. It is all very hard.’ The ever-generous Aunt Olya also sent Vladimir 1,000roubles, even though she was starting to run short of money herself. Her main reassurance was that Lev seemed all right, mainly thanks to Mariya Garikovna. ‘It seems as ifhe has finally found happiness,’ she wrote. ‘Mariya is very caring, she is fun, she is brave.’

  Both Lev and Mariya Garikovna needed to be brave. The plan now was for the two of them to attempt a defection to the Germans via Iran, Turkey and then perhaps Bulgaria. They were not the only ‘defectors’ involved in this ambitious, if not desperate, operation. In Germany they were to make contact with an assassination group led by Igor Miklashevsky. Miklashevsky, a champion boxer and also the son of an actress at the Moscow Art Theatre, had defected soon after the battle for Moscow was over. He had an uncle by the name of Blumenthal who really had fled to the Germans at an early stage of the Moscow campaign. This uncle then became a radio announcer for the Nazi propaganda radio station destined to persuade the Soviet people that Hitler came as a liberator.