The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

by Antony Beevor

  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.

  The procession of Western journalists to Olga Chekhova’s house in Spree Strasse did not stop, as General Zelenin told Abakumov on 24 November. She took these opportunities to deny the stories of her spying, but it did not seem to do much good. An American journalist called Sam Wagner apparently told her that she should not deny them. They could make her a fortune if she came to act in the States. He brought cigarettes and Cognac as a goodwill offering. SMERSh assumed that all these journalists were really intelligence officers in disguise, just because they wore the uniform of war correspondents.

  Olga Chekhova finally managed to win peace a few years later when a Stuttgart newspaper repeated the story of the medal from Stalin, illustrating their claim with a ridiculous forgery of photo-montage. They took a still from Befreite Hände, her movie with Carl Raddatz, in which she is holding up a small statuette, then replaced the object with a Soviet decoration. Olga sued on the grounds that this was damaging her career and she won. But her relationship with the Soviet intelligence services had still not ended.

  21. After the War

  By the time Olga Chekhova returned from Moscow, the endless work parties of German women had cleared most of the streets and sidewalks. Many of these exhausted Trümmerfrauen, or ‘rubble-women’, tried to live without thinking. Their only hope was to rebuild some normality into their children’s lives.

  It was easier for most not to reflect on the war which had just ended. They had reached ‘Stunde Null’ - the hour zero of their country’s lowest moment. For the majority, exhaustion and the shock of defeat, combined with the demands of the Allies to accept partial guilt for the concentration camps, made thinking seem too hard. All they could do was to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  Their husbands were still in Soviet camps and these women, in all too many cases, had faced rape on their own, just as they had had to face the relentless Allied bombing of the city and the Soviet onslaught. Many were deeply scarred by their experiences, some were shattered, but it seems that most were immeasurably toughened by the need to survive the downfall of Nazi Germany.

  Signs of the determination to move forward arose rapidly from the ruins. The black market flourished, with a standing souk around the Brandenburg Gate and in the Tiergarten. Prostitution was the shortest route to food and other necessities, but the ubiquity of venereal infection was terrifying. The newly arrived British troops said that in Berlin VD stood for ‘Veronika danke-schön’. Flyposters on burned-out tanks advertised dance classes in a strange city of foreign soldiers and German women whose husbands and boyfriends were their prisoners.

  Olga Chekhova, whose strength had come from surviving the Russian Revolution, had been spared the suffering of other German women in 1945. Yet the nervous strain of her time in Moscow should not be underestimated. Considering the dangerous game in which she was involved, her nerve was remarkable. At a time when the discovery of a firearm in a house would trigger the instant execution of every inhabitant, Olga Chekhova fired off her pistol at drunken Soviet soldiers who tried to steal her car one night. The fact that she had been provided with a gun is significant enough. And she promptly wrote to Abakumov, asking for more sentries to guard her waterside mansion in Friedrichshagen.

  For Olga Chekhova, Stunde Null did not exist. She was in any case determined to keep working as an actress. Since few films were likely to be made in Berlin at that time, she gave guest performances and ‘chanson evenings’ in improvised or patched-up theatres, mainly in west Berlin. Even the deepening division of Berlin between the Soviet and Western sectors did not hamper her freedom of movement.

  Perhaps the most extraordinary story of survival in the younger Chekhovian circle was that of Kachalov’s son, Vadim Shverubovich. Having escaped into Italy from the Wehrmacht prison camp in Austria, an outrageous fate awaited him entirely in character with the brutal indifference of the Soviet system.

  His father’s letters to Stalin about him finally had an effect. Vadim was located in the American camp in north Italy, where he was helping to translate in refugee camps. His return to the Soviet Union was organized, but almost as soon as he was back in the country, the NKVD arrested him simply because he was a former prisoner of war. Any Red Army soldier who had surrendered to the Germans was being screened for treason. Most were sent to labour camps. Nobody believed his story that he had been ordered back to report in the capital.

  ‘What, in Moscow?’ the NKVD officer asked contemptuously. ‘Well, you need to work a bit more - felling trees.’ Vadim was sent to a Gulag camp which was just as bad as the German ones he had experienced. He was there in the summer and autumn of 1945. Then, after another inquiry from the Kremlin, he was again traced by the authorities. The NKVD camp administration shipped him back to the Lubyanka. He was by then in a terrible state, ill, emaciated and not very far from death. To cover up the blunder, he was kept there for a month and fattened up on a ‘double officer’s ration’. At the end of the month, he was suddenly told he was free to go home. His prison clothes had rotted, so he was issued with a smart suit that was almost new. Shverubovich, when putting it on, found that it had two small holes high in the back of the jacket. It had evidently come from the NKVD warehouse of good-quality clothes saved from the corpses of their most distinguished victims. He received nothing else, and he had to make his own way on foot to his parents’ apartment on Bryusov pereulok.

  Aunt Olya often went out to the Kachalov dacha after the war. She and her fellow actor had been friends as well as colleagues for fifty years, and they sat together on the veranda surrounded by tall trees. The strain of the war years had taken its toll on both of them, with Aunt Olya worrying about Lev and Kachalov about Vadim. ‘I’ve distanced myself from life,’ she wrote to Olga’s sister, Ada, in Berlin. ‘I no longer have the strength to live at a modern pace.’ Her only journey away from Moscow was to the Crimea to stay at her beloved Gurzuf. Lev and Mariya Garikovna came to visit her there, bringing their large black poodle, Judy. But by 1947 she was becoming more and more house
-bound, often finding it hard to breathe.

  Yet even if she had distanced herself from life, life continued to come to her in the form of friends and admirers. ‘In the evenings, there is always somebody dropping by, and Sofya [Baklanova] always cooks something delicious.’ The immediate post-war New Year’s Eve parties at her apartment, especially that of 1947, were memorable. Candles were lit on a Christmas tree, food laid out and the grand piano prepared for Lev and other musician friends, such as Svyatoslav Richter. Lev’s former wife, Lyuba, came, with her new husband, the conductor Nikolai Pavlovich Anosov, and the Kachalovs came with their family.

  The following year, 1948, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Moscow Art Theatre. Kachalov, the only other survivor from the early days, was not at all well by then, so Aunt Olya went out to his dacha as often as she could. ‘We sit together - he and I - the last two of the Old Guard.’ The forty-fourth anniversary of Anton Chekhov’s death was also approaching, she observed to Ada in a letter, ‘and I am still alive’.

  There was also a big party each year for Aunt Olya’s birthday on 22 September. Kachalov’s granddaughter, Mariya Shverubovich, remembers Lev with his hair turning white and his ‘very charming face’ which ’always looked tanned‘. Lev at this time was starting to lose the hard, haunted look of earlier photographs.

  It was impossible to forget the war, even in the most unlikely places. When Lev had the chance in 1947, he organized another mountaineering expedition in the Caucasus. With a small group, he tackled the ascent of Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe. During the climb, they found bunkers, food depots and the corpses of German Alpine troops frozen into the snow. Preserved by the cold, their skin had gone a dark brown. These were members of General Konrad’s 49th Mountain Corps, who had fought on the flanks of the mountain in 1942, just at the start of the battle for Stalingrad. One group had managed to reach the top, a feat trumpeted by Goebbels in the Nazi press.

  During his immediate post-war travels, Lev frequently encountered German prisoners of war repairing roads or working on construction projects. He evidently enjoyed their surprise and curiosity when he chatted to them with his perfect command of the language. Lev was to remain under General Sudoplatov’s command until 1949—there was still the task of identifying anti-Communist Russians abroad—but he was never called upon once the war was over. It may well have been this gradual sense of retirement from the NKVD which allowed him to relax at last.

  Perhaps it was no coincidence that his relationship with Mariya Garikovna, in a way the most intense point of his involvement with the NKVD, should have begun to disintegrate. In the summer of 1947, she had to stay in Moscow with her mother, who was dying from stomach cancer, while Lev took his son, Andrei, climbing in the Caucasus. While friendship with his first wife, Lyuba, had been restored, Lev’s current marriage was giving way to his next.

  It is hard to know whether Mariya Garikovna was still afraid of Lev, but she certainly remained in awe of his music. Whenever anybody came to visit and Lev was composing, she would tiptoe up to them and whisper: ‘Lyova is working!’ Judy, the dog, was locked in the other room so that the maestro would not be disturbed. Even after Lev left her, Mariya Garikovna was very upset when Lev failed to receive some important prize. ‘How is it,’ she would way, ‘that they didn’t include Lyova?’

  Mariya Garikovna, a brilliant linguist, continued to work for Soviet intelligence. It was on the very morning of her state exam at the Institute of Foreign Languages that Lev told her he was leaving her. She replied with bitter humour that he might have waited until she had finished the exam. When he left Mariya Garikovna that morning, Lev took only his briefcase with him: a point of honour among Russian males when leaving a wife. His first wife’s new husband, the conductor, had rushed round soon afterwards with a heavy overcoat. ‘Lyova,’ he said, ‘don’t be a fool, it’s winter!’

  Lev’s suffering was, however, minimal in comparison to that of Mariya Garikovna. She was so upset when the truth sank in that she virtually lost her sight for a week. Some time later Lev dropped by to visit her and suggested that they could remain friends and lovers. She slapped his face.

  Even though Mariya Garikovna continued to admire Lev the composer, his musical career was not enjoying the same success as before the war. He had been one of the composers invited to create a new national anthem, but his version was not chosen. Then, in 1948, at a time when Stalinism was entering another manic period, the Soviet authorities condemned Prokofiev and Shostakovich for ‘Formalism’. Stalin’s enforcer in cultural matters, Andrei Zhdanov, is said to have picked out tunes on the piano to show the sort of music the party wanted. Apparently Lev was out of favour too for speaking imprudently on Prokofiev and Shostakovich’s behalf. But he was also frustrated with his own work. Aunt Olya often had to remind him that there had to be failures as well as successes in life. Failure seems to have come partly from his concession to the political pressures of the late 1930s. A few years later Lev admitted that many people thought that his symphonies were in some ways like ‘propaganda posters’.

  Lev’s sister remained even more of a mystery. Olga Chekhova and the whole family suddenly moved in 1949 from their SMERSh-sponsored house in Friedrichshagen to a new apartment in Charlottenburg in the western sector. That she managed to do this at the height of tension during the Berlin Airlift and the tight Soviet cordon on the western sectors of the city is striking to say the least.

  Olga Chekhova had been in contact since 1947 with the NKVD’s star agent, Aleksandr Demyanov, working with Lev’s old paymaster, Colonel Shchors. She apparently also maintained her contacts with Abakumov and General Utekhin, until shortly before both were purged in August 1951. In his inimitably devious way, Stalin had used Abakumov against Beria, then he allowed Beria to destroy him, slowly and cruelly. Abakumov was held in appalling conditions, not knowing from one day to the next whether he was to be released or killed. Photographs showed a dramatic ageing in five years. Olga Chekhova, because of her known contact with Abakumov, was regarded as dangerous, but it appears that Beria still wanted to keep her as a card up his sleeve.

  In 1952, the Berlin-Karlshorst KGB rezident was ordered to find out everything he could on Olga Chekhova. Somebody at Moscow Centre had heard ‘a rumour’ that she had been flown to the Soviet capital at the end of the war. They wanted to ascertain why, thus demonstrating the confusion caused by watertight compartments within the intelligence world.

  Stalin’s death in March 1953 produced an outpouring of grief in the Soviet Union, even among families who had suffered during the Terror. Ordinary people wept openly in the street. Hundreds of thousands queued for days and nights to walk past Stalin’s coffin. They cried as much in fear as from a sense of loss. What would happen to them now that the great leader was gone? Would there be another war?

  The inter-regnum which followed was uneasy, mainly because the inner circle of the Politburo was nervous, and with good reason. Lavrenty Beria seized back control of Soviet intelligence and security. They knew that he was not just powerful because of his position, he was also the most energetic and intelligent of them all. And Beria, they soon discovered, had a master plan. He wanted to end the Cold War through the reunification of Germany in return for massive aid to the Soviet Union from the United States. It may seem ironic that the most feared name of the Soviet system should have wanted to do this. Yet Beria, although never one of nature’s democrats, was at least a pragmatist. He knew that the Soviet Union could not catch up and beat the West economically through heavy-handed autarchy.

  Beria first needed to sound out the West’s likely reaction through unofficial channels. He called on Prince Janusz Radziwill again and warned him to prepare to visit the United States, acting as his personal emissary. He also decided to find out what leading West Germans would feel by using Olga Chekhova. But Soviet intelligence still ‘over-estimated the importance of Olga Chekhova in both the cultural and political life in Germany’. In June, Beria summoned the hea
d of the KGB German Department, Colonel of State Security Zoya Ivanovna Rybkina, who had been Zarah Leander’s controller during the war. She was instructed to fly to Berlin to meet Olga Chekhova and brief her on her task. On 17 June, East German workers rioted. Red Army tanks were ordered in to suppress the revolt. Beria, despite the alarm sown among his colleagues by events in Germany, decided to press ahead with his plan.

  On 26 June, Rybkina met Olga Chekhova in East Berlin. We have no idea whether any of the Western intelligence services had their eye on Olga Chekhova and became aware of this meeting. In any case, the whole project was doomed for a very different reason. That very morning in the Kremlin, on Nikita Khrushchev’s instructions, several senior officers, armed with pistols and led by Marshal Zhukov, burst into a meeting and arrested Beria. The plan to reunify Germany had been denounced by his rivals as ‘a direct capitulation to imperialism’.

  Olga Chekhova must have slipped back into West Berlin unnoticed. Rybkina, meanwhile, was the one in greatest danger. Khrushchev, who had some idea of what was afoot, wasted no time. He ordered General Grechko, who was in Berlin with a ‘special commission’, to investigate KGB activities there. Officers at the headquarters at Karlshorst were interrogated to find out if anybody from Moscow Centre had turned up in the city.

  Rybkina was saved by one of Grechko’s GRU military intelligence officers whom she had known during the war. He helped her on to a plane back to Moscow while other KGB personnel loyal to Beria were rounded up. The purge was even more thorough in Moscow. General Sudoplatov, who had worked closely with Beria during the war, was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment on one of the usual trumped-up charges. Many others of more junior rank suffered too. Lev’s former liaison officer during the battle for Moscow, Zoya Zarubina, was thrown out of the KGB simply for having been one of Sudoplatov’s group. Rybkina also had to leave the KGB. She was sent as part of the Gulag labour camp administration to Kolyma in the far north-east of Siberia.