The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

by Antony Beevor

  To the astonishment of her chief in the KGB, she made no protest. ‘Do you realize where you are going?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I do,’ she replied. She went to Kolyma and spent two years there. She tried to help those prisoners whom she knew. She even met a German there, a prisoner whom she had met before the war, when he came to Moscow with a German opera group.

  Mariya Garikovna also suffered, as another member of Soviet intelligence closely associated with Beria. She was thrown out of the KGB and could not get another job. It was, of course, a small hardship in comparison to what would have happened to her a dozen years before, but she found herself reduced to poverty for the first time in her life. According to her nephew, she was down to a single set of underwear, which she washed each night and dried on the radiator. This penury continued for several years until suddenly a new intelligence regime realized that her linguistic gifts were wasted. She was recalled for foreign service, mainly in Western Europe. It seems as if she was now acting as an ‘archangel’ to delegations sent on cultural and economic missions abroad. This was a sad waste of her talents, but that was a common fate. Even sadder was the manner of her death. Before a trip to Paris, she underwent plastic surgery on her face. In the Soviet Union such rarely practised techniques were crude to say the least. Mariya Garikovna died the following day from unforeseen complications.

  Of the younger Chekhovian circle of cousins from Moscow in 1914, one of the first to die was Misha Chekhov. Aunt Olya showed Sergei Chekhov, who had almost worshipped him, a copy of an American newspaper dated 30 September 1955. It announced that the actor Mikhail Chekhov had died in Beverly Hills. Misha, the anointed of Stanislavsky, had been the ‘Method’ guru to many actors, including Gregory Peck and Marilyn Monroe. Aged just sixty-four, he had looked much older than his years. Sergei felt, as perhaps Misha did himself, that he had never sustained the brilliant promise of his days with the Moscow Art Theatre as Hamlet, Erik XIV, Malvolio and Gogol’s Government Inspector. Did the genius simply wither, once separated from his Motherland, or did he burn himself out with alcohol?

  Misha’s former wife, Olga, on the other hand, never seemed to burn out, partly because she was a strong pragmatist. Unlike Misha, she never allowed herself to suffer the disillusionment of dashed ideals. Misha himself had been her only ideal, and she was probably grateful in retrospect for the harsh lesson of their failed marriage.

  She knew that her profession had increasingly little to offer a woman of her age, but she was determined not to give in. Her slightly raffish and voluptuous elegance had served her well in so many movie roles, but she knew those days were past. She would try other roles more suited to her fifties. To take advantage of the great appetite for the cinema in West Germany during those hard years before the economic miracle, she even set up her own film production company, ‘Venus-Film München/Berlin’. Olga made contact with the new Communist regime at the old UFA studios at Babelsberg to attempt co-productions and to sell her films to East Germany. Her big mistake, however, was to make herself the star in three consecutively unsuccessful movies, and ‘Venus-Film’ collapsed. Yet she still made the most of that boom period. Between 1949 and 1974 she had parts in twenty-two films, nearly half of them in 1950 and 1951.

  With Babelsberg in the Soviet sector, the German movie industry was reborn in Munich, with American support. Olga Chekhova moved there herself in 1950. So did her granddaughter, Vera, who also wanted to become an actress. Olga realized at this time that she needed a new parallel career as her movie-making days came to an end. In 1952 she published her first volume of colourful and misleading memoirs under the shameless title Ich verschweige nichts! (I Conceal Nothing!). She also made her first move into the world of cosmetics, with the publication of a ‘beauty and fashion guide’ entitled Frau ohne Alter (Ageless Woman). Although full of Olga Chekhova’s rather trite philosophy of beauty, it adopted a surprisingly sexy approach for that repressive decade in Germany. Encouraged by the response, she decided to form her own cosmetics company.

  ‘Olga Tschechowa Kosmetik’ was set up in Munich in 1955, and ’expanded very rapidly‘. Considering that ’the millions which she had earned during her career were lost’ at the end of the war, and that ‘Venus-Film’ had so recently failed, it poses the question of where she managed to obtain financing. This is of interest because Soviet intelligence sources are absolutely convinced that Olga Tschechowa Kosmetik was set up almost entirely with money from Moscow. One even considers that it offered a very useful opportunity for making contact with the wives of NATO officers.

  One must, however, treat such assertions with caution, since Russians still take great pride in the Soviet Union’s intelligence coups. This has encouraged exaggeration and myth-making. Stalin is even quoted as having said in 1943 that ‘the actress Olga Chekhova will be very useful in the post-war years’. On the basis of the evidence currently available, this seems an unlikely remark, yet perhaps there was more to her career than we know. SMERSh certainly treated her with an extraordinary degree of care and respect on her return to Germany in the summer of 1945. The KGB officers who passed Vova Knipper the batch of papers about his cousin referred to the case as ‘a complicated and somewhat unusual story’. There remain a considerable quantity of documents on the subject which have not seen, and probably never will see, the light of day.

  Olga Chekhova, although not one of nature’s businesswomen considering her failures in the past, was nevertheless immensely disciplined and hard-working. Her extraordinary vitality, which had attracted men so much younger than herself, did not desert her even in her sixties. She still found time to appear in another six films while running Olga Tschechowa Kosmetik. She also encouraged her granddaughter, Vera, in her acting career.

  Vera had caught the eye of the most famous member of the United States Army. On 2 March 1959, Private First Class Elvis Presley drove with his two companions, Lamar Fike and Red West, to Munich to visit Vera Chekhova at her grandmother’s house in Fresenius Strasse in Obermenzing. Presley had fallen for Vera, by then a beautiful nineteen-year-old, soon after he joined the US Seventh Army near Frankfurt am Main. During his visit to Munich, Vera was acting each evening in a play called Der Verführer (The Seducer), but the young couple saw a good deal of each other during the day. Presley even sat through a special screening of all her films, and he returned again in June.

  In 1962, Olga Chekhova received the Deutscher Filmpreis, in her case a life-time achievement award ‘For many years of outstanding contribution to German Film’. More intriguing, after the row over her supposed Order of Lenin, was her award from the West German government in 1972. The President decorated her with the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic. She received it along with Konrad Lorenz.

  In 1964, five years after Aunt Olya’s death, Olga Chekhova wrote to her companion, Sofya Baklanova. She announced that she intended to visit Moscow, accompanied by a small retinue including her masseur, her secretary and her doctor. She wanted a suite in the Hotel National and proposed to visit the graves of Uncle Anton and Aunt Olya in the Novodeviche cemetery. Among the forms she filled in, she claimed once again that she had acted at the Moscow Art Theatre under Stanislavsky’s direction. In the end, she never went. It was her last chance of seeing Lev.

  Lev did, however, reply to a letter from Ada ten years later. He was still travelling, mostly in Siberia and Central Asia, and planning more musical projects. He was off to East Germany to produce a Symphony-Oratorium on Germany between 1933 and 1945. He was also working on an opera, Count Cagliostro, based on the novel by Aleksei Tolstoy, whom he had persuaded to return to the Soviet Union fifty years before. Lev continued to compose obsessively right up to his very last hours in July 1974. A final consolation for this morally tormented patriot was to receive the title of ‘People’s Artist of the USSR’ a few days before his death.

  His sister clearly never suffered from political angst in any form. She continued to live in Obermenzing, where she refused t
o watch a single documentary on television about the war. She complained in a letter to her sister, Ada, that her cosmetics company was getting too large, with 140 employees. This authoritarian matriarch was clearly fed up with all the social aspects and personnel relationships involved. ‘A proletarian will always be a proletarian,’ she wrote. ‘The demands get bigger and bigger but the faculty of reason does not keep up!’

  At the very end of her life, Olga Chekhova demonstrated both courage and an urge to follow family tradition. At the age of eighty-three, she was dying painfully from leukaemia, but never complained. On 9 March 1980, knowing that the end was near, she whispered her last request to her granddaughter, Vera.

  When Anton Chekhov was on his deathbed in Badenweiler, he had told Aunt Olya that he would like a glass of champagne. He had drunk his champagne and then died. Olga Chekhova decided to follow his example. She was even able to direct Vera to the correct shelf in the wine cellar. When Vera returned, Olga Chekhova drank down the glass. Her last words were, ‘Life is beautiful.’

  Although of German blood, Lutheran by baptism and German by nationality for over half a century, Olga Chekhova left instructions that she was to be buried according to Russian Orthodox rites.

  Rumours about her mysterious life continued to grow. A German newspaper wrote that Himmler had wanted to arrest her in 1945, because by then he was convinced of her treachery. In Russia it was claimed that on Stalin’s personal order Olga Chekhova, with the help of the SS General Walter Schellenberg, went to the concentration camp where Stalin’s son, Jakov Djugashvili, was held, but she did not manage to save him. Some time later, the President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, made a dramatic announcement about the Amber Room—that magnificent present from a Prussian King to a Russian Tsar, seized back by the Wehrmacht during the war and lost. Yeltsin claimed that he knew where this treasure was hidden in Thuringia and that the codename of this bunker was Olga. It would have been so suitable if it had proved true. Olga Chekhova was part of that ancient fascination between Russia and Germany, a dangerous borderland of shifting frontiers and loyalties.

  OLGA CHEKHOVA’S FILMS

  REFERENCES

  Abbreviations

  Interviews

  Lev Aleksandrovich Bezymenski (formerly Major GRU); Professor Tatyana Alekseevna Gaidamovich (widow of Lev Knipper); Vadim Glowna (Olga Chekhova’s grandson-in-law); Academician Andrei Lvovich Knipper (son of Lev Knipper); Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Melikov (Mariya Garikovna Melikova’s nephew); Eduard Prokofievich Sharapov (former Colonel KGB); Igor Aleksandrovich Shchors (former Colonel KGB); Mariya Vadimovna Shverubovich (granddaughter of Vasily Kachalov); Professor Anatoly Pavlovich Sudoplatov (son of General Pavel Sudoplatov); Albert Sumser (Olympic trainer and lover of Olga Chekhova in 1945); Vera Tschechowa (Olga Chekhova’s granddaughter); Zoya Vasileevna Zarubina (former Captain First Directorate NKVD, liaison officer for Lev Knipper and Mariya Garikovna).

  SOURCE NOTES

  1. The Cherry Orchard of Victory

  p. 1 ‘Attention, this is Moscow . . .’, quoted Porter and Jones, p.210.

  p. 1 ‘Gorky Street was thronged’, Ehrenburg, p. 187.

  p. 2 ‘kissed, hugged and generally feted’, Manchester Guardian, quoted Porter and Jones, p. 210.

  p. 2 ‘What immense joy ...’, ibid.

  p. 2 Muscovites and clothes, Berezhkov, 1994, p. 322.

  p. 4 The Cherry Orchard special performance, AD-MCM, V. V. Knipper Fond.

  p. 4 Maxim Gorky (1868—1936) was a pen name. His real name was Aleksei Maximovich Peshkov.

  p. 4 ‘deathly pale’, ‘smelled of a funeral’, Stanislavsky, 1924, p. 422.

  p. 5 Stanislavsky’s real name was Konstantin Sergeievich Alekseiev, but to hide his youthful passion for acting from his father, Moscow’s most distinguished merchant, he adopted the stage name of Stanislavsky.

  p. 5‘a huge chapter’, Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhova to Stanislavsky, Tiflis, 19 September 1920, Vilenkin (ed.), Vol. II, p.122.

  p. 5 ‘Just as he could wear . . .’, quoted Benedetti, 1988, p. 140.

  p. 5 Stalin’s order for the execution of Meyerhold, Isaac Babel, Koltsov (the original of Karpov in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls) and 343 others was signed on 16 January 1940. Meyerhold was shot on 2 February 1940, Shentalinsky, p. 70; Montefiore, p. 287.

  p. 6 Beria’s former mistress, V. Matardze, and Meyerhold apartment, Parrish, p. 37.

  p. 6 Tiflis is now Tbilisi.

  p. 6 Moscow Art Theatre request in 1943 for honour for Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhova refused, AD-MCM, V. V. Knipper Fond.

  p. 7 Thousandth performance, letter to Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhova, 12 November 1943, Vilenkin (ed.), Vol. II, p.206.

  p. 7 Chekhov and Ranyevskaya. On 14 October 1903, he wrote to Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhova that the part ‘will be played by you, there’s no one else’, Chekhov, Pisma, XI, pp. 273—4, quoted Benedetti, 1988, p. 128.

  p. 8 ‘One pair of hands is enough ...’, Vilenkin (ed.), Vol. I, p. 226, quoted Pitcher, p. 183.

  p. 8 Stanislavsky’s sound effects. His admitted ‘enthusiasm for sounds on the stage’ during The Cherry Orchard provoked a sharp joke from Chekhov. ’“What fine quiet,” the chief person of my play will say,‘ he remarked to somebody nearby so that Stanislavsky could hear. ’“How wonderful! We hear no birds, no dogs, no cuckoos, no owls, no clocks, no sleigh bells, no crickets” ‘, quoted Stanislavsky, 1924, p. 420.

  p. 8 Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhova sights Olga Konstantinovna Chekhova, AD-MCM, V. V. Knipper Fond. The exact date of this special performance has been impossible to find in the files of the Moscow Art Theatre, which are clearly incomplete since there is no record of her appearing in any production of The Cherry Orchard between 1938 and 1948, though she completed her thousandth performance in 1943.

  2. Knippers and Chekhovs

  p. 9 August Knipper, the actress’s grandfather, however, was a metalworker. His son, Leonhardt Knipper, left Germany to seek his fortune as an engineer at the age of twenty-five. Leonard Knipper (he had soon dropped the Germanic spelling of his first name) moved to Glazov in the Urals to run a paper factory. His wife, Anna Salza, a talented pianist, came from Baltic German stock. She was ten years younger than him. Leonard and Anna spoke German at home and remained Lutherans, even though they took on Russian nationality. Konstantin, their eldest child, had been born before their move to Glazov, and Olga was born there, but in 1872 the family moved to Moscow, where a second son, Vladimir, or Volodya, was born later. They spent their winters there in a villa on the Novinsky bulvar. Knipper ancestry, V. V. Knipper, pp. 26-30; Helker and Lenssen, p. 22; and Andrei Lvovich Knipper, interview, 22September 2002. In her memoirs Olga Chekhova claims that the Knippers were of noble descent. This is not really true. The Knipper ancestor who had been the court architect of Wenceslas III, the Elector of Westphalia, had been ennobled, but the title was stripped from him later. Olga Chekhova’s father, Konstantin Leonardovich Knipper, was automatically ennobled according to Peter the Great’s ‘Table of Ranks’, purely because of his post as an official in the Ministry of Transport, but then so was Lenin’s father as an inspector of schools. Another branch of the Knipper family had gone to Russia in the eighteenth century. Karl Knipper, a ship-owner, had set up and sponsored a group of German actors in St Petersburg in 1787. V. V. Knipper, p. 22.

  p. 10 ‘my vaulting-horse’, quoted Rayfield, n. 37, p. 622.

  p. 11 ‘cows who fancy ...’, ‘Machiavellis in skirts’, quoted Rayfield, 1997, p. 183.

  p. 11 ‘Have you been carried away by his moire silk lapels?’, quoted ibid., p. 505.

  p. 12 Just before Chekhov’s death in 1904, Gorky was so provoked by a jealous attack from Olga Leonardovna Knipper-Chekhova’s former lover Nemirovich-Danchenko that he severed his ties with the Moscow Art Theatre. For the row between Nemirovich-Danchenko and Gorky in April 1904, see Benedetti, 1988, pp.139-48.

  p. 13 ‘little skeleton’, OR 33⅙2/27, quoted Rayfield, 1997, p. 118
.

  p. 13 ‘Natalya is living in my apartment...’, 24. October 1888, quoted ibid., p. 179. These two children, Nikolai (Kolya) and Anton, were the children of Aleksandr and his common-law wife, the divorcee Anna Ivanovna Khrushchiova-Sokolnikova.

  p. 14 ‘thunderous voice’, echov, 1992, p. 12.

  p. 15‘Am in the Crimea’, ibid., p. 20.

  p. 15‘Misha is an amazingly intelligent boy’, Sergei Mikhailovich Chekhov, MS, AD-MCM/Sakharova/File 81.

  p. 16 Konstantin Knipper’s wife’s name in her passport had been Yelena Yulievna Ried, but within the family she was Luise or Lulu, and later, when a grandmother, Baba.

  p. 16 Her school records give her date of birth as 13 April 1897, but that was according to the old Orthodox calendar, RGALI 677/ ¼087.

  p. 16 Olga Konstantinovna Chekhova’s birthplace according to official documents, AD-MCM, V. V. Knipper Fond.

  p. 17‘a hunting lodge’, Tschechowa, 1952a, p. 53.

  p.18 ‘I hellishly wanted ...’, quoted Rayfield, 1997, p. 573.

  p. 18 ‘which looked like a see-saw’, Andrei Lvovich Knipper, interview, 22 September 2002.

  p. 18 ‘first music shock’, L. K. Knipper, p. 11.

  p. 20 ‘unruly character’, ibid.

  p. 20 Olga Chekhova’s school record, Stroganov Art School, personal file of Olga Konstantinovna Knipper, 1913, RGALI 677/ ¼087.