The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (13 page)

Aunt Olya and Lev returned finally to Moscow via Scandinavia with the Kachalov group in May 1922. There is no mention in any of their letters that they had met Olga in Berlin, yet they did make contact. The Russian émigré grapevine was far too effective for Olga not to have known of her aunt’s arrival. It also appears that Sergei Bertensson, the Moscow Art Theatre stage manager on the tour, met her and fell hopelessly in love.

In Moscow, on the other hand, the slightest whisper of the word émigré put people on their guard. The Kachalov group, to their dismay, found that nobody had come to the Belorussky station to welcome them back. And when the two parts of the Moscow Art Theatre met up again, there appears to have been a good deal of unease on both sides. Lenin, on the other hand, could afford to ignore such political squeamishness. ‘At last!’ he is said to have exclaimed on hearing of the Kachalov group’s return. ‘It will be very interesting to discover their reaction to the new Russia, to the new Moscow. They are a sensitive lot. In any case, our audiences will be very happy to see them again.’ Lenin certainly spoke for himself. He far preferred the old productions of the Moscow Art Theatre to the hectoring Proletkult worthiness espoused by Lunacharsky. It was an interesting paradox that Lenin, who wanted to exterminate the bourgeoisie, should have been so fond of Anton Chekhov’s plays. And less than a decade later, Stalin adored Mikhail Bulgakov’s play
Days of the Turbins,
which was condemned as reactionary, if not counter-revolutionary, by his culture commissars. The Soviet leader went to see it no fewer than fifteen times at the Moscow Art Theatre.

Aunt Olya was careful when expressing her reaction to the new Russia. Clearly the reality of Moscow had not lived up to her longings from abroad, but above all she had been shocked to find that so many friends had died in her absence. ‘Here I am in Moscow after three years of wandering,’ she wrote to her sister-in-law Masha in the Crimea, ‘and so far I am happy to be in Russia. I don’t know how I am going to feel afterwards.’

The main purpose of this hurriedly written letter was to take advantage of a reliable courier, the brother of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who could take Masha earnings from Chekhov plays staged abroad. ‘I only learned late yesterday evening that Yevgeny Emilevich [Mandelstam] is going to the Crimea today. In August we are leaving for America with the theatre for a year.’ Mandelstam was asked to deliver part of the Chekhov royalties from the earnings of the Kachalov group, most of it in German marks, the rest in ‘lemons’, the joke-name for inflated Soviet banknotes at the time, because million sounded like
limon.

For Aunt Olya, part of the pleasure of her return to 23 Prechistensky bulvar was to see her two great-nieces - Olga and Ada’s little daughters. Although it was a large apartment by Soviet standards, the compulsively generous Aunt Olya shared it with many members of the extended family.

Aunt Olya was the only one to have a whole room to herself. Her nephew Vova, Vladimir’s son, described it: ‘There was a small bed in the far corner behind a silk screen, with a coverlet of red fox fur, a marble washstand and a wardrobe with a mirror. By the window there was a small desk and an antique little round table with several armchairs.’ It must have been quite a large room, because it also contained a grand piano, where Lev later wrote his music, and the pelt of a polar bear spread-eagled on the floor. Two glass-fronted bookcases on another wall were filled with publications presented to her by friends. Gorky had written the following dedication in one of them: ‘For you, Olga Leonardovna. I would like to have bound this book with the skin of my heart, but my wife would bark at me. You are nice, you are good, you are a sweet person and you are talented. I could say a lot more to you but it would be better if I just silently shake your hand with all my heart.’

She invited Sofya Chekhova, the mother of Volodya, who had shot himself in 1917, to move in after her husband died. There were also her brother Konstantin, now too sick to return to work as a railway engineer, his wife, Lulu, Ada and the two little girls. Lev turned up from time to time to stay as well. Aunt Olya, however, appears to have known about only one side of her adored nephew’s life.

‘On my return to Moscow,’ wrote Lev many years later, ‘I could not fight my passion for music any more.’ He was twenty-three. At first, his family was highly sceptical. His aunt, his father and his uncle Vladimir, the opera singer, sat as a jury to hear whether he had any talent, both as a pianist and as a composer. Their verdict was ‘very discouraging’ and they tried to persuade him to give up his plans. Lev, however, was adamant.

Aunt Olya, despite her participation in the unfavourable verdict, could not resist wanting to help. She introduced Lev to Yelena Gnesina, the director of the best-known music school in Moscow. Gnesina employed him as the administrator of the school building. Lev claimed later that, as a ‘White Guardist’, he could not be taken on officially as a pupil, so Gnesina gave him a job and private lessons. In fact the only problem was that Lev, at twenty-three, was far too old in a school for students between the ages of seven and seventeen. ‘Those were hard years,’ Lev wrote towards the end of his life, but his memoirs are just as disingenuous as those of his sister Olga, even if he did not indulge himself with fantasies.

According to the spymaster General Pavel Sudoplatov and other Soviet sources, Lev Knipper, ‘after he returned to Moscow in 1922, was interviewed many times by state security organs’ (at that stage the newly constituted OGPU, the forerunner to the NKVD and later KGB). Lev’s status as a ’former White Guard officer’ left him little option but to comply. Whether he was forced to recruit his sister in Berlin straight away or later is impossible to tell without access to the relevant files, which remain firmly closed, but according to General Sudoplatov’s son, Professor Anatoly Sudoplatov, who knew Lev’s controllers, ‘in the 1920S [Olga Chekhova] was a key figure, instrumental in arranging all sorts of meetings among Russian émigrés in Germany’. In any case, Lev was to visit her in Berlin quite frequently, a link neither of them ever mentioned, even to their relatives. Apparently Lev Knipper, ‘assisted by the NKVD, maintained regular communications with Olga Chekhova during the 1930s’.

In the beginning, Lev may have seen his relationship with the OGPU as an intriguingly dangerous game. He seems to have enjoyed a surge of self-confidence at this time. He had conquered his childhood weakness, he had survived the civil war, he was extremely good-looking and enjoyed the admiration of many women, and especially of his aunt, one of the most respected figures in Russian cultural life. Perhaps his new secret life encouraged him to think that he could flaunt Western ways and new artistic ideas and ignore the dreary dictates of Proletkult. Yet in his youthful arrogance, he must have also underestimated the dangers. As a former White Guard, he was forever in their power and might have to denounce friends and colleagues in the arts. It was probably a classic case of refusing to see that he was selling his soul, and then having to persuade himself of higher motives later, once the bitter truth became clear. One side of his character might also have been attracted to the work. Lev was extremely touchy and he did not forget a slight, whether perceived or real. His highly controlled exterior, according to some of those who knew him, concealed some deep resentments.

Aunt Olya, meanwhile, was impressed and worried by Lev’s dedication to his musical studies. ‘Lev has just turned up,’ she wrote to a friend that August. ‘He has completely plunged into his music. He was working so hard that he utterly exhausted himself He has lost fourteen pounds and the doctor has forbidden him to do any work and to rest and put those pounds back on.’

According to Lev, having learned the basics of theory, he started on harmony in that same month of August. He was also composing in any spare moment. The pressure of overwork, he claimed, led to a recurrence of his childhood osteo tuberculosis and ‘a committee of professors decided that it would not be possible to cure me’. Next month, a large group from the Moscow Art Theatre was about to go on tour abroad, first to Western Europe and then to the United States. It was part of the Bolshevik regime’s attempts to normalize relations and re-establish trade links after the civil war. Aunt Olya was able to arrange for Lev ‘to join the theatre on paper’ so that he could be treated by specialists in Berlin.

That a recently returned White Guardist should be allowed back to Berlin within such a short time would have been surprising to say the least. But as a cover story for a mission, it could hardly have been bettered. Lev was to re-establish contact with his sister Olga and report on any White Russian émigré activities in Germany, while he pursued his musical studies there as a cover. ‘From time to time,’ General Sudoplatov cryptically wrote later, ‘we used Lev Knipper’s contacts with the émigrés.’

This period was one of intense secret operations abroad mounted by INO (Inostrannyi Otdel), the Foreign Intelligence Department of the OGPU. Even after the destruction of the White armies, Lenin was determined to pursue counter-revolution abroad. In December 1920, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, had begun to organize operations against émigré groups in France and Germany. Berlin alone contained 200,000 White Russian refugees.

Relatives of prominent émigrés were seized as hostages at home and agents were rapidly recruited for operations abroad to infiltrate émigré organizations and arrange the kidnapping of their leaders. A sophisticated development was to create fake White Guard organizations within Russia to trap the regime’s enemies. These activities were given the highest priority. For the first dozen years of its life, INO’s ‘main foreign target remained the White Guard movement’.

The White Guard movement was directed from Paris by the Russian Combined Services Union (ROVS), led by General Kutepov, who was kidnapped in Paris by OGPU agents in January 1930. A successor, General Miller, was also kidnapped in December 1936. He was taken back to the Soviet Union drugged inside a trunk, interrogated, tortured and then shot. The émigré world of White Russians in the early 1920S was a political demi-monde of agents and double agents, mostly working for the OGPU. Homesick White Russians in Paris and Berlin, many of them well-born officers working at night as taxi drivers, were prepared to betray their closest friends for the chance of what they thought was a guarantee of safe conduct home.

Lev, however, was not expected to take part in kidnappings. His task was to identify those émigrés, especially intellectuals, who could be persuaded to return to the Soviet homeland as obedient citizens. He apparently played a quiet but important role in providing information for the OGPU on writers like Aleksei Tolstoy, a former White officer like Lev and the author of the Moscow Art Theatre’s early success Tsar Feodor, in which Olga Knipper-Chekhova made her name and attracted the interest of Anton Chekhov. Tolstoy, who became known as ‘the Red Count’, was allowed back in 1923 as a ‘repentant expatriate’ and never disappointed the Kremlin. He was raised to the status of grand old man of Soviet letters after Gorky’s death.

The Russian émigré community in Berlin was more like a colony, largely because it was so concentrated on the western centre of the city. Berliners jokingly called the Kurfürstendamm the ‘Nöpski Prospekt’, and Charlottenburg was known as ‘Charlottengrad’. Writers including Vladimir Nabokov, Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Pasternak treated the cafés of the area, such as the Prager Diele, in the same way as French existentialists later used the cafés of Saint-Germain. There were around 200 Russian-language newspapers, magazines and journals in Berlin, a number of publishing houses and even a Russian high school. But this already precarious community was to be devastated and scattered within a decade by the economic crisis and unemployment triggered by the Wall Street Crash.

The Moscow Art Theatre touring group, some sixty strong, with Lev discreetly in attendance, reached Berlin at the end of September 1922. They had sailed from Petrograd down the Baltic to Stettin, encountering heavy storms on the way. Most of them felt very sick and battered when they took their train to Berlin, arriving a week after Stanislavsky.

Stanislavsky was very nervous. He could relax even less in foreign countries than at home in Moscow. Every arrangement for the tour had been made by the impresario Morris Gest, who was also a great publicist. As a result, Stanislavsky, already ashamed of his shabby overcoat, found himself, as he stepped from his carriage in the Friedrichstrasse station, ambushed with flashbulbs and moving-picture cameras. He even had to repeat his departure from the station for their benefit.

The tour, as he knew only too well, was an immense undertaking and politically fraught. Outside Russia they were likely to be seen as representatives of the regime which had butchered the Tsar and his children, while any soothing remarks they made abroad could be interpreted at home as ‘counter-revolutionary‘. The fact that Lenin and Lunacharsky had given permission for this foreign tour was not a guarantee of their safety on return.

The tour did not start well in Berlin. Stanislavsky was trying to lick the cast into shape for Tsar
Feodor,
only to find that they could not rehearse properly at their theatre, because they were sharing it with another company. Max Reinhardt, the great impresario of the period, stepped in to help with the offer of his own company’s workshops. Stanislavsky insisted that not a minute should be wasted. Although nearly a quarter of a century in the Art Theatre’s repertoire,
Tsar Feodor
had not been performed for some time and needed a good dusting.

At the technical rehearsal on 24 September Stanislavsky was sitting in the auditorium. The dramatic moment came when the bells of the Kremlin were to ring out, but the sound was tinny. ‘And when are we going to hear the real chimes?’ Stanislavsky called out from the darkness of the deserted rows. Somebody in Moscow, without telling Stanislavsky, had decided to leave the main bell behind because it weighed one and a half tons and was thus far too heavy for a European and American tour. Stanislavsky’s pent-up nerves exploded in a magisterial tantrum. He insisted that the performance must be cancelled. Eventually, a stagehand suggested that a large circular saw, if suspended, could prove a reasonable substitute if struck in the correct way. Circular saws were summoned for a trial from a nearby workshop, Stanislavsky was finally convinced and the play went ahead.