The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (30 page)

Stalin had ordered Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Konev to encircle the city. This was to prevent both the Nazi leaders from escaping and the Americans from slipping into the city from the south-west. Packed into her little air-raid shelter, the first that Olga Chekhova and her companions would have heard was the battle on 26 April for Gatow airfield, just the other side of a thin barrier of pine trees. There, a mixture of Luftwaffe cadets and elderly Volkssturm militia depressed the barrels of the 88mm anti-aircraft guns to minimum elevation and took on the Soviet tanks advancing through the chaos of wrecked and burned-out aircraft. Their resistance lasted most of the day.

The Soviet troops were from the 47th Army, which had advanced north ofBerlin via Oranienburg and then swept south to meet up with the 3rd Guards Tank Army near Potsdam. On that evening and the following day, Soviet soldiers fanned out, searching the area for German stragglers. Their faces were masked by the dirt of the last ten days of fighting.

Olga Chekhova’s version of their arrival is characteristically melodramatic. The Katyusha rocket launchers have fallen silent. Only isolated shots can be heard. A Red Army soldier suddenly appears in the doorway to their cellar. There is blood on his forehead. He staggers, and they realize that he is mortally wounded. He points his sub-machine-gun at them, but just as he looks as if he is about to fire, he falls dead at their feet. Her cinematic instincts clearly got the better of her. The dead soldier’s comrades burst in. One of them says accusingly: ‘You killed Kolya!’ Then they march Olga and her family off to the Soviet kommandatura. ‘The sentence was execution,’ she wrote. ‘Just like a film.’ But to judge by the general state of affairs at this time, if the soldiers had for a moment believed that their comrade had been killed, they would have immediately gunned down every occupant of the house. And a local kommandatura would not have been set up and operational before the neighbourhood had been secured.

Albert Sumser’s version is more convincing. They were sitting in the house, waiting for the first Russians. He was next to Olga and had her little dog, Kuki, on his lap. The first soldiers, surprised to find that Olga spoke Russian, appear to have called a woman commissar. He remembered her black, greasy hair and enormous breasts, and above all her fury. She screamed at Olga that she was a traitor to the Motherland, then grabbed her by the throat, shouting threats. She was fortunately interrupted by the arrival of a colonel, who demanded to know what was happening. Olga immediately told him who she was. The colonel promptly turned on the woman commissar and began yelling at her, telling her she was stupid and ignorant if she had never heard of Chekhov. He ordered her out and told two of the soldiers to stay there and guard the house. No doubt he reported his discovery to higher command, and word was passed to SMERSh counter-intelligence.

The next evening, a staff car containing two Soviet officers pulled up under the tall pine trees outside the house. Olga Chekhova was told to pack a few things and to accompany them. She said goodbye to her daughter, granddaughter and Bert Sumser, who, although of military age, had not been taken away as a prisoner. The two officers were escorting her to the headquarters of Marshal Zhukov’s ist Belorussian Front. This was in the former military engineers school at Karlshorst, on the other side of Berlin, and a wide detour was necessary to avoid the fighting which still continued in and around the centre of the city.

At Karlshorst, she was interrogated on the following day, 29April, by Colonel Shkurin of SMERSh. It was a strangely restrained and truncated interrogation, almost as if the interrogator had received instructions to do little more than go through the motions. This, it must be remembered, was at a time when White Russians found in Berlin were either executed on the spot or rounded up, ready to be turned into ‘camp dust’ in the Gulag. The next morning, 30 April, Colonel Shkurin’s protocol was sealed in an envelope with a covering letter from Lieutenant-General Aleksandr Anatolievich Vadis, the head of SMERSh attached to the 1st Belorussian Front. Two days later, Vadis, harried by telephone calls and signals from Moscow, was in charge of the hunt for Hitler’s corpse in the Reichschancellery.

The package containing the documents on Olga Chekhova was handed to her chief escort officer. It was addressed to Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, the chief of SMERSh, who had received the Order of Kutuzov ist Class on 21 April and would soon be promoted to Colonel General, even though the only shots he had ever heard fired had been those of execution squads. Olga Chekhova and her escort were then taken by staff car, probably an American Willys, and driven eastwards to Poznan, captured after a brutal siege in late February. There, an aircraft sent from Moscow awaited her.

Twenty-five years after leaving the Belorussky station, Olga Chekhova found herselfback in Moscow. According to Soviet intelligence sources, she was taken ‘for a 72-hour rendezvous’ to an NKVD safe-house in central Moscow. Abakumov’s habit of taking ’actresses, cheating wives, secretaries and foreign visitors’ to safe-houses for his illicit affairs compromised these secret locations and was well known within the NKVD. This weakness later featured on the list of charges against him under the category of ignoring ‘Communist moral principles’.

General Ivan Serov, the NKVD chief in Berlin, when attacked by Abakumov later—almost certainly on Stalin’s orders - wrote a letter of denunciation to Stalin on 2 February 1948, describing Abakumov’s behaviour during the battle for Moscow in late 1941: ‘Let Abakumov tell the Central Committee about his cowardly behaviour during the hardest period of the war when the Germans were near to Moscow. He went round like a wet hen, moaned and sighed about what would happen to him and did not do anything. His cowardly behaviour influenced the subordinates of the department. His obsequious servant Ivanov, who was responsible for his household, was sent to us to measure up for boots to be made for running away from Moscow. The generals who stayed in Moscow witnessed Abakumov’s behaviour. Let Abakumov refute the evidence that during the desperate days of the war, he went to Moscow and chose girls of easy virtue and brought them to the Hotel Moskva.’

In May 1945, Abakumov was thirty-seven years old. ‘The very ideal of a Chekist’, he was tall and quite good-looking, with sensual lips and ‘a shock of black hair’. Like Beria, he was a sex addict, although he resorted less to rape. And also like Beria, he was a sadist who thoroughly enjoyed torturing his victims. Solzhenitsyn recorded that in order not to spoil the Persian carpet in his office, ‘a dirty runner bespattered with blood was rolled out’ before the unfortunate prisoner was brought in.

Abakumov was also obsessed with stage and film stars, which was perhaps part of the reason for his interest in Olga Chekhova, even though, at forty-seven, she was ten years older than him. He later arrested General V. V. Kryukov, a dashing cavalry commander and close friend of Marshal Zhukov, tortured him personally, and then had his wife, Russia’s most famous singer, Lydia Ruslanova, dragged in. She spurned him and Abakumov sent her straight to a Gulag labour camp.

There is no clear indication whether Olga Chekhova slept with Abakumov, either under duress or because she considered it a necessary insurance. Perhaps nothing happened between them at all. But if Abakumov did sleep with Olga Chekhova and he had known of Beria’s patronage, he would very probably have sought his agreement first. Abakumov would not have risked antagonizing Beria at this stage. Olga Chekhova’s two subsequent letters to him, released by the KGB along with the other papers, are far from conclusive on the issue, despite the fact that she asks in one of them, ‘When are we going to meet?’ and they were both addressed to ‘Dearest Vladimir Semyonovich’. Even the ‘Dearest’ is inconclusive, since it may have been an actress’s professional effus iveness, and the fact that she called him Vladimir instead of Viktor apparently reflects Abakumov’s habit of using a
nom de guerre
even in unmilitary situations.

Olga Chekhova’s account of her time in Moscow is significantly evasive and flat, though she could have made a wonderfully melodramatic story, as she had of her adventures in Nazi Germany. She claims that she was lodged with the wife of a Red Army officer still listed as missing in Germany. In her version, charming officers who spoke several languages visited her constantly, played chess with her, chatted and then took her off for interrogation sessions in the Kremlin, the only purpose of which was to fill in details about Hitler’s circle.

It is certainly true that, for Stalin, the interrogation of all those close to Hitler was a very high priority. Stalin was still obsessed with his enemy and the source of his power over the German people. The copy of Olga Chekhova’s handwritten deposition, which the KGB released to Vova Knipper just as the Soviet regime was collapsing, tends to support this. Yet this deposition is far from complete and in any case it was written for SMERSh military counter-intelligence, not for the Foreign Intelligence Department of the NKVD, or Beria’s innermost circle. The KGB, not for the first or last time, was shamelessly playing games with a highly selective release of material.

Yet even the limited selection of material made available is enough to demonstrate that Olga Chekhova was taken extraordinarily seriously by the chiefs of Soviet intelligence—one suspects far too seriously. This is amply confirmed by the VIP treatment accorded to her on her return to Berlin some eight weeks later.

During her time in the Moscow apartment after the first safe-house, Olga Chekhova pretended to keep a diary and hide it. She must have known that her SMERSh guardians would find it and read it secretly. ‘All that Olga Chekhova wrote,’ Sergo Beria surmised years later, ‘was clearly written for Abakumov’s men to read. Apparently, Abakumov’s men really believed that the woman could be naive enough to keep a diary while living in a safe-house of military intelligence.’ Olga Chekhova, a ‘talented actress’, he concluded, ‘was not and could not have been a naive person’. An excerpt from her supposedly secret diary was quoted in another document by Major General Utekhin, the head of SMERSh’s foreign counter-intelligence. ‘Rumours circulating about me are worthy of a novel,’ Olga Chekhova scribbled. ‘Apparently, there’s information about me being intimate with Hitler. My God, I laughed a lot about it. How come and what are all these intrigues about? Incredible and mean slander! When one’s conscience is clear, nothing can affect one. And how wonderful it is to speak the truth. Time will show whether they will believe me or not.’

An even more bizarre event took place in Moscow while Olga Chekhova was there under SMERSh protection. Aunt Olya received a telephone call from a Red Army officer whom she did not know, to say that he had brought a parcel for her from Berlin. She asked a friend of the family called Sofya Stanislavovna Pilyavskaya to go and fetch it. Aunt Olya must have been uneasy at anything coming from Berlin after sighting her niece at the end of the victory performance of
The Cherry Orchard.

The parcel which she fetched was addressed to ‘Olga Knipper-Chekhova’. Aunt Olya opened it, read the accompanying letter and suddenly exclaimed in alarm: ‘It isn’t for me!’ The parcel contained evening dresses and the letter was from Olga Chekhova’s daughter, Ada, who had sent on these extra clothes, assuming that her mother had been taken back to the Soviet Union to perform in some guest performances at the Moscow Art Theatre.

Aunt Olya rang Kachalov to tell him what had happened and ask him if he knew anything about an invitation to her niece to perform in the Soviet Union. Kachalov was a friend of the military governor of Berlin, the very popular General Berzarin, and managed to put a call through to him. To his consternation, Berzarin was most unwelcoming and abrupt. ‘I know nothing about Olga Chekhova, and don’t call me any more, forget about it.’

A very confused and alarmed Aunt Olya felt that she had even more reason to hasten down to the Crimea. She wanted, with Aunt Masha, to burn all the letters and postcards from their nieces in Germany.

Aunt Olya, despite the holiday in her beloved Crimea, soon fell seriously ill. Whether or not it was hastened by nervous exhaustion and the strain of recent times, it is impossible to tell. Lev was with her, and when Vova Knipper wrote to Aunt Olya from Moscow about his engagement to Margo, it was Lev who replied.

‘Dear Vova,’ he wrote. ‘I read your letter out to Aunt Olya. She’s been in bed since the 6th. Her seventy-fifth birthday on the 22nd was a sad day. And she had an operation on the 23rd. For two weeks her temperature ranged between 38 and 39 degrees. Now she’s feeling better after the operation. We think that she’ll be out of the hospital by the 30th. We are very happy for you. We are glad that Margo’s family has received you so warmly. This means that you won’t be so lonely in Moscow at the start of your stay there. It’s good that you have completed your studies. Nowadays one does need an education, especially if one wants to be an actor. By the way, I did not know that you were interested in this profession. It is hard work. You have to work hard on yourself. Masses of reading, thinking, and most important for any artistic profession are inner discipline, self-control, and an ability to withstand failures, which are usually much more numerous than successes, even for talented actors. But you saw how your father could work. And Aunt Olya is still working. Knippers are hard-working and they persevere in achieving their goals. Well, that’s enough moralizing. I will be in Moscow around 10 October and Aunt Olya later, when she’s feeling better. She sends her kisses. I shake your hand. Say hello to Margo for me because I do not know their telephone number in Moscow. Yours Lev Knipper.’

Aunt Olya may have had an additional reason for not wanting to reply in person. She had apparently heard unsettling rumours that Vova had not acquitted himself well during the war and an air of disgrace hung over him within the family. But there was at least one major reassurance for her at this time. On the occasion of her seventy-fifth birthday on 22September, the veteran actress received the Order of Lenin on the instructions of the Central Committee. Apart from the prestige attached to the award, it was a clear signal that the Knipper family was not under threat from the NKVD.