During the confused years which followed the collapse of Communism, I was always fascinated by the role of Russian women. While their menfolk sought consolation in the vodka bottle, the women kept things going. It is no exaggeration to say that without their courage, Russian society would have disintegrated. They demonstrated a strong sense of humour in the most adverse circumstances imaginable.
In 1996, my research assistant Luba Vinogradova showed me an article in a woman's magazine. It was entitled: "Shall we pretend to obey our husbands?" The basic idea was that Russian men were either bastards and successful, or else they were idealists and hopeless. Luba told me a number of stories from the experience of friends to back this up.
Some five years later, when we were researching the extraordinary story of Olga Chekhova for my new book, I suddenly remembered the article. It seemed to sum up the tragedy of Olga's calf-love marriage in 1914 to a brilliant young actor, who was a hopeless idealist as well as maddeningly egocentric. It struck me that Olga was a great example of the toughness and grace that Russian women have so often had to call upon.
Nobody could have been more innocent of the world than Olga Chekhova, yet she survived the revolution and civil war in Russia, and then became a movie star in Germany overnight. In fact, as Hitler's favourite actress, she was invited to all the major Nazi receptions. What he did not know was that she was a Soviet agent - and neither the Nazis nor the Western Allies ever found out. Viktor Abakumov, the head of SMERSh (the Soviet counterintelligence organisation), sent an aircraft from Moscow to bring her back from Berlin while Soviet armies fought their way into the centre of the Nazi capital.
Olga Chekhova was born in the Caucasus in 1898, where her father, Konstantin Knipper, directed the Tsarist railway system. Her aunt was Olga Knipper-Chekhova, the great actress of the Moscow Art Theatre and Anton Chekhov's wife. The Knippers, in this story of confused allegiances, were of German origin. The playwright frequently teased his wife about this. He found her family so bourgeois and organised in comparison to the chaos and emotional incontinence of the Chekhovs.
Olga was sixteen when she met Mikhail Chekhov, her first cousin by marriage. She was a beautiful and naïve girl, a dreamer who had wasted her time at school. Her artistic family never took her seriously. Misha was a brilliant young actor chosen for great things by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre and the man who revolutionised drama at the turn of the century.
Misha was a charismatic leader of the revels among the younger generation of Chekhovs and Knippers. He had an extraordinary gift for mimicry, both facial and vocal, while his mesmerising eyes and haunted face allowed him to play old men convincingly even before he was twenty. "He was short, thin and moved restlessly", wrote his first cousin, Sergei Chekhov. "He dressed carelessly in a shabby velvet jacket and, horror of horrors, he did not just lack a starched collar, he wore no collar at all. But he had a captivating tenderness about him. He was warm and had a sweet smile which made one forget that he was not handsome."
The innocent young Olga adored him. She had no idea that his charm and great talents concealed a disastrous irresponsibility and an incipient alcoholism, probably inherited from his father, Aleksandr Chekhov, the playwright's eldest brother. Misha had also inherited a compulsion to seduce, although mercifully in a rather more romantic fashion than his father, who was notorious for his crudeness. "From my earliest youth," Misha wrote later, "I found myself in a constant state of falling in love."
Misha and Olga, whatever the exact details surrounding their decision to marry so young, undoubtedly acted on the spur of the moment, without telling anyone. They knew that if they did ask for permission, it would be refused and Olga would be taken home to Saint Petersburg immediately. So early one morning in September 1914, soon after the outbreak of war, Olga packed a small suitcase with her passport, wash-bag and a new nightdress and slipped out of her aunt's apartment on Prechistensky bulvar. It must have taken considerable courage.
Olga took a drozhky to join Misha and together they drove to a small Orthodox church at the other end of Moscow. Misha, saying that they did not have much time, handed their passports to the priest, a very old man with a wrinkled face. The priest clearly did not want to be hurried, and kept shaking his head in disapproval. The bride and groom each grasped a flickering candle and two bystanders, engaged by Misha, held the crowns over their heads. The fact that Olga was a Lutheran does not appear to have been a problem. By Orthodox standards it certainly seems to have been a simple, short ceremony. Even so, Olga claimed later that Misha was constantly looking at his pocket-watch, afraid of being late for that afternoon's performance.
For Olga, the enormity of what they had just done sank in only after they had returned to Misha's apartment. They sat down to drink some tea from the samovar in his bedroom. The bed was so small that she wondered where she was supposed to sleep. And they had to share the apartment with Misha's old wet-nurse as well as her mother-in-law, Natalya Golden-Chekhova, who lay prostrate in her darkened bedroom next door. She had collapsed in shock and grief at discovering that her adored son had married without telling her.
Olga received little support from Misha, who was appalled by the family scandal they had unleashed, and clearly felt sorrier for himself than for his seventeen-year-old bride.
By the following summer, Olga was pregnant. "It is so nice not to be doing anything", Misha wrote to his aunt, Masha Chekhov, in Yalta. "Although we are all three in town, we are still in a very peaceful mood. My Kapsulka [my little capsule, ie the pregnant Olga] isn't particularly happy to be stuck in the city with Mama. She was dreaming of sketching somewhere in fields and forests. But what can I do? She shouldn't have married me. She could for example have married Volodya [Chekhov, another first cousin]. But she preferred to share my fame with me than to be the wife of a provincial judge."
For the heavily pregnant Olga, relations with Misha's possessive mother had become unbearable. To make matters far worse, Misha was drinking heavily. He poured vodka into his beer for what he called "deep effect", claiming that he was "a true Russian", and drank until he collapsed. At night he would wake suddenly and cry out: "Paper! Pen! Write, Olinka! Write! Great thoughts have come to me."
Olga soon realised that the marriage was a farce. When she had told Misha that she was expecting a child, he had avoided her gaze, shrugged his shoulders and left. She claimed later that she had tried to terminate the pregnancy with hot baths. One day she returned to the apartment and found their bedroom door closed. She heard a giggle. Misha had brought one of his girlfriends home.
Moscow that summer was oppressively hot, so finally Misha rented a dacha. Olga described it as a "small, utterly primitive little place, which one would only take for the shortest possible time." She distracted herself by painting while Misha, when reasonably sober, played tennis at a nearby court with a succession of girlfriends, one of whom would become his second wife. In August, as the birth approached, she returned to Moscow. Olga was just over eighteen years old when their child, a baby girl, was born on 9 September 1916.
Olga suffered a nervous collapse soon after the birth, presumably a form of post-natal depression exacerbated by the state of her marriage. Another source states that she went down with meningitis. Any romantic illusions she still had were finally crushed by her experiences during the course of that year and the next. Misha showed no interest in their daughter and was drinking even more than usual. Olga found herself forced to reassess everything. She was married to a self-destructive drunk, trapped by responsibility for a baby daughter. And it was not just her marriage that was falling to pieces. The whole of Russia and the secure existence that she had known since childhood was starting to disintegrate as the armies facing the Germans and Austrians collapsed. Talk of revolution spread in the streets.
In May 1917, Misha had to abandon rehearsals of The Seagull due to nervous depression exacerbated by drinking. In late November, just after the Bolshevik coup d'etat, Olga left him. She moved her possessions and the baby to the Knipper family apartment in Moscow at 23 Prechistensky Bulvar, near the Arbat. The shock of being poor for the first time in her life was considerable, and undoubtedly contributed to the determination and ambition she was to display later in life.
Conditions in Moscow rapidly deteriorated, so the Knipper parents departed for Siberia, where Olga's father's expertise as a railway engineer was in great demand. They took Olga's little daughter with them, as she stood a far better chance of survival in the countryside. Olga stayed behind in Moscow with her sister Ada. Early 1918 was cruelly cold. There was no coal. Foraging for firewood was outlawed, but almost everyone was desperate enough to take the risk of being shot by Red Guard patrols to bring home boughs from a tree or a plank from a step. The two sisters were reduced to burning their father's books from his library in a little iron stove. In an attempt to retain some body heat at night, Olga and Ada even built a tent out of a Persian carpet over a mattress on the bedroom floor to keep them warm.
Olga and Ada soon found more and more strangers billeted on them by the local Soviet housing committee. They often had four or five people to a room. The house was also used as a billet for soldiers and the sisters seem to have narrowly escaped rape at the hands of two sailors. "Every day, my sister Ada and I", wrote Olga later, "were prepared for the worst."
In 1920, after the collapse of Admiral Kolchak's White Army, the Knipper parents returned to Moscow with Olga's little daughter, who no longer recognised her mother. She refused to allow Olga to kiss her or to hold her hand because she did not consider her to be her "real mother". It was also the last time that Olga ever saw her father.
She was thinking of leaving Russia, at least for a time. In the "hunger years", survival itself had been degrading. Olga wanted to try her luck in Berlin. In 1920 the twenty-two year-old Olga left her daughter with her mother and set out from Moscow's Belorussky station. She looked like a young peasant woman. Her head was wrapped in a large headscarf, and she wore valenki felt boots and a bulky overcoat. Her few belongings were stowed in a bag made out of an old piece of carpet Concealing her most valuable item, a diamond ring to turn into cash in Berlin, under her tongue, she pretended to be semi-mute. She knew she would have been arrested if the ring had been found at one of the many control points. The export of jewellery was strictly forbidden, in order to prevent "former people" taking anything of value out of the Soviet Republic where all such items were now forfeit to the State.
Once in Berlin, Olga, through a stroke of luck, met Erich Pommer, the German movie mogul, and the director Friedrich Murnau, who needed a leading lady for his new silent film, Schloss Vogelöd. Shamelessly exploiting the Chekhov name, Olga even claimed to have been a member of the Moscow Art Theatre and that Konstantin Stanislavsky himself had trained her. This was a complete invention. Olga, who hardly spoke any German, had to work from a script in Russian. She admitted later that she had little idea of what was happening. But the film became a great success, and she was hailed as a star.
Olga seized the opportunity. She learned German and worked tirelessly at the Babelsberg studios. She was soon making up to eight movies a year. But she avoided emotional entanglements. Her experiences with Misha had convinced her that she did not want to depend on a man ever again.
In the intervening years, her brother Lev had become an avant-garde composer. He had returned to Russia after fighting as a White Guard officer in the civil war against the Bolsheviks. To save himself from prison camp or even execution, Lev was forced to work for Soviet intelligence, and was sent to Berlin to spy on emigres. There he recruited Olga as a "sleeper". Her reward was to take the form of four exit visas: for her mother, Baba, for her own young daughter, and for her sister Ada and her little girl Marina. So part of the family established itself in Berlin, housed and paid for entirely by Olga, who had been so patronised as a girl. This matriarchy, with Olga as bread-winner, their mother as the controller of the house, and Ada as book-keeper worked most effectively.
Perhaps the most satisfying touch for Olga came when Misha Chekhov turned up in Berlin with his second wife. They were refugees, because Misha, the idealist, could not stomach the new Stalinist dictates of socialist realism.
Olga found an apartment for them close by so that Misha could see their daughter frequently. She also obtained a part for him in the film, Troika, in which she was the star, and she directed him in another, suitably called The Fool of Love. Misha would later take Stanislavsky's system to Hollywood, where it became known as method acting.
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of all their stories is that Olga, her brother Lev and Misha all managed to survive the most dangerous and murderous era of history. For Olga, like most Russian women, the determination to survive was neither political nor purely selfish. She simply knew that she needed to find the necessary strength to preserve her family.
· Antony Beevor is the author of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945. The Mystery of Olga Chekhova is published this week by Viking Penguin at £16.99.
