Author(s): Antony Beevor

Biography

This is the extraordinary tale of how one family survived the Russian Revolution, the civil war, the rise of Hitler, the Stalinist Terror and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. There have been many tantalizing rumours about Olga Chekhova, the niece of Anton Chekhov. She left Russia for Germany and became a film star honoured by the Nazis yet secretly worked for Soviet intelligence. Some of her closest relatives joined her in Berlin; the rest remained in Moscow. Young and beautiful yet with nothing of value but a smuggled diamond ring, Olga Chekhova left Moscow in 1920 to escape starvation and degradation. In Berlin, by making the most of her Chekhov name, she obtained a part in a silent movie. Success followed quickly and she eventually became Hitler's favourite film star. Olga's brother, Lev Knipper, was a composer who had fought with the White Army during the civil war. When he returned to Russia in 1921, he was forced to work for Soviet intelligence. His controllers sent him abroad to spy on Russian emigres and in Germany Lev recruited his sister as a 'sleeper'. Later, at the height of the war, plans were made for the two of them to launch a suicidal attack right at the heart of the Nazi regime. In putting together this dramatic story, Antony Beevor brilliantly shows how people lived under the terrible pressures of a totalitarian age. It reveals a confusion of courage, idealism, fear, self-sacrifice, opportunism and betrayal. The astonishing part of this epic tale is that both Olga and Lev survived the most murderous era known in history. What they had to do to stay alive may have left deep but hidden scars. In The Mystery of Olga Chekhova, Britain's most eagerly read historian brings fully to light for the first time the true story of how a beautiful Russian woman, found herself, a 'State Actress' of the Third Reich - photographed at the side of the Fuhrer at official receptions. Born in 1897, to a family of German origin, Olga Chekhova was the niece and namesake of Anton Chekhov's widow, the revered actress Olga Knipper Chekhova. After a disasterous marriage, left as a single mother on the eve of the civil war, Olga Chekhova embarked on a career as an actress. In 1921, she left Moscow to pursue work in Berlin, then the centre of the film industry. During the civil war, her brother Lev, a musician, had been a White Guard Officer, fighting the Bolsheviks. His subsequent rapid rehabilitation and integration into the elite of the communist regime, at a time when he would surely have been named 'an enemy of the people', points to his role as a valued Soviet secret agent.