The Whites collapsed on all fronts. Kolchak’s forces abandoned Omsk in November and, within two months, Admiral Kolchak himself would be handed over to the Reds for execution. The pattern of total disintegration, moral as well as military, was repeated in the south. The sauve-qui-peut was rendered even more despicable by massacres of Jews in the retreat. The Whites had become obsessively anti-Semitic, convinced that all Jews must somehow be tainted with Bolshevism simply because Trotsky and a number of other leading commissars were Jews.
The utter corruption and selfishness of most of the Whites had been revealed in the speculation and looting which lay behind their crusade to save Russia. Such self-defeating short sightedness also contributed to the British government’s decision in November to withdraw all support. The nobility and middle class sheltering in the south were thrown into panic. Everyone tried to exchange their Don roubles for foreign currency only to find that they had become worthless virtually overnight. Nobody wanted them. Panic spread as fast as the epidemic of typhus passed on by the lice-ridden troops as they fell back.
Olga’s brother, Lev Knipper, who was also lice-infested, was extremely fortunate not to have contracted typhus. He appears to have been better nourished than many, which may have increased his resistance to the disease. Although deprived of a balanced diet, he and his fellow officers had acquired a life-saving source of eggs and lived off gogol-mogol- a Russian version of eggnog. He also managed to keep up his spirits at a time when many officers, especially the wounded and ill, had started to shoot themselves. No officer dared to be taken alive by the victorious and avenging Reds. Lev was also fortunate to be part of the forces which withdrew into the easily defended Crimea.
Those forced back into the neck of the Caucasus faced a terrible experience. The scenes at the end of that winter as fear-stricken White refugees fled to the port of Novorossiisk on the Black Sea provide some of the most painful descriptions in modern history.
Unaware of the collapse of Denikin’s armies, the Kachalov group had sailed from the safety of the Crimea to Novorossiisk. They were on their way to perform at Rostov-on-Don. There, they found filth, chaos and railways in a state of virtual collapse. The only place left to sleep was on the platform.
Rostov, like most of the region, was suffering a typhoid epidemic and the theatre in which they were supposed to perform had become an improvised hospital. They found another building in which to put on The Cherry Orchard. This persistence was partly due to professional pride, but also to financial need at a time of exponential inflation as the Don rouble crashed. Aunt Olya must have wondered constantly about Lev during that disastrous winter and whether their paths had crossed without them knowing it. Yet it was Vasily Kachalov and his wife who experienced a miracle. Quite by chance, a man appeared at one of their performances to tell Kachalov that his son, Vadim Shverubovich, was lying sick with typhus in the railway station.
Vadim was close to death when they found him and brought him back to less squalid surroundings. They brought a doctor, who provided them with medicine and some carbolic acid to clean and sterilize his skin. The doctor warned them that Vadim was approaching the crisis in his fever. During that night, Vadim’s mother knew that the crisis must have arrived as his temperature dropped rapidly. She poured what she thought was the medicine down his throat, but in her flustered state she had picked up the carbolic acid. It began to burn his insides. Somebody found some milk once they realized what had happened and that soothed the delirious boy a little. And they then gave him the right medicine. Kachalov maintained his self-control with irony. ‘You know, this has the air of a rather vulgar melodrama,’ he announced. ‘A mother, who has been waiting desperately for her son, poisons him on the very first night of his return. This just isn’t possible in real life.’ They nursed Vadim back to health, but even after all his experiences, the boy did not want to let go of his pistol.
As the Red armies advanced in February 1920, the Kachalov group had only one route of escape left. It lay south across the Caucasus. They moved first to Ekaterinodar, but that, they realized, would also be attacked before long. Fortunately, the director of the State Theatre in Tiflis, capital of the now independent Georgian Republic, had studied with the Moscow Art Theatre and was delighted to provide an official invitation.
To get to Tiflis they had to return to Novorossiisk in a goods train. They hoped to find a boat there to take them down the Black Sea coast to Georgia. Vadim Shverubovich, now fully recovered, described Aunt Olya in a coal wagon, sitting erect on a suitcase, reading a book in a gilt morocco binding, oblivious to the dirt, the bitter wind and the sound of gunfire in the distance. Novorossiisk was already filling rapidly with refugees and no ship’s captain was keen to take a company of actors with their costumes and props, however much they pleaded. Finally, the master of an Italian steamer took them on as deck passengers and they escaped the growing horrors of the port.
In the course of the next two weeks, abandoned weapons and the corpses of White officers and civilians, killed in their thousands by typhus, cold and starvation, marked the route to Novorossiisk. Survival depended upon getting on one of the French or British ships in the harbour before the Reds surrounded the town and bombarded the port. Some 50,000 troops were evacuated by the end of March 1920, but a further 60,000 military personnel and countless civilians were left behind once the Red forces arrived and brought up artillery. Allied warships fired salvoes of covering fire as the last ships hauled in their gangplanks. Thousands of screaming people on the quayside, including mothers with babies, begged the ships’ crews to save them. Cossacks shot their horses down by the harbour as if this would somehow oblige the foreign ships to take them away. Scores committed suicide, either throwing themselves into the icy water or blowing their brains out.
The arrival of the Kachalov group in Georgia, and the welcome accorded them in the delightful city of Tiflis, made their recent experiences seem like a bad dream. It was spring and the Georgians were generous with their excellent food and wines. Aunt Olya was suffering badly from arthritis, especially in her hands. This had not been helped by months of living off horsemeat and no vegetables. The contrast with Bolshevik Russia made Georgia seem a paradise, but she was again afflicted by an acute homesickness for the Art Theatre in Moscow and a longing to revisit her husband’s grave in the Novodeviche cemetery. Tiflis had many Russian refugees, and their performances at the State Theatre were eagerly attended. But the Kachalov group knew that they could not stay, nor could they return northwards through the Caucasus. Terrible reprisals were being exacted by the victorious Red Army on the villages of the Terek, Kuban and Don Cossacks.
The hospitable Georgian authorities even arranged for the group to spend a long summer holiday at the Georgian spa of Borzhomi. There the Georgian government put them up in the Likani Palace, a summer retreat built for the Tsar’s brother Grand Duke Michael in Riviera Muscovite style, with many neo-classical and Italianate touches. It later became one of Stalin’s country houses and he spent some of the happiest times there with his wife, Nadya, before she committed suicide.
For the Kachalov group, their large and empty lodgings provided an awkward splendour, but at least they were left alone to discuss their future. They had to choose between exile and a very uncertain return to Bolshevik Moscow. It was hard, especially for those who found themselves in a minority, because the one thing that they all agreed on was that they could only survive together.
‘I have been suffering for a month in Borzhomi,’ Aunt Olya wrote to Masha, ‘unable to make up my mind whether to go to the west or not. I don’t think that I have shed so many tears in my life. I did not want to give the others my consent and I have been expecting from moment to moment to receive a summons back to Moscow ... We had a crazy day. We had been sitting together from morning to night and could not decide what we had to do ... How I want to go to Moscow! How tired I am of wandering!’
But with no guarantee from the authorities permitting their free return,
even Stanislavsky realized that it was still far too dangerous to intervene on their behalf. The decision of the Kachalov group went against Aunt Olya’s longing to return at any price, but she understood Kachalov’s need to secure a safe-conduct for Vadim, who as a White Guard could easily face a death sentence despite his youth. ‘So it seems as if we’re almost certainly leaving, Masha,’ she continued her letter. ‘We’ll travel via Sofia, the Slav countries, Prague - then maybe Berlin, Paris? ... Masha, try to sense it when we set off across the Black Sea. My God, how revolting and shameful it is to go abroad!’
The dinner parties of the two aunts in Moscow for all their young nephews and nieces must have felt like part of a previous and completely separate life. The last performance of the Kachalov group before departing into European exile was The Cherry Orchard. The play’s note of valediction haunted her more than ever. Just before leaving she wrote a farewell letter to Stanislavsky. “‘Our life in this house is over”, as they said in The Cherry Orchard. And God knows where we will be united again and how we will find each other.’
Lev, once again, was on her mind. In her letter to Masha, she remonstrated with her once again for not having told her of his visit. ‘You don’t understand what a joy it would have been for me to hear that Lev is alive.’ But any news of him was by now nearly a year old, a time during which hundreds of thousands of people had died from war, disease and starvation.
Despite his later claim to have deserted from the White Army, Lev had in fact remained with Baron Wrangel’s forces in the Crimea after the terrible evacuation of Denikin’s men from Novorossiisk in March. Wrangel knew that he had neither the men nor the popular support on the mainland of southern Russia to risk an offensive. But in June, when the Poles forced the Red Army on to the defensive with their attacks, he decided to sally forth from the Crimean peninsula. His army managed to seize a large part of the Tauride provinces, but hopes of reuniting the Don and Kuban regions with the White cause were vain. In October, the Soviet regime concluded a ceasefire with the Poles. This allowed them to bring vastly superior forces south-eastwards against Wrangel. The Whites, who had only 35,000 men facing Red armies 130,000strong, were forced to retreat rapidly back into the Crimea. All Wrangel could hope to do was to hold them back at the landbridge to the mainland, the Perekop isthmus, and prepare for evacuation.
Once again the White currency collapsed in value as civilians scrambled for places on the ships. But Wrangel’s withdrawal was at least far better organized, mainly thanks to the geography of the Crimea and the determination of the rearguard to hold the Perekop defence line. Altogether 126 ships, British, French and White Russian, took part in the evacuation, ferrying 150,000 people across the Black Sea to Constantinople and the Bosphorus.
Britain and France arranged for the remains of Wrangel’s army to be housed on the Gallipoli peninsula, the site of Britain’s painful military disaster five years before. The defeated Turks were not of course consulted. Wrangel’s men remained in uniform and in their regiments. The evacuation had forced them to leave horses and artillery in the Crimea, but they had been allowed to retain side arms and personal weapons. Once they were settled in their extremely primitive billets - the headquarters of the Nikolaevskoe military college was a commandeered mosque - Wrangel ordered that military training should recommence on 21 January 1921 to maintain morale. But this mainly consisted of endless parades, either to celebrate regimental days or in honour of visiting White Russian dignitaries.
Lev was evidently among those young officers who wanted to leave, but it was not easy. A special commission considered the applications of those wishing to be dismissed because of illness or injury. Those who fell into this category were moved to a camp for refugees. Those who wanted to quit the army for other reasons encountered various obstacles. A common practice was to stop giving them their rations, taking away their warm clothes and blankets. Lev wanted to leave, but without money he did not stand a chance. He feared that if he stayed, he would die. His only hope was Aunt Olya, but he had no idea where she was.
Lev was indeed fortunate that his aunt had not been able to return to Moscow as she had hoped. The Kachalov group had been in Constantinople but encountered no success in arranging a season of performances. The shortage of money had forced them to move from a modest hotel to a virtual dosshouse, before taking ship for the Balkans.
Aunt Olya’s brother, Konstantin Knipper, was much luckier in his attempts to return to Moscow. After the collapse of Admiral Kolchak’s forces, he somehow managed to get back from Siberia with his wife and Olga’s child. The importance of his skills as a railway engineer saved him. The Bolshevik government was prepared to make temporary concessions to get the right expertise at that time, and repairing the railroad system was vital if the starving cities were to be fed. On their return to the family apartment at 23 Prechistensky bulvar, Olga’s little daughter did not recognize her mother after so long. She refused to allow Olga to kiss her or to hold her hand, because she did not consider her to be her ‘real mother’.
This was to be the last time that Olga ever saw her father. She was thinking of leaving Russia, at least for a while. In those ‘hunger years’, survival itself was degrading. Most young actresses were forced to resort to part-time prostitution and venereal disease was rife. Olga wanted to try her luck in Berlin, leaving her daughter, Ada, once again with her mother. She was greatly encouraged in this plan by Ferenc Jaroszi, the Austro-Hungarian cavalry captain described by Misha. He and other members of the family were certain that she married him. Olga applied for a six-week exit permit. Later, in a typical example of compulsive embroidery for her movie memoirs, she claimed in one volume that permission had been given by Lunacharsky himself, thanks to the intervention of Aunt Olya (this was most unlikely, since she was still abroad as an illegal émigrée); and elsewhere that her exit pass had been signed by Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya.
According to her own account, the twenty-three-year-old Olga set out in January 1921 from Moscow’s Belorussky station looking 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. She claimed to have concealed her most valuable item, a diamond ring to turn into cash in Berlin, under her tongue while pretending to be semi-mute. 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 to prevent ‘former people’ taking anything of value out of the Soviet Republic, where all such items were now forfeit to the state. Passengers were searched at the Belorussky station by Red Guards in their strange budyonovka - pointed hats with earflaps, shaped like an Asiatic helmet, but with a large red star on the front.
But the date which Olga Chekhova gives for her departure seems highly unlikely. In her letter of 11 September 1920, Aunt Olya wrote to Masha: ‘They have written to me that my Olya has gone abroad with a new husband.’ This would indicate, when one considers the bad communications, that Olga had left for Berlin in August 1920at the latest. Olga Chekhova’s claim that she thought that she was leaving Soviet Russia for just six weeks is also unconvincing. But she could never have foreseen the manner of her only return to the city, when, at the end of April 1945, she was to be flown back from Germany by special aeroplane on the orders of the chief of SMERSh.
Both brother and sister had, within a few months of each other, become émigrés, one of the key words in the Bolshevik lexicon of hate. Lev ranked even higher in the order of enmity as a ‘White Guardist’. Yet both became valued agents of the Soviet intelligence services at a key moment in history.
10. The Far-Flung Family
In that time of civil war and chaotic communications, it seems miraculous that any letters managed to reach their intended recipient. Yet Lev, stranded and penniless on the Gallipoli peninsula with a miserable mass of other White officers from the Wrangel army, somehow made contact with his exiled Aunt Olya, touring in the Ba
lkans with the Kachalov group. As soon as she heard of her favourite nephew’s plight, she immediately sent money and told him to join her.
Aunt Olya had the funds to send to him only because a Russian émigré organization, planning to start a movie studio in Milan, had paid the Kachalov group a large advance to take part in an adaptation of a novel by Knut Hamsun. The project collapsed, but the group did not have to pay back anything. They had by then reached Bulgaria, and this financed their first foreign season in the capital, Sofia.
Vadim Shverubovich later described the complications of touring abroad. The group had brought The Three Sisters into their repertoire in Sofia and they needed a band to play the Skobelev March when Masha is saying goodbye to Vershinin in the last act, the most moving scene of the whole play. A Bulgarian military band was found, but the bandmaster, cor seted with gold braid and sporting a huge moustache, did not know the Skobelev March, so he launched his men into a thumping Prussian alternative. Aunt Olya, whose definitive version of Masha had always been played with the Skobelev, ‘rushed towards the orchestra pit, looking like some wounded bird in Masha’s long black dress’. She screamed at the bandsmen and fled to her dressing room, completely distraught. Aunt Olya, like Masha in The Three Sisters, was pining for Moscow. She was close to nervous collapse, longing for a message from Stanislavsky to say that the authorities had forgiven them and that they were needed back at the Art Theatre.
The Kachalov group proceeded north-westwards through the Balkans to the newly created kingdom of Yugoslavia. Aunt Olya wrote to Stanislavsky from Zagreb, describing their celebration of the New Year of 1921, according to the old Russian calendar. ‘We lit candles in a fir tree, and several of the young ladies told fortunes. Then everyone got carried away with memories of the theatre. A lot of stories were told. We spoke a lot about you and the performances, marvelled at them, and remembered Anton Pavlovich, and I recounted his last days in Badenweiler. It was quiet and everyone softened. Our performances are going well. The Croats are in love with us. If we have succeeded and if we are popular is all thanks to you and Vladimir Ivanovich [Nemirovich-Danchenko]. You are with us always and everywhere, invisible and untouchable but inseparable from us. We always talk of you at rehearsals. How would you have done this or that and what you would have said.’