Category Archives: USSR

During the Great Terror, Lev [Knipper], like hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, was clearly going through a personal and political crisis. He was desperately trying to convince himself of the rightness of the Stalinist purges, even when surrounded by the madness of arrests and denunciations all around him….

In early April 1937, not long after the second wave of show trials, Lev wrote a striking letter to Aunt Olya [Knipper-Chekhova]. ‘My life has become a lot more complicated, confused, and harder than it was before, when I still had many illusions of youth, self-importance, young unspent strength and boiling energy which covered up for everything else. And now the time has come to pay the bills. And it’s turned out that I’ve accumulated next to no interest on my capital, and that I will have to pay from the reserve.

‘When I was twenty-three, a new life began for me, thanks to you … I was somehow careless about everything – like a bird which knows nothing of tomorrow, like a creature who, it seemed to me, was “lucky” in its life. And really, I’d soared over dozens of my colleagues, like a rocket. I won’t even say it was undeserved. My talent isn’t a minor one, I possess a huge supply of energy, and my will for life is also not small … Selfishness and a somewhat exaggerated self-assurance are the reasons for my loneliness. And now, thirty-nine years old, I am facing myself, absolutely alone in all senses. And this is the most terrible of all. With all the force of my brain, I desire to be a true Bolshevik, and for this I lack knowledge. This has impeded my development as a composer in the last three to four years … Nothing can ever remove my feeling of guilt towards the party and the Soviet regime about the years of the civil war. “White Guardist” in my presence, it’s like a knife in my flesh, and I always think they’ve said it about me. This is the hardest trauma in my life, and there’re only two ways to cure it – either the party would accept me in its ranks, or death will get me. I am not afraid of it, and I’ve thought of it frequently in the last five to six years.’ …

You see, my dearest Aunt Olya, politics is one of the reasons which make the two of us unable to talk to each other from soul to soul. And the reason for this is that for me politics is something deeply personal, lyrical, exciting. I am fighting for the Soviet regime (and therefore love it, and mistakes are painful for me).’ The ‘mistakes’ he referred to were presumably the millions of false accusations of the Great Terror. But Lev was unrepentant. ‘For me, my personal life, my creative work, absolutely everything is intertwined with the issues of the party life. You don’t want to believe in this, you think that I want to “be this way”, rather than I already am this way.’

He went on to reject ‘absolute’ human values, dismissing them as ‘intelligentsia ethics’. Lev had imbibed the essential ruthlessness of Leninism. ‘More than anything else, I can’t stand people who use “intelligentsia principles” and “humanity” to justify a general, deeply anti-Soviet behaviour.

‘I need to learn what sort of a person one has to be to become, in this decisive moment of the fight, part of the millions giving all of themselves (not from the brain, but from the heart) to the future of humankind.’

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), pp. 144-147

Lev’s first cousin Vova Knipper had a friend who was a barber in the proezd Serova near the Lubyanka [during the Soviet Great Terror of the 1930s]. Most of his clients were NKVD officers. When the barber’s shop opened at eight in the morning, NKVD interrogators, in a nervous state with heavy stubble, turned up in either military uniform or civilian clothes. They wanted a shave and a face massage to freshen up after a hard night’s work beating confessions out of their prisoners. They asked for bloodstains to be daubed from their tunics and trousers with eau-de-Cologne. Some were so exhausted that they would fall asleep in the chair, and the barber found it hard to wake them up afterwards. But those who stayed awake talked compulsively about their work. The hairdresser warned Vova about the need to keep his mouth shut at all times. ‘We’re in a trap,’ he warned.

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), p. 148

Theatres … were much more tightly controlled [after the Russian Revolution]. The Moscow Art Theatre soon had to search for a repertoire more attuned to the new era, just as Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko had to forget their enthusiasm for Kerensky, who had fled into exile following the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd. In fact the tall and distinguished Stanislavsky now strode down Moscow streets with his fur coat thrown wide open to show a large red bow, demonstrating his revolutionary loyalty. The actors and stage crew of the Moscow Art Theatre became state employees on pitiful salaries and answerable to People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky.

Bolshevik agitprop groups brought factory workers into the much larger Solodovnikovsky Theatre, just across the road, where Stanislavsky and his colleagues performed as part of a programme, designated ‘Proletkult’, to bring culture to the factory floor. This organization, promoted so strongly by Lunacharsky, was designed through groups of actors, musicians and singers to create a cultural revolution for the working class, just as the encyclopédistes had produced one for the bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France. Lenin, however, was privately scathing about such efforts, partly because his own tastes owed more to the ancien régime, but also because he knew perfectly well that this was not real proletarian culture. At best, it was simply an attempt to force-feed the masses on high-minded political correctness. At worst, it was an excuse for cultural nihilists, such as Futurists like Mayakovsky, to call for the destruction of all traditional art works as a shock tactic of cultural liberation.

Some of these workers gaped in bewilderment at the Moscow Art Theatre production or simply ignored the proceedings and just ate, drank, smoked and chatted together. Others, however, shuffled their feet in irritation at what seemed to them a sympathetic portrayal of bourgeois life. Many yelled their opinions. On some occasions, the noise and behaviour struck Stanislavsky as so unseemly that he went front of stage to remonstrate with the audience. The Moscow Art Theatre, which had appeared so revolutionary when it began in 1898, now looked dated, if not reactionary. It was a depressing twentieth anniversary for those who, in Stanislavsky’s phrase, ‘always served beauty and nobility’. But he also acknowledged rather abjectly that ‘we have become the representatives of experience; we have been placed as conservatives with whom it is the holy duty of the innovator to struggle. One must have enemies to attack.’

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), pp. 52-54