Free The Mystery of Olga Chekhova by Antony Beevor Page A

scarves, the men’s with fur or cloth shapkas pulled down. The cast, who had to take off their overcoats and hats just before they went on stage, became severely chilled and most fell ill. Many of the costumes had been stolen, and the shortage of wigs meant that Olga Knipper-Chekhova - Aunt Olya - had to dye her hair, which was now quite grey.
    The intellectual debates of the early years in the Moscow Art Theatre were now a distant memory. Exhaustion from malnourishment made it hard to concentrate and to act. It often seemed as if the only subject of conversation was food, and where you might find the basic necessities. Horsemeat and dogmeat became vital commodities. Aunt Olya was beside herself with happiness when she obtained an egg, the first she had seen in three months. The revolution in the countryside, with the burning of manor houses which had begun a couple of months after the abdication of the Tsar, had drastically reduced food production. It was to be made far worse when Lenin launched a civil war against the peasantry to force them to hand over their grain to the starving cities. The Bolshevik leaders had a profound contempt for the rural population: what Trotsky famously labelled as the Russia of ‘icons and cockroaches’. But the peasants hid their grain and the Red ‘food brigades’ resorted to terror and torture in an attempt to force them to hand it over. Soon the new Soviet government was having to put down far more peasant rebellions than any Tsar had faced in modern memory. Even the supposed backbone of the movement, the industrial proletariat, was coming out on strike against Leninist authoritarianism and their declining living standards.
    Aunt Olya was one of the few members of the Moscow Art Theatre who did not fall ill, but she was utterly dejected by ‘the devastation and neglect, the filth and chaos, in which we are living’. Decidedly unpolitical, she could not see the point of the appalling sacrifices to be made in the name of the new order. ‘It’s not revolution that one wants,’ she had written at the time of the 1905 uprising, ‘but freedom, room to move, beauty, romanticism’, and she deeply regretted the victims ‘who belonged neither to one party nor the other’.
    There was no middle-ground. You either supported the Bolsheviks or you were an ‘enemy of the people’. The population now inhabited a world dominated by commissars in black leather jackets and caps, establishing a discipline of terror at the point of their Mauser pistols. They even became known as ‘the leather coats’.
    The fate of a human being became utterly arbitrary. In the People’s Courts, if the accused had uncalloused hands, he risked an immediate death sentence, whatever the crime. It was also dangerous to have lent anyone money. A debtor could denounce a creditor as ‘a blood-sucking bourgeois’. But nothing was as sinister as the new Cheka - the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage - which could define whatever it liked as a capital crime and carry out executions on the spot. It was the forerunner of the Stalinist NKVD, which was to play a considerable part in the lives of the Knipper family.
    Class war meant encouraging the total subjugation of the burzhooi, a term which encompassed the nobility as well as the bourgeois. They were put to work cleaning streets and clearing snow to humiliate them, just as the Nazis did to the Jews less than two decades later. The pleasure for the overseers was to force their former social superiors to accomplish the most menial tasks, then watch those unused to manual labour as they were reduced to a clumsy exhaustion.
    As unproductive workers, burzhooi were allowed only the most minimal rations. Purely to survive, remnants of the nobility and middle classes were reduced to standing in flea markets, where they tried to barter any possession from icons and bibelots to redundant Tsarist uniforms and diamond rings, in