The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

In his latest work, Antony Beevor—bestselling author of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945 and one of our most respected historians of World War II— brings us the true, little-known story of a family torn apart by revolution and war. Olga Chekhova, a stunning Russian beauty, was the niece of playwright Anton Chekhov and a famous Nazi-era film actress who was closely associated with Hitler. After fleeing Bolshevik Moscow for Berlin in 1920, she was recruited by her composer brother Lev to become a Soviet spy—a career she spent her entire postwar life denying. The riveting story of how Olga and her family survived the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the Stalinist Terror, and the Second World War becomes, in Beevor’s hands, a breathtaking tale of survival in a merciless age.

• Title : The Mystery of Olga Chekhova
• ISBN-13: 9781101175057
• Author: Antony Beevor
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
• Publication date: 08/30/2005
• Sold by: Penguin Group

To his credit, and the book's favor, Beevor lays bare the limits of Chekhova's consequence. By his tale's end, shorn of myth, his protagonist is revealed to be an opportunistic actress, a flagrant embellisher and a spy of dubious accomplishment. Beevor, however, adroitly elevates his material, setting an ungainly life against the most spectacular turns of Europe's past century. The result is a gem, a small tale spun large, a familial epic freighted with historical drama. - The Washington Post

On Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, Goebbels gave him a hundred and twenty movies, and the pair indulged their love of cinema by holding lavish parties for their favorite stars. One of these was Olga Che-khova, a Russian émigrée living in Berlin who was the niece of Anton Chekhov, and whose acting the Führer greatly admired. But her biggest fans were the Soviet secret police, who, seeing her closeness to the Nazi élite, recruited her as a sleeper agent. The closest she ever came to active duty was a 1941 plot to assassinate Hitler, but Stalin decided that keeping him around was a better idea. Beevor soft-pedals the more salacious details of his story and presents a documentary account of the large and complicated Chekhov clan. His painstaking work clears away historical gossip and shows how ingeniously Olga played powerful figures off against each other to survive the revolution, the war, and Stalin’s purges.