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The Mystery of Olga Chekhova
  • Published: 5 June 2006
  • ISBN: 9780141925943
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war




The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war.

Olga Chekhova was a stunning Russian beauty and a famous Nazi-era film actress who Hitler counted among his friends; she was also the niece of Anton Chekhov. After fleeing Bolshevik Moscow for Berlin in 1920, she was recruited by her composer brother Lev, to work for Soviet intelligence. In return, her family were allowed to join her. The extraordinary story of how the whole family survived the Russian Revolution, the civil war, the rise of Hitler, the Stalinist Terror, and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union becomes, in Antony Beevor's hands, a breathtaking tale of compromise and survival in a merciless age.

  • Published: 5 June 2006
  • ISBN: 9780141925943
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

About the authors

Antony Beevor

Antony Beevor's books include Crete - The Battle and the Resistance, which won a Runciman Prize; Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 (written with his wife, Artemis Cooper); Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature; Berlin - The Downfall, which received the first Longman ­History Today Trustees' Award; and, most recently, The Battle for Spain. His books have appeared in thirty foreign editions and sold nearly four million copies.

Praise for The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

A fascinating spy story, a delicious entertainment, a compelling investigation

Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Evening Standard

An extraordinary drama of exile and espionage

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Compelling . . . as engaging a read as Stalingrad and Berlin

Guardian

Beevor uses the story to evoke a world - the vague ideological borderlands of Nazism and Communism

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Times

Fascinating. An intricate, gracefully told and often moving social history of a talented family in times of revolution, civil war, dictatorship and world conflict

Rachel Polonsky, New Statesman