When Hitler ogled Olga

One of the great adventuresses of her time, Olga Chekhova, married into Anton Chekhov's family and then became Hitler's favourite film star, Goebbels's protégée, supposedly Stalin's and Beria's secret agent, possibly mistress of the head of Smersh, the Soviet intelligence organisation, and finally was mythologised by the English tabloids as "The spy who vamped Hitler".

This temptress has long been a lurid footnote in books on Hitler and or Stalin: she is a footnote in mine but a seductive one, longing to be illuminated centrestage. Now, on leave from the frostbite and howitzers of his familiar Eastern Front, Antony Beevor has done just that.

Born in 1897 in Russia to a middle-class family (ethnically German but Russianised), Olga Knipper became an actress and married Misha Chekhova, the writer's nephew, while her brother, Lev, became a composer and supported the Whites in the civil war.

She escaped Russia in 1920 with only a diamond to fund her new life in Germany while Lev returned to Soviet Russia in 1921 as a composer but really as a (perhaps reluctant) Soviet spy.

After adventures in Hollywood and encounters with Greta Garbo, by 1933, when Hitler came to power, Olga was already a successful film star, a sort of sub-Marlene Dietrich who starred in 150 movies, including a version of Maupassant's decadent Bel-Ami and an early version of Moulin Rouge in which she cavorted naked with a python. No wonder Hitler, while still an obscure beerhall orator, had ogled Olga. Now she was regularly described as the Führer's "favourite", and indeed he made sure he met her almost as soon as he could.

"La Chekhova, eine charmante Frau," as Goebbels always called her in his diary, became one of the leading film stars of the Nazi galaxy: Hitler sent her Christmas presents with handwritten notes.

As Europe moved inexorably towards war, Olga outdid herself as a Nazi socialite, seeing much of Goebbels and Goëring. She was photographed sitting next to Hitler chez Ribbentrop.

The Nazi paladins did not know that her brother Lev had recruited her as an agent of influence, a "sleeper" in the Nazi establishment, an "asset" of Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria. But Beevor rigorously reveals her real lack of importance: with no private access to Hitler, she was no use as a spy.

Perhaps she was just a thespian making a career - though she may have protected a Jewish actor. She later claimed she and a friend had told Hitler, in 1933, their "best lovers were Jewish"; and that she had warned Goebbels, in late 1941, that Russia was undefeatable - but Beevor dismisses these stories as unlikely and self-serving. However apolitical, her starring role in Nazi propaganda suggests an opportunistic grifter if not something more contemptible.

As Nazi Germany collapsed, Victor Abakumov, swaggering boss of Smersh, airlifted her out to Moscow for debriefing: he, like everyone else, overrated her importance. She was still bewitching in her fifties; Abakumov was, at 38, an athletically sadistic torturer and a priapic sex-addict. Beevor has unearthed letters where she calls Abakumov "Dearest" and concludes there may have been an affair.