Reportedly they personally knew Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Ernst Tellmann. Hermann and Emilia escaped to Russia in 1921 after the violent suppression of the Spartacist uprising by the Weimar Republic that was followed by the so-called Kapp-Luttwitz putsch. They arrived in Moscow and were soon sent to the Altai Mountains to build communism in a remote town. Hermann worked as a redwood carpenter and Emilia as an attendant at a mountain resort for the Moscow nomenclatura. One of my family pictures shows her with a group of guests among whom is the wife of Mikhail Kalinin.

Few women were as well connected during the second world war as Olga Chekhova. But was she a Russian spy, sent to Germany to ingratiate herself with the Nazis? It is not a question which Antony Beevor manages to resolve, though the circumstantial evidence is impressive. But if Chekhova was a Russian spy it was certainly not because she was committed to the Soviet cause. Neither a fascist nor a communist, she never, notes Beevor, suffered from political angst in any form. Rather, she was an opportunist, for whom personal survival overrode any ideological or patriotic concerns.