Biography: Antony Beevor usually writes history as though hitting an oil well - the results, rich and thick and deep, spew 20th-century catastrophe into the air.
You feel there is nothing he doesn't know about Germany and Russia in the first half of the 20th century; and so, when he closes in with a microscope on an insignificant figure in this enormous landscape he does it with the confidence of someone who knows everyone and everything in the panoramic picture, every inch of the ground as well as every reason for the wounds that show up under scrutiny. Olga Chekhova, the ostensible subject of this compressed social history, was the niece by marriage of that miraculous playwright, Anton Chekhov. She was born Olga Knipper, a name she shared with her aunt, Chekhov's wife, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, but she herself also got the name Chekhova when she secretly married Anton Chekhov's nephew, Misha, a marriage that soon foundered.
Born a beauty at the centre of the theatrical and musical web of Moscow bohemian society, Olga Chekhova became a film star in turbulent Germany in the 1930s and was reputedly a spy. The original Olga Knipper-Chekhova, who had been a more famous actress, bobs up all over the place in one of the early subtexts that underline the main narrative and in fact redeem it: the story of the Moscow Art Theatre (that extraordinary group led by Stanislavsky, its presiding genius, which had started to revolutionise dramatic art in 1898) on its wandering exile through Europe and New York during the Bolshevik upheavals. It's extraordinary that the Moscow Art Theatre survived at all in the new angry climate. The Futurist poet, Mayakovsky, who so gladly welcomed the revolution and was Chekhov and Stanislavsky's most scathing critic, described their theatre as "putrescent" and satirised it with lines about "Auntie Manya, Uncle Vanya, sitting on the sofa whining". Yet Mayakovsky himself became one of the casualties of the brave new world, committing suicide "as the poet's conclusion was that it was impossible to work under Soviet conditions". The Moscow Art Theatre kept right on trucking. The older Olga seems more amusing and three-dimensional than her niece. When she went on tour to the United States she wrote: "It's so noisy here. Everything is catching up and overtaking . . . It's like some wind-up clockwork machine. It's impossible to read anything in people's faces. It's as if everything is always all right . . . "
Beevor has tight command of his tone. There are no displays of sentiment as horrid things unfold their wings, horrors are revealed, and even when, occasionally, art is ratified.
"When we play the farewell to Masha in The Three Sisters I am embarrassed," wrote Stanislavsky in 1921. "After all that we have lived through it is impossible to weep over the fact that an officer is going away and leaving his lady behind."
But later, when the Moscow Art Theatre performed in Paris, many White Russian émigrés were reduced to tears, "seeing the recreation of the country they still longed for and loved, and experiencing once again its poignant, painful ending, with Ranyevskaya leaving for Paris and the lover who she knew was faithless".
The narrative moves effortlessly between Berlin and Moscow, which is more than can be said of the characters; they endure frightful privations in their travels, except for Olga Chekhova, who somehow remains a vapid creature. Yet she was much admired by Hitler, was a friend of Goebbels and was appointed "Actress of the State" by the Nazi regime. Her films include a scandalous Moulin Rouge, Bel Ami and, incidentally, a film, Der Fuchs von Glenarvon, set in Ireland. Here Beevor's tone becomes steely.
"She played Gloria Grandison, an Irish patriot staunchly supporting freedom fighters at a time when the Wehrmacht was shooting them on the spot, along with hostages, in occupied Europe," he writes.
Not unnaturally, the Soviet embassy in Berlin appeared to regard her as the prima donna of the Nazi film industry and she was reviled in Russia. Beevor never quite cracks the mystery of how important Chekhova was as a spy, if indeed she was a spy at all, or simply a woman who knew how to make ends meet, how to match up dangerously different patterns to make a shift of a life. Yet according to Beevor, she was a Russian spy, perhaps by default. Stalin had purged all foreign intelligence officers during the Great Terror and a widely published photograph of her seated next to Hitler at a reception had probably given the Soviets an exaggerated idea of her contacts. Certainly after the fall of Berlin she was given a new house and all her demands were met by what appeared to be overawed Soviet authorities.
Beevor uses an insubstantial biography to make a substantial and gratifying read. Every page has a nugget of knowledge, of inimitable research lightly displayed. Terrible tiny details of savagery (sloping floors so that the blood of torture victims could be easily sluiced away) lie beside apercus into iconographic figures (such as Rachmaninov, Anton Chekhov's old friend, thin and angular, suffering and incredible tiredness in his face). What could have been a book about a nobody with a famous surname becomes a short, sad, shocking history of everybody living in terror.
• Polly Devlin is a writer and broadcaster. Her first book, All of Us There, has just been reissued as a Modern Classic by Virago