A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy

by Deborah McDonald

  In this book, the names used are those that were current during the time in which the story is set. Similarly, Ukraine is referred to as the Ukraine. One exception is the people of Latvia, who were referred to by anglophones as Letts or Lettish; this has been avoided for the sake of clarity.

  Prologue

  London, 1970

  Baroness Moura Budberg, moving as quietly and as gracefully as her age and arthritis allowed, entered the Russian Orthodox church in Kensington. Passing between the red marble pillars, her footsteps masked by the chanting of the choir, she paused before the icon of Christ, and lit a candle, that she might be forgiven her sins.

  Of these she had many – more than a single lifetime’s worth, sins of all shades from the blackest transgressions to the most scarlet.

  She was in her late seventies, yet Moura’s Slavonic cheekbones and feline eyes still hinted at the allure that had captivated men in her younger days. Aristocrats and diplomats, secret agents and intellectuals, prime ministers and princes, all had fallen under her manipulative spell. And yet, for all her sins, the only one for which she had really suffered was no sin at all – that of falling in love. The one man she had truly loved with all her heart had slipped out of her grasp. Now, long decades after the passion of their youth – a wild and dangerous affair sparked amidst the flames of the Revolution – she had come here today, to this church of exiles, to mourn his death.

  Moura had ruthlessly lied her way through life: survival was what mattered, at any cost. She had used her sex and her powerful mind to manipulate men, had spied and betrayed, and suffered in her turn. She could safely say she had led a colourful life, despite not having shared it with the man she loved.

  The choir chanted its haunting Russian melody, and incense filled the air. The gleaming gold leaf of the icons and the elaborate murals, the white vaulting and gilded dome above the altar were all in stark contrast to Moura herself: her dress, like her mood, was black and all-enveloping. She had felt the need to fortify herself with a few gins and a cigar before coming here. Other than the priest and choir she was the only person present: this was her own private memorial service. She was here to thank Christ for the life of Robert Bruce Lockhart, agent, writer and adventurer, her lost lover. At last, now he was dead, Moura had him to herself.

  How different life might have been if he hadn’t betrayed and forsaken her – her dear Locky, her Baby-Boy. They could have been together all their lives, and there would not now be such a bitter twist of despair in her mourning for him. She recalled the night they were seized by the Cheka; the thunderous hammering on the door, the terrifying ride to the Lubyanka. He, the conspirator, the plotting assassin, expected execution. The gunshots of the firing squads echoed through the building as the Red Terror began to spread through the streets of Moscow. Alone in his room, hour by hour he expected them to come for him. Moura alone knew the full truth about why he was spared – the degrading sacrifice she had made in return for his life.

  And she recalled the time before Lockhart – so gay and easy it seemed now, a mere prelude before the Revolution, when every summer was a lazy idyll and every winter a snowy wonderland . . .

  PART 1

  Flouting All Conventions: 1916–1918

  A Russian of the Russians, she had a lofty disregard for all the pettiness of life and a courage which was proof against all cowardice . . . Into my life something had entered which was stronger than any other tie, stronger than life itself. From then onwards she was never to leave . . . until we were parted by the armed force of the Bolsheviks.

  Robert Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, 1932

  1

  The Eve of Revolution

  December 1916

  The week before Christmas, Yendel, Estonia

  A sleigh sped along the arrow-straight driveway of the Yendel estate, bells jingling, the horses’ cantering hoofbeats muffled on the packed snow. It flickered through the shadows cast by the naked boughs of the beeches lining the drive, raced by the frozen lake and past acres of glittering parkland, heading towards the house.

  Seated in the sleigh, swathed in furs, were two women, with three small children gathered to them like fragile parcels. The younger woman gazed out at the icy world with a serene complacency in her feline eyes. The other woman – middle-aged and handsome – kept her attention on the children, fearful of their falling out of the speeding, open sledge. The journey from the village railway station had been a short one, and straight, but Margaret Wilson was not a woman to take unnecessary risks with her charges. Their mother, seated beside her, was another matter. Madame Moura loved her children, but was happy to let their nanny take the burden of care. And possessing a courage that was close to recklessness, she didn’t think of danger. Life had yet to teach her the lessons of protection and survival. (Her poor father had never learned those lessons; he had put his high principles before self-preservation, and suffered for it.)

  The house came into view. The sleigh reduced speed, the high hiss of the runners fading. It was a house that could not fail to be noticed, especially in this season. The manor at Yendel was known, with dull country literalness, as the Red House; its ruddy brick bulk, four-square and bracketed by fairy-tale turrets, stood out lividly in the snowy landscape, surrounded by hoar-frosted shrubberies and the white needles of the silver birches that skirted the lake.

  Moura’s thoughts were on the lively events of the past few days and the coming pleasures of Christmas. There would be dinners and fireside singing, lively company and sleigh-rides . . . and more. Moura anticipated a season of delights. Her husband, who was away at the war, might not be present for much of the holiday, but Moura could easily stand that. If only his mother would stay away too, that would be ideal. But it was their house – one of the many seats of the grand Benckendorff family, into which Moura had rather hastily married when she was little more than a girl.

  The sledge drew to a halt amidst a cloud of condensing horse-breath. The doors of the manor swung open, and the servants came forward to take the luggage. Moura unwrapped herself from the fur rugs, lifted the youngest of the children – baby Tania – and stepped down onto the snow.

  There had been snow on the ground on the day Moura was born, nearly twenty-five years earlier and many hundreds of miles away. In March 1892 she came into the world,1 fourth and dearest child of Ignatiy Platonovich Zakrevsky, member of the landed gentry and high-ranking lawyer in the service of the Tsar.

  She was born on the Zakrevsky family estate at Beriozovaya Rudka, in the Poltava region of the Ukraine. It was a beautiful house – a grand edifice built in the style of a classical villa, with columns, arches and portico, but with a Slavonic flavour: little onion cupolas and the exterior stuccoed and painted in the imperial Russian style, salmon pink trimmed with white.2 An exquisite place to be born, but not such a good place for a wild spirit to grow up.

  Ignatiy Zakrevsky and his wife had three children already – a boy called Platon (known as ‘Bobik’) and twin girls, Alexandra (Alla) and Anna (known as ‘Assia’). The newborn was christened Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya.3 The name Maria was from her mother, but the girl soon became known to everyone as ‘Moura’. She was the darling of the family. Her father especially doted on her, ‘the favourite toy of his middle age and he spoilt her unashamedly’.4 When he had visitors, he would stand her on a table to recite poems. She relished attention and applause; indeed she demanded it, and could grow incensed on the rare occasions when she didn’t get it.5 Her charisma and intelligence ensured that she was able to hold the attention of all who met her.

  Beyond the elegant house and park, Beriozovaya Rudka was a rustic, dull place for such a child to grow up. The Zakrevsky estate encompassed thousands of acres of forest and farmland, much of it given over to sugar beet, which was processed in the estate’s own factory. But though his wealth came from the land, Ignatiy Zakrevsky was no farmer. His energies were devoted to justice – criminal justice through his place in the court system,
and social justice through his campaigning and charitable acts. Much of his work was done in St Petersburg, and Moura was happiest during the seasons when the family lived at their apartment there.

  There was a meeting of temperaments between father and daughter – both were liberal in thought, and inclined to be impulsive and imprudent. Ignatiy Zakrevsky was chief prosecutor for the Imperial Senate, the highest judicial body in Russia. But his radical political views – including his campaign to introduce jury trials into the judicial system – went against the conservatism of Tsar Nicholas II, and he eventually lost his post. The final misdeed was his active support for Émile Zola in the Dreyfus affair. In 1899 he was forced to resign from the Senate.

  It was a time when radical and conservative tendencies were coming ever more into conflict. Peasants and workers were suffering abysmal privations. In the year of Moura’s birth, almost half a million people in the Poltava region died from cholera and typhus, weakened by malnutrition. A series of savagely cold winters had caused famine, and what little spare food there was had been earmarked by the state for export. At the same time, the Tsar took his land taxes from the impoverished farms. So desperate did the peasants become that they resorted to eating ‘famine bread’ made of rye husks mixed with goosefoot weeds, moss and tree bark or whatever else came to hand.6 Ignatiy Zakrevsky urged the government not to be complacent, warning that their failure to introduce social and judicial reforms would lead to an uprising sooner or later.

  He was right, but he didn’t live to see it. In early 1905, during a trip to Egypt with his twin daughters Alla and Assia, Ignatiy Zakrevsky suffered a heart attack and died. His widow, with children to support and a family estate to maintain, was left with an inheritance far smaller than it ought to have been, Ignatiy’s final eccentric act having been to leave a portion of his fortune to the Freemasons.

  St Petersburg was too expensive, so Madame Zakrevskaya took Moura, twelve years old and with her exuberant personality starting to reach full bloom, to live permanently at Beriozovaya Rudka. It was the beginning of a bleak period in Moura’s life: she had lost her beloved father, and was now doomed to years of dismal country life. It had a baneful effect on her and helped guide her into making a regrettable decision.

  The hard snow creaked under Moura’s heels as she stepped out of the sleigh. While the male servants collected the luggage, she took a moment to look around her and gaze up at the house.

  Yendel’s Red House was darker and less elegant than Beriozovaya Rudka, resembling a tumescent hunting lodge more than a manor house, but Moura was happy here, in a way she had rarely been in her childhood home. What mattered most to Moura was life and people and fun – not places. At Yendel she was the mistress of the house, and could surround herself with her choice of company. Estonia was also closer to Petrograd (as the capital was now called). Just an overnight train journey and a short jaunt in a sleigh, compared to the long, exhausting haul to the far end of beyond that she recalled from her childhood journeys to the Ukraine.

  Petrograd in 1916 was not a stable place to be, so an extended holiday at Yendel was doubly good. The common people were restive. Their lot had not changed in the past quarter-century – other than for the worse. The effects of poverty and repression were ever-present, and the Patriotic War7 against the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, already into its third year, was draining Russia’s manpower and its wealth. The military hospitals were full, and the bread shops were empty.

  The political frictions went to the very top of the imperial tree. Just a few days ago, on 16 December, Moura had attended the infamous ball given by Prince Felix Yusupov at the Moika Palace,8 where hundreds of Petrograd’s finest dined and danced in the ballroom while Rasputin was being put to death in the cellars below. Regarded by the elite as a baneful influence on the Tsar and Tsarina, he had been lured to the palace at midnight, fed poisoned cake and wine, and then subjected to an ordeal of abattoir violence at the hands of his murderers, who seemed unable to make him die. Eventually it was done. Meanwhile, the ball danced on. The imperial family mourned the loss of their counsellor, and the outraged Tsarina lusted for revenge.

  Insurrection was in the air, but hardly anyone – least of all Moura – believed that it would blow up in revolution. It was just more of the same turmoil that had been part of Russian life for centuries. From time to time it flared up, but always died down again. Moura’s liberal sympathies lay with the people, but not so much that she would worry herself over them. She may have been somewhat like her father, but she was not him.

  With little Tania in her arms, she turned to watch the other two children being shepherded from the sledge by their nanny: four-year-old Pavel had to be extricated from the rugs, but Kira, the eldest, stepped out gracefully. Aged nine, Kira was older than her mother’s marriage, and her parentage was uncertain: not her paternity but her maternity. The little girl was a part of the complicated tangle of life that Moura was already building up around her.

  With her father dead and the family’s wealth reduced, Moura had not been sent away to school like her elder siblings. Her entire life between the ages of twelve and seventeen was bounded by the family estate and the bleak Ukrainian Steppe that surrounded it, a flatland that seemed to go on forever, relieved only by trees and the occasional dome of a church.

  She was educated by tutors and governesses, but her closest companion was her nursemaid, ‘Micky’, who had been with the family since before Moura’s birth. Micky’s real name was Margaret Wilson, and she was a woman of character – young, beautiful, strong-willed and utterly devoted to her charges. She was also a woman with a past that had made her life in her home country untenable.

  Born in Liverpool in 1864, Margaret had married young, to an Irishman who stayed with her long enough to give her a son and then went off to take part in one of the frequent uprisings that broke out in Ireland in the 1880s – the so-called Land War – and was killed there. Margaret, a spirited, unconventional girl, became mistress to a British cavalry officer, Colonel Thomas Gonne, who had served in Ireland and was old enough to be her father. In July 1886 she gave birth to a daughter, Eileen. As if there were some pattern at work, a few months later Colonel Gonne died of typhoid fever, and Margaret was again left alone with a child – this one shamefully illegitimate.9 Her life from that time on must have been intolerable, but eventually help came from a surprising source.

  In 1892 Ignatiy Zakrevsky was visiting England on business. He came into the company of British people who were like himself – wealthy, upper class and politically radical. Among them was Maud Gonne, actress, supporter of Irish nationalism and mistress of the poet W. B. Yeats. She was also the daughter of the late Colonel Thomas Gonne, which made her the half-sister of Margaret’s little daughter Eileen, who was now six years old. Maud had been helping Margaret support Eileen since her birth (in the teeth of opposition from her uncle, the late Colonel’s brother).10

  Ignatiy Zakrevsky took an interest in young Margaret, and an arrangement was agreed. Zakrevsky – a man whose charitable impulses often outweighed his good sense – would take Margaret with him back to Russia, where she would teach English to his twin daughters, Alla and Assia. Meanwhile, Eileen would be taken care of by Maud.11

  When Ignatiy Zakrevsky returned to Russia with Margaret, it was intended that she be employed for twelve months and that her duties would consist simply of teaching English to the twins. But she was soon drawn into the heart of the family, and the original plan was forgotten. Margaret ended up spending the rest of her long life with the family.12 Having had little education, Margaret was no teacher, and aside from English, the Zakrevsky children were taught other subjects by tutors.

  Moura was born within weeks of Margaret’s arrival, and she became nursemaid to the infant, and later her companion, friend and a kind of surrogate mother. All the Zakrevsky children adored her. While the parents knew Margaret formally as ‘Wilson’, the children called her ‘Ducky’, which later evolved into ‘Micky
’. The name stuck, and she was Micky for ever after. Regarding herself as part of the family, she never took a wage; instead, she simply had to mention anything she needed, and it would be provided. Her tastes were simple and her needs few.

  Micky had a great influence on the children – especially Moura. Never learning to speak Russian properly, she made the children (and the rest of the family) speak English. The result, it was said, was that Moura grew up speaking better English than Russian, and spoke her native language with an English accent.

  Confined to Beriozovaya Rudka during her early teens, Moura was frustrated by the isolation and dullness of the place, and gradually began to exhibit the waywardness and sensualism that would mark the whole of her adult life. Had Micky been her real mother rather than just a surrogate, one might have said that the trait was inherited.13

  But Moura had gifts that Micky had not – prodigious gifts that were uniquely hers. And she had strong desires to go with them. Her need to be at the centre of a fascinating social whirl became more intense as she approached womanhood, and her talent for getting and holding people’s attention grew and grew. She could charm, delight and seduce. Her glittering, sly eyes would fix themselves on a person, and she would make whoever she talked to feel, in that moment, as if they were the most important person in the world to her. And as she matured physically, she discovered the power of her sexual attractiveness. She became a dangerous young woman; a danger not least to herself. A contemporary said of her:

  Her face radiating peace and calm, and her large, wide-set eyes sparkling with life . . . her bright quick mind, her profound ability to understand her interlocutor after hearing only half a word, and her reply, which would flash across her face before she spoke . . . gave her an aura of warmth and rarity . . . Her lightly pencilled eyes were always eloquent, saying exactly what people wanted to hear: something serious or funny, sad or smart, soft and cozy. Her body was straight and strong; her figure was elegant