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

by Deborah McDonald

  She thought about the ball at the Moika Palace, and the death of Rasputin. Moura was smart enough to know that the bitter retribution of the Tsarina would stir up the masses still further, but was not timid enough to fear the consequences herself. Pah – let the wolves run! She could run faster.

  She didn’t know – nobody at Yendel knew – that the patter of their feet and the rank gust of their breath had already begun sweeping through the city.

  The maid snapped shut the clasps on the last valise, and Moura came out of her dream, turning away from the window. The maid bobbed a curtsey, slid the valise off the dresser and went out of the door. The trunk had already been taken down by a footman. There was a faint jingle of bells outside. Moura glanced out; the sledges were being brought round to the drive, the horses stamping their feet on the packed snow. They were as eager to depart as she was.

  Moura took a last look at herself in the mirror, adjusted her fur hat, and followed her luggage downstairs.

  Convivial chatter and the laughter of children filled Yendel’s hall that evening. After a hurried dinner, the small house party – consisting of Moura’s children and her two closest friends – had gathered in the entrance hall while the sleighs were made ready, taking one last lingering taste of the manor’s warmth and comfort before venturing out into the cold. The two young women lounged in the comfortable chairs by the fire, chatting. There was Meriel Buchanan, daughter of the British Ambassador – she had a long, rather mournful face, but her rosebud mouth broke into a smile at the sight of Moura descending the stairs. The other young lady was Miriam Artsimovich – American-born, despite her name. They were the last and dearest of the holiday guests, lingering on to the very last gasp of the holiday. Both were dressed for the cold.

  ‘My daaahlings,’ Moura pronounced theatrically as she made her entrance. Despite speaking English better than Russian, she enjoyed investing it with a heavy Slavonic cadence.

  While the women rose as if royalty had made an appearance, the children gathered round her. Pavel, son of his father, and Tania, daughter of her mother – and of course Kira, of uncertain parentage. Moura stooped to kiss her little darlings, while Micky stepped in to impose some order. She was one of the few people whom Moura loved and utterly trusted.

  Standing aside, Moura posed to show off her exquisite fur-trimmed travelling outfit to her friends. It was duly admired, and while they waited for the coachman’s summons, the three of them fell into breathless conversation – as excited as the children were about the impending night-journey.

  Their talk was all of society gossip, the journey ahead, and of the war. All three women worked as volunteer nurses at the hospital of St George, where rumours circulated among the soldiers about the special sort of care given to wounded officers by the lady Moura.9 But there were always rumours about her of one kind or another. There were always people credulous enough to believe, and Moura herself took delight in encouraging them.

  Entirely absent from their conversation was any mention of the latest events in Petrograd. The news of the storm that had begun to break the previous day had not yet reached Estonia; the papers had merely reported shops being looted, and that there were strikes in the factories. It sounded much the same as in the weeks prior to the holiday, and they were so accustomed to it that it had not cast a pall on their conviviality.

  When the time came, the travelling party – three ladies, three children, Micky, and Moura’s maid – went out into the freezing dark and squeezed into the open sleigh, wrapping themselves in rugs and furs. While the women fussed and chattered, the house servants waited, freezing obediently in the arched loom of light from the great hall door, waiting to bow their farewells.

  ‘Feet inside the sledge, little Pavel!’ Moura swept the boy onto her lap. ‘The wolves will bite them!’

  ‘There are wolves?’ the little boy asked.

  ‘Always there are wolves,’ said Moura. ‘And on a night like this they long to feast on the feet of careless little children! But – we shall outrun them! Away!’

  The coachman shook the reins, and the sledge leaped forward with a shivering jingle of bells, its runners hissing and the horses’ hoofbeats thumping gently, muffled by the snow.

  It was a short but searingly cold journey to the local village station at Aegviidu, where they had booked a compartment aboard the Petrograd train. The night glowed; the sky was clear and dotted with stars, and a rising moon shone on the still, silent expanses of snow.10 They drove on down the road that ran straight from the house, past the frozen lakes, and twisted through the woods beyond. The quiet of the sleigh’s passage in the icy shades of the woods filled the women with eerie shivers of exhilaration. Here and there, woodsmen’s cottages loomed up, with lights glowing yellow in their windows, filling Meriel’s head with thoughts of fairy-tale witches.

  Aegviidu station was a lopsided timber-faced building with grand pretensions, standing alone on the flat space between the village road and the open rail tracks. Its waiting room was full of soldiers and unwashed, sheepskin-clad peasants. Fortunately, the genteel young women didn’t have to endure the company for long before they heard the chuff and whistle of the incoming train.

  Every carriage was already packed to bursting with passengers who had boarded at Reval. Even the corridors were full. The three ladies were once more spared the impertinent proximity of the grimy peasantry. The Benckendorff name, together with Meriel’s diplomatic connections, had earned them a private carriage, arranged through the head of the district police. This would be the last time their position would afford them such special treatment.11 Locking the door, the women arranged themselves for the night’s journey, settling into accustomed comfort while out in the corridors the proletariat snored propped up on stools or stretched out on the floor.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, the train steamed into the Baltic station in Petrograd, and the travelling party got their first real intimation of trouble.12 The palatial halls of the station felt strangely eerie and perturbed, although it was difficult to say exactly how or why. William, Sir George Buchanan’s chasseur and butler, was there to meet them with the embassy motor car.13 Accompanying him – rather surprisingly – was Brigadier General Knox, the military attaché, splendid but alarming in full uniform, his face grave.14

  Moura asked what the matter was, and he turned his severe eyes and glum moustache towards her. There had been riots in the town, he told her, and strikes.

  ‘Pff – there are always riots,’ said Moura; ‘every day, strikes.’

  ‘Indeed, madam, but they are somewhat worse of late. Vehicles are forbidden to travel without a pass.’

  Moura’s cheeks paled a little, but she was still unconvinced that such an air of gloom could be justified. While William grumpily wrestled the heaps of luggage onto a handcart, the ladies followed the General through the echoing halls of the grand station. The embassy motor car was waiting for them. The women looked at the car, at the children, and at each other. How could they possibly fit everyone in? Meriel suggested that they order a cab for the servants and the luggage. General Knox’s long face lengthened, and he shook his head. There were no cabs; the izvozchiki § were on strike.

  ‘Can’t the servants go in a tram?’ Moura suggested. ‘Then we can take the luggage with us.’

  General Knox suppressed an impatient sigh. He had been up since six, and still had a lot to do that day; the British military staff were on high alert.15 ‘There are no trams,’ he said. He was carefully avoiding telling them the whole truth about what had been going on in the city in the past two days. The last thing he needed was a clutch of hysterical females on his hands. ‘They are on strike,’ he repeated. ‘Everyone is on strike. We shall have to get everything into the motor somehow.’16

  By this time, the other travellers from the train were congregating in the snow outside the station, growing restive and irritable as they wondered how on earth they were going to get home. One man had managed to find a small sledge; h
e piled his luggage on it and set off down the street while the remaining crowd began to pick arguments with the station’s helpless porters.

  Moura and her friends, the three little children, General Knox, Micky, Moura’s maid and all their combined luggage were squeezed into the car, and it set off, followed by a host of envious gazes. On the General’s instructions, William took a roundabout route, avoiding the major thoroughfares of the Nevsky and Morskaya. They wound their way into the Admiralteysky district, seat of the Russian government, where Moura had her apartment and where the grand British Embassy stood on the riverside between the Winter Palace and the Summer Garden.17

  Moura’s complacent calm was gradually eroded as the car drove through the snow-swept city. They passed an abandoned tram with its windows all broken, and a soldier wielding a rifle stopped them to check their permit. He found everything in order and they were allowed to carry on through deserted, desolate streets which had been bustling with people last time Moura was here, with rushing yellow trams and sledges. Everywhere was silent, foreboding, anticipating trouble.18 Shops were boarded up. The few people who were about kept their heads down and hurried along as if fearing attack. Here and there were checkpoints manned by groups of soldiers and armed police, who eyed the car with intense suspicion as it passed, but made no move to stop it. Moura shivered, feeling the brooding malevolence, and unconsciously drew her children closer. There was more to this than just strikes and riots. There was death here.

  General Knox’s cautious route brought them by St Isaac’s Cathedral and out on the fashionable English Quay. As the motor made its solitary way beside the frozen Neva river, the passengers sensed an air of silent dread; it surrounded the Winter Palace and the Petropavlovskaya§§ fortress on the island opposite – the old citadel of St Petersburg, with its imperial flag hanging forlornly in the gloomy air. The bridges over the river were empty. It was as if the city were cowering before a wolf, waiting for it to pounce.

  Moura and the children were dropped off at her apartment. The car continued on to the Embassy, where Meriel was met by her anxious parents. Sir George, regretting that she had come back from Yendel so soon, forbade her to go out of doors again.19

  The three young ladies had got safely home, and not a moment too soon.

  Later that same morning, the swollen storm clouds finally burst: the silent streets were flooded with crowds of rioters and protesters, shouting and chanting, accompanied by the clatter of hoofs and the rattle of gunshots. The Tsar’s soldiers had thrown in their lot with the workers; they came raging out of their barracks, and battle was joined on the streets of Petrograd, soldiers and revolutionaries fighting against the Cossacks and the police.

  It was the culmination of acts of violence that had been going on sporadically for days. The people’s patience had been bitten down to the quick. The peasants and workers had at last reached the point where they would take no more of the disorganisation and injustice that led to empty shops and empty bellies for the poor, and unstinting luxury for the rich. The continual flood of soldiers returning from the terrible conditions in the trenches, only to half-starve on their arrival home in Russia, had added to the unrest.

  While Moura and her guests were frolicking in the snows at Yendel and relaxing in the fire-lit comfort of the manor, in Petrograd there had been blood on the streets. The authorities had put up posters forbidding demonstrations. The people ignored them. And then, on Sunday 26 February, the government put a burning match to the powder train. While the young ladies at Yendel lunched and anticipated their homeward journey, demonstrators who had gathered in the suburbs of Petrograd were converging on the government district. There were military strongpoints at every major junction, patrols of soldiers and armed police everywhere. As the demonstrators marched along the Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare leading into the heart of the city, the first shootings occurred. The incidents were sporadic: nervous, inexperienced troops led by fearful, angry officers shot at and wounded dozens of people. The demonstrators scattered, and some began to hurl brickbats back at the soldiers. In Znamenskaya Square, the violence reached a bloody peak when a regiment opened fire and killed fifty people.20

  With those shots, Russia propelled itself down a road from which there was no return. For Moura, and for every Russian, the world was about to change.

  Buildings were barricaded; the Palace of Justice was set on fire and any place housing the police became a target for the crowd’s rage. They stormed the prisons and set the prisoners free. By Monday morning, when Moura and her friends arrived, holiday-fresh and lighthearted, an uneasy lull had fallen over the city – a shocked pause and intake of breath – before the violence exploded again with ever greater ferocity. In the battles that broke out that day, an infantry regiment fought the Cossacks and the police in defence of the rebellious citizens; only a few days before, the situation had been reversed, Cossacks fighting against the police, while the army killed the people. Nobody knew whose side anybody was on: district by district and regiment by regiment, the sympathies of the officers and men swayed this way and that; nobody had any fixed allegiance – nobody, that is, except the starving workers and the ruling aristocrats. Their sides had been chosen for them by birth and circumstance.

  Among the aristocrats there was at least one exception. While the February Revolution unfolded in the streets outside her apartment, the sounds of gunfire and yelling mobs echoing off the grand façades, Madame Moura von Benckendorff watched with alert eyes and knew one thing: whichever side won the fight for Mother Russia, that would be the side she would attach herself to. Others might suffer and perish, but Moura would survive.

  She had no inkling yet how heavy a toll her choice, when she eventually made it, would exact from her.

  For the upper classes, the foreign expatriates and diplomats, the change was slow to affect them. Despite the unrest and the killing of so many civilians in the Nevsky on Bloody Sunday, that same afternoon the English ladies came as usual to their regular sewing party at the Embassy. Not put off by a bit of shooting, they braved the ugly streets on foot, past soldiers and burning buildings. In the ballroom of the Embassy, trestle tables were set up and loaded with bales of flannel, lint, cotton wool, scissors and sewing machines. The ladies made them up into packages for sending to the ambulance trains going to the front, or to the military hospital.

  Everything else shut down for the duration of the storm. Shops and restaurants ceased trading, newspaper offices were closed, and red flags could be seen everywhere. Supporters of the Revolution pinned red ribbons to their clothes. Soon, everyone was wearing them: to do otherwise was to court trouble. The revolutionaries demanded the overthrow of the government and the Tsar, the institution of a republic, and the end of the so-called Patriotic War. The proletariat rallied to the cause, and gradually formed a concerted revolutionary movement. The workers’ soviets were becoming a potent political force. The violence subsided and the negotiations began; when the Duma reconvened, the soviets were formally invited to elect representatives.

  On 2 March, the keystone in the old structure of government fell: Tsar Nicholas II, who had continued to reside at Tsarskoye Selo throughout the crisis, abdicated. He had seemed little concerned about the fighting in the capital. With two of his daughters worryingly ill with measles, he hardly noticed what was going on in the outside world. He was informed that there had been virtually no organised resistance to the uprising: even his own Imperial Guards had defected. Realising that defeat was inevitable, the Tsar gave up his throne.

  With the abdication a void opened up at the heart of Russia – a void which even the peasants and the soviets believed had to be filled by a traditional kind of leader. Supporters of the Revolution called for a new republic – but a republic that had a ‘strong Tsar’ at the head of it. The title had come adrift from its imperial moorings, and seemed to have turned into a myth of heroic sovereignty: the people envisaged an elected ruler, embodying the will and character of Russia and its pe
ople.21

  Such a man was standing by. The void left by the abdication drew into itself the one man who had the position, the charisma and the will to take on the role of inspirational figurehead. Moura noticed him too.

  Alexander Kerensky came out of the soviets, but he was not a worker. He was a lawyer, a fervent socialist, a spellbinding orator and an ambitious politician. He was also vain, eccentric and a renowned philanderer. He was born in 1881, in the same provincial city as Lenin (their fathers were acquainted). Despite him being a decade younger, Kerensky’s career advanced quicker. While Lenin was still ideologically locked inside the furnace of red-hot, uncompromising Bolshevism (and physically stranded in Switzerland), Alexander Kerensky was the coming man of the new revolutionary age.

  His rise was rapid. As vice-chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Kerensky was invited to join the new Provisional Government – the first of a succession of unstable coalitions that would rule Russia during the optimistic springtime and stormy summer that followed the first revolution. As the coalitions struggled to retain their grip, Kerensky rose from Minister of Justice (in which office he abolished capital punishment and restored civil order) to Minister of War. By the summer he had gained the premiership and taken up residence in the Winter Palace.

  In appearance he cut an unprepossessing figure, with prim, pallid features, his hair austerely cropped and bristled; as Minister of War, he took to wearing the uniform of a common soldier (albeit exquisitely cut). But in him was a fire. A British vice-consul who saw him speak at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow (a popular venue for revolutionary speeches) witnessed his overpowering oratory: even the wealthy were hypnotised by his ‘gospel of suffering’ in a speech that lasted two hours and called for self-sacrifice and support for the troops at the front and for the poor workers: