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

by Deborah McDonald

  Also staying was Denis Garstin, with whom Moura now worked in the propaganda office as a translator. (Her friend Miriam had also taken a job alongside her as a clerk.) Moura adored her ‘Garstino’ with a sisterly affection, and the feeling was reciprocated. Garstino’s position was becoming uncertain. The Bolsheviks were so profoundly suspicious of any hint of British subterfuge, propaganda was no longer practicable.

  Garstin’s chief, and Moura’s employer, was an enigmatic, slippery fellow called Hugh Leech, a British businessman with a background in the oil industry. Leech was officially a commercial agent for British businesses in Russia. He ran the trading firm of Leech & Firebrace for that purpose, and the Embassy’s propaganda office was officially just a sideline.23 In fact, although few knew it at the time, Hugh Ansdell Farran Leech was deeply involved in covert activities. He was an agent of the Secret Intelligence Service – the SIS24 – and throughout 1917 his firm had received tens of thousands of pounds in British government funding for his anti-Bolshevik propaganda activities. Since the Revolution he had been involved in further schemes to fund the anti-Bolshevik Don Cossacks and buy up controlling interests in Russian-based banks and businesses to prevent the Germans gaining influence.25

  Moura also provided translation services to Commander Ernest Boyce, the head of the SIS Petrograd office.26 Whether or not she knew that two of the men she worked for were agents of British intelligence (she probably did; she was too smart not to notice what they did, and she’d already had contacts with SIS agent George Hill), Moura delighted in the atmosphere of intrigue that had begun to surround the old Embassy. Life – which had seemed so dismal and hopeless at the beginning of the year – was becoming exciting and fulfilling in every way.

  She might have guessed that it couldn’t last. On 2 March the German aeroplanes which had been making intermittent flights over Petrograd began dropping bombs. The next day, the Bolsheviks capitulated to the inevitable, and signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, accepting the German terms in full. On 8 March they announced the treaty’s ratification to the public. Lenin was reviled as a Judas by the far left of the Party, but he weathered the storm and kept his position. Germany had conquered most of the western subject states of the old Russian Empire. With the signature of the treaty by the beaten Bolsheviks, Russia lost a third of its people and lands. Among them was Estonia, which became nominally independent under German protection.

  So Djon von Benckendorff had got what he desired – peace, order and a semblance of freedom for Estonia with German monarchist patronage. The border between Estonia and Russia slammed shut. Moura was cut off from Yendel, and her children from their father.

  Less than two weeks later, Moura underwent another parting. As a precaution against the risk of German invasion, the Bolsheviks had decided to move the capital to Moscow. Besides its strategic vulnerability, they found Petrograd too European, both in character and in proximity. The Asiatic style of Moscow suited the Bolsheviks better. That meant that Lockhart’s little mission would have to abandon the apartment on Palace Quay and follow the seat of Bolshevism to the new capital, more than four hundred miles away.

  All the time, the political situation – and Lockhart’s task – grew ever more tense. Lloyd George continued to believe that communication with the Bolsheviks should be maintained. But the War Cabinet feared that Germany would take over Russia in toto and thereby gain a strategic position in the Pacific. That was unthinkable, so the Cabinet voted to notify Japan that if it wished to intervene against Russia in Siberia, such a move would be approved. The United States gave a similar approval.27 Lockhart tried to persuade his government to offer the Bolsheviks support to fight a partisan war against Germany. Instead, it began laying plans to launch its own invasion of the northern Russian coast at Murmansk and Archangel – ostensibly as a move against German influence east of the Baltic. The Germans were still fighting, still snatching territory that had been ceded to them but which they hadn’t yet occupied. There seemed every possibility that they might continue to advance beyond the agreed borders.

  The British government also began to consider the possibility of using covert measures to bring down the Bolshevik regime. The stakes were rising, and the principal players – Moura and Lockhart included – were about to be drawn deeper than ever into the game.

  For the time being, they acted as if all was well. The British mission’s last week in Petrograd coincided with the festival of Maslenitsa – the traditional Russian Orthodox ‘butter week’ of indulgence before the onset of Great Lent. On Monday, Moura threw a small luncheon party in her apartment. The guests were her four remaining British friends.28

  There was Francis Cromie, handsome and debonair as ever, the only one who would be staying on in Petrograd, to continue managing the British presence there. Cromie was finding it a financial strain living in Bolshevik Russia – a leg of mutton cost £2, and he complained to people back home that the ‘conditions have to be lived under to be believed’.29 But life was still easy if one were willing and able to spend a fortune, as Moura was.

  Young Denis Garstin was another guest, as full of life and gaiety as always – the ‘prince of good fellows’ as one of his commanding officers had called him.30 He had been hand-picked by Lockhart for his team. Even Garstino’s indomitable nature was starting to wear thin under the strain, but he and his eternal stock of optimism were far from exhausted yet. He had recently met the scandalous Alexandra Kollontai, the promoter of ‘Bolshevik marriage’. Contrary to the lady’s reputation, Garstino had thought her a ‘little quiet woman in an untidy dark flat, full of Bolsheviks’. He had interviewed her in a tiny bedroom: ‘I told her why I disagreed with Bolshevism, and asked her, as one propagandist to another, to explain many things.’ He was impressed by her answers, and found her charming. ‘She isn’t pretty and she isn’t young,’ he declared, ‘but she bowled me over.’31 The meeting had scandalised the bourgeoisie of Petrograd; a British cavalry captain in a tête-à-tête with a commissar – especially one with such a sensational reputation – whatever next?

  Completing the trio of captains at the party was Hicks, who was quickly becoming the third man of the British mission, after Lockhart and Cromie. Lockhart, the sole civilian among the men, composed doggerel verses for everyone, Cromie made a lighthearted speech, and Moura served endless rounds of the traditional Maslenitsa blini* with caviar, washed down with shots of vodka and accompanied by gales of laughter and good fellowship.32

  It was the last hurrah of the British players in Russia; from now on, the stakes would rise so fast they would have to fight to keep up. Before the summer had reached its end, two of the people present at that party would be dead, and the other three would be in a Cheka prison, wondering if at any moment they might find themselves in front of a firing squad.

  The transfer of power to Moscow had begun. Lenin was the first to make the move. The following Saturday, 16 March, Trotsky followed. He went on a special train, escorted by seven hundred Latvian soldiers – ‘the Praetorian Guard of the new Red Napoleon’.33 Also accompanying him were his staff and, in places of honour, Robert Bruce Lockhart and Captain William Hicks. They dined with him en route, and he continued to assure Lockhart that he intended to fight the Germans. He had just been appointed Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs – or Minister of War, as everyone called it – and said he wouldn’t accept the post unless Russia was going to fight. Lockhart, for the time being, still chose to believe him.

  Left behind in Petrograd, Moura was lonely. She had her children, but that couldn’t last for long. It was too dangerous for them in the city, and Moura reluctantly took the decision to allow Kira, Pavel and Tania to go to Yendel and be cared for by Djon.

  With the border closed and Estonia under German control, it was a risky venture. The children were smuggled out of Petrograd in one of the fast horse-drawn troikas† which were still the backbone of Russia’s postal service. Micky went with them. She would face the greatest danger, a British subject g
oing into a German-controlled nation. She was provided with a false passport and enjoined not to utter a word of English until they were settled in at Yendel.34 Micky’s command of Russian had never been very good, so it was a journey beset by risks. In addition to Micky, the children were accompanied by their grandmother’s two fox terriers. Food was so short in the capital, Madame Zakrevskaya could no longer feed them.

  Equipped with a day’s provisions and accompanied by a Swiss escort who had made a living out of smuggling people over Russia’s borders, the little party of fugitives boarded the postal troika and departed. Micky, daring as she was, feared for the children. Her own tongue she could control, but the children had been brought up speaking English, and at their ages – Tania three, Pavel five, and Kira seven – who could tell what they might blurt out, no matter how strictly they were warned not to?

  After a long, weary journey – there was still snow on the ground, which slowed the wheeled troika – they reached the Estonian border. The children kept silent, and they crossed without being challenged by the guards. They eventually made it to Yendel, where they were greeted by Djon.

  Under German protection, order had been restored to Estonia, and the Benckendorffs – Djon, the children and all their relations – settled down to a life of peace and safety. But the children were now stranded. The border between them and their mother was a frontier between hostile nations, and they could never go back.

  Moura had explained her reason for staying in Russia – her mother was here, and couldn’t travel. But she had a much more pressing reason. Free now from her most important responsibility, she was looking forward to the moment when she could travel the four hundred miles to Moscow to be with Lockhart.

  Notes

  * Russian pancakes.

  † A vehicle (sleigh or carriage) drawn by three horses.

  6

  Passion and Intrigue

  April–May 1918

  Friday 12 April 1918, Moscow

  A young woman lay face-down on the carpet, surrounded by the smashed fragments of expensive china and broken champagne bottles. The gorgeous Aubusson carpet was soaked with wine and pools of blood, and the drawing room’s silken walls were pocked by bullet-holes. Yakov Peters, deputy head of the Cheka, pushed the toe of his boot under the woman’s midriff and turned her over. She had been caught through the neck by a bullet, and her dishevelled hair was matted with a mass of congealed purple blood.

  ‘Prostitutka,’ Peters muttered, and shrugged dismissively. She wasn’t one of the intended victims of the battle that had seared through this house and dozens of others in the district – just a casual associate of the Anarchists who had made their dens in the abandoned homes of Moscow’s wealthy elite. But still not worth anyone’s concern.

  Lockhart looked down at the woman’s rigid, mottled face. No more than twenty years old, he estimated. He glanced around at the bullet-holes in the walls and ceiling, and the wreckage of what appeared to have been some kind of orgy. There were other bodies lying about the house, some cut down defenceless, others heavily armed.1 The Cheka had begun wresting control of the new capital from the counter-revolutionary rabble, and this was their first large-scale operation.

  It had been a strange and unsettling day for Lockhart, a shocking but also thrilling interlude in a monotonous first month in Moscow.

  In the weeks that had elapsed since the move from Petrograd, life had become an almost ceaseless train of meetings and interviews. Often he had to force himself to concentrate. As day followed day and grew into weeks, his thoughts of Moura grew ever more distracting. When would she come to him, as she had promised, as they had planned? How long would he be able to bear the waiting? It had been four weeks. The journey was long, permits were required, she had her work and he his . . . but even so, the suspense was hard to bear. It hampered his work. He had written, sent telegrams, telling her so. Her hasty, tantalising replies were pored over and carefully preserved, as every note from her would be until the day he died. One visit had already been promised and cancelled. Then Denis Garstin returned from a trip to Petrograd with a letter and the news that Moura was unwell.

  ‘Dear Lockhart,’ she wrote, maintaining the formality they had cultivated: ‘Again it’s only a letter and not my own person. Garstino will explain how and why. But I hope you will soon see the red sweater again and do a little more and better work . . . Best love, Moura Benckendorff.’2 The mere thought was enough to set him itching for her.

  In the meantime there were meetings, and still more meetings. Most of them – with Lenin, Trotsky or the other commissars – he had to go to himself, but sometimes the mountain, in the form of fellow diplomats and agents, would come to Mahomet. Lockhart had set up his headquarters in a suite at the Elite Hotel, a refined but rather squat block which took up the whole of a side road off Petrovka Street. The Elite was one of the very few quality hotels still functioning in the city.3 It seemed that everyone in Moscow needed to quiz, cultivate or sound out the British agent, or be sounded out by him – Russians, British, French, Americans, representatives from every part of the old Russian Empire had to speak to him, for either their benefit or his. Favours were asked or offered, information exchanged and opinions shared.

  That was the daylight hours taken care of; after dark he wrote his reports and messages, labouring over the ciphers himself because his mission had no staff. Just a secretary (who wasn’t entrusted with ciphers), Lockhart himself, Hicks and occasionally Garstin. There was a loose collection of other Britons in Russia – businessmen, journalists, military men, who weren’t attached to Lockhart’s mission but had special concerns of their own, often on orders from the British government – yet more of Lloyd George’s multifarious roulette chips. Lockhart had little or no knowledge of their business, yet the Russians regarded them as his responsibility.4 There were only a few he had direct dealings with. Cromie and some of the intelligence fellows in Petrograd were regularly in touch, and sometimes visited. Then there was the military mission in Petrograd and Murmansk, whose job was to prevent the huge stores of British supplies left over from Russia’s days as an ally falling into German hands. (There was constant back-room talk about the mission forming the nucleus of an invasion force – an idea which Lockhart strenuously resisted.) He also had a lot to do with the Manchester Guardian journalist (and later children’s author) Arthur Ransome, ‘a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache’ who was very friendly with the Bolsheviks and a good source of intelligence. Lockhart liked him a lot.

  Lockhart was occasionally invited to attend meetings of the Central Committee, held in the restaurant of the Metropol Hotel. The whole building had been requisitioned as a parliament and dormitory for Bolshevik delegates, renamed the Second House of Soviets.5

  At one of these meetings in early April he had been introduced for the first time to the man who was regarded as the embodiment of Bolshevik terror. A slender, impeccable villain from a well-to-do Belarusian family, with a goatee streaked with grey and a nose like a scimitar, Felix Dzerzhinsky was the founding head of the Cheka. A lifelong radical with years of imprisonment and exile behind him, he’d served in the military arm of the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution. He was highly regarded by Lenin, and already had a reputation for utter ruthlessness in annihilating anything that smelled of counter-revolution. The meeting made a profound impression on Lockhart. Although Dzerzhinsky had twinkling eyes and his thin, delicate mouth tended to twist into a slanted smirk, Lockhart sensed no trace of humour in him.

  Accompanying the Cheka boss was a rather short, thickset man of about forty, with a long nose resting on an abundant black moustache; below his dense thatch of combed-back hair, a pair of narrow, intense but faintly humorous eyes stared out. Lockhart was introduced to him and shook his hand, but neither man spoke. The fellow was called Josef Dzhugashvili, a name that meant nothing to the British agent. He gathered that the man was ambitious, but not taken very seriously. ‘If he had been announced then to the assembled Party a
s the successor of Lenin,’ he would recall, ‘the delegates would have roared with laughter.’6 But already Dzhugashvili was cultivating a chilling, steely persona and going by his revolutionary pseudonym, Stalin.7

  Dzerzhinsky, having built a ring of security around Lenin, was looking outward at the threats massing against the Bolshevik state. After months of disorder, the regime was beginning to impose discipline on the city of Moscow. Counter-revolutionary plotters were to be eradicated, and the Anarchists were high on the list. They had been valued comrades of the Bolsheviks during last year’s revolutions, but the Anarchist Communists had broken away when the Bolsheviks abandoned their ideal of obliterating the state and began setting up their own tyranny. The Anarchists, driven underground, had evolved into a strange and frightening hybrid of subversive political movement and criminal plague, their ranks made up of an unholy mix of ex-soldiers, radical students and criminals. Their leaders had tried to disavow the criminal element, but the Bolsheviks had made up their minds that the Anarchists might once have been allies but had now become counter-revolutionary bandits, and had to go. The Cheka embarked on a campaign to clean them out.

  The first big strike against them began on 12 April. It had its origins in an incident a few days earlier, when a motor car belonging to Raymond Robins, Lockhart’s American counterpart, was stolen, allegedly by Anarchists.8 In the early hours of the morning, over a thousand Cheka troops mounted raids on some twenty-six locations known to be Anarchist strongholds, many of them in the opulent houses of Povarskaya Street in the western district where Moscow’s wealthy merchants had formerly lived. The Anarchists were well armed, and the gun battles went on for hours, from house to house and room to room. Dozens of Anarchists were killed,9 and another twenty-five summarily executed by the Chekists.10 More than five hundred were captured alive and herded away.