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

by Deborah McDonald

  Into the middle of this tangle of politics intruded the most basic, most pressing of human crises. A month on from their last passionate spell together in Moscow, Moura discovered that she was pregnant with Lockhart’s child.

  As soon as she could, in the last days of June, she travelled to Moscow to tell him the news. The jokes they had concocted about an imaginary little boy Moura would give him, who would be fed on raw meat and be good at football, had suddenly become real.

  Again Moura was surprised by her own feelings. It confirmed for her that Lockhart was the man she wanted to be with, and without whom she could not live. ‘All the day the thought of you never leaves me and I feel lost without you – why Baby, what have you done to me, the little callous icicle!’5 She was thrilled to be able to give him a son; there was no doubt in either of their minds that it would be a boy, and they christened him ‘little Willy’ – or ‘little Peter’ if they were in a more serious mood. The welfare of both Moura and the baby were added to the towering stack of worries that overshadowed Lockhart night and day.

  Together they faced the question of what was to be done about little Peter and about the future. There was a wife in England and a husband in Estonia to consider, not to mention Moura’s other children. What would become of them? It was decided that Moura must go to Yendel – with her freedom to travel and her experience of crossing borders, it should be little trouble. Her purpose there would be to contrive to have Djon sleep with her. Thus, when the baby was born, his legitimacy could not be disproved, and the two lovers could do what they wished without a stain on their little boy’s character.

  It was a desperate plan, and a dreadful prospect. Unusually, Moura shrank from acting on it, and she delayed her departure from Moscow. After a month without his arms, his kisses, his presence, she clung to Lockhart. But eventually she had to detach herself from him. His situation in Russia was becoming more precarious by the week, and when Moura boarded the train for Petrograd on Thursday 4 July, it was with the possibility that he might not still be here when she returned.

  Moura arrived in Petrograd to find a letter waiting for her. It was from Djon. She had contacted him to suggest a visit, but would he still wish to see her now? The last time they had been together, at the beginning of the year, it had been in a state of frigid dislike. Did he know about Lockhart? Tearing the letter open and racing through it, she was relieved to find that he wanted her to come to Yendel.6

  The relief was tinged with guilt. Moura fretted about the impending plot. ‘I love my kids very dearly,’ she wrote to Lockhart from Petrograd, ‘and placing them in a false situation apart from losing them . . . will be very very painful to me.’ But her resolve held – ‘not for a moment does it interfere with my decision, not for a moment does it make me think: “is it not better to give him up – return to the old life again” – I might as well think of giving up light – air’.7

  Whatever her feelings, she could do nothing immediately. There were no trains between Petrograd and Estonia, so she intended to travel by the same mail troika that had taken the children in March, with the same escort. But her delay in leaving Moscow had made her miss the departure. She would have to linger in Petrograd and wait for the man’s return.8

  It had become a miserable place – ‘dying a natural death’ from poverty and starvation.9 There had been outbreaks of cholera, with more than three hundred new cases each day.10 Everything was short, and Moura and her mother had become dependent on flour sent by Lockhart or Denis Garstin from Moscow, where food was plentiful if you had the money to pay the rocketing prices.

  While she slipped back into her usual life – working, seeing Cromie and the other embassy people, gathering gossip, writing letter after letter to Lockhart – the situation took a sudden dramatic turn. In Moscow on Saturday 6 July, two days after Moura’s return to Petrograd, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, German Ambassador to Moscow, Lockhart’s nemesis, was assassinated – shot and bombed to death in his own embassy.

  The reports were confused, but the Red papers in Petrograd claimed that the killing had been instigated by British and French imperialist agents. A horrified Moura wondered what repercussions might ensue for Lockhart.11

  The assassination had been a long time in the planning. And whatever the Red papers might be saying in Petrograd, the plot had originated, hatched and been executed from within the upper ranks of the Cheka.

  It came to a head during the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the great policy-making gathering of the governing parties of the Russian Soviet Republic.12 The Congress was held in the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, and began on Thursday 4 July, the same day Moura departed for Petrograd.

  In the spirit of revolutionary openness and egalitarianism that still lingered in summer 1918, all parties, all opinions, all dissenting voices, were allowed to be heard. and the representatives of foreign missions were encouraged to attend as observers. Lockhart, accompanied by Captain George Hill and some members of his mission staff, found himself allocated a box on the left side of the stage, along with the French and American missions. Directly opposite were the boxes of the Central Powers – the Austrians, the Hungarians, and the Germans, presided over by a serene and self-satisfied Count Mirbach.13

  The entire Congress – delegates, audience and chairmen – crackled with tension and hostility from the very beginning. There were over one thousand two hundred delegates in attendance, from all over the Soviet Republic. They represented the only two parties still surviving from the informal coalition that had fought the October Revolution – the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Lenin’s Bolsheviks were unquestionably the party of power. Having dominated, purged and destroyed most of the others – including the Anarchists and Mensheviks – they now outnumbered the Left Socialist Revolutionaries two to one, and were set on establishing a total monopoly on power. The Fifth Congress of Soviets quickly turned into the prelude to the final, fatal showdown between the two parties.

  Their mutual loathing came into the open on the second day, when the leadership of the Left SRs began laying their grievances at the feet of the Bolsheviks – from the reintroduction of the death penalty to the continuing poverty of the rural peasantry. The foremost speaker was a slight, pale young woman called Maria Spiridonova. Utterly dedicated to the socialist cause, in her youth she had gained fame by shooting dead a brutal landowner and local government enforcer. Her courage was indomitable, and from the stage of the Bolshoi she berated Lenin from pillar to post. ‘I accuse you of betraying the peasants, of making use of them for your own ends’. In Lenin’s philosophy, she said, the workers were ‘only manure’. Her voice was monotonous and grating, but her spirit was potent, and she promised that if the Bolsheviks continued to humiliate and crush the peasants, she would deal out the same retribution she had delivered to the Tsarist enforcer twelve years earlier.14

  While the theatre erupted in wild cheering, Lenin sat quiet, with an air of such self-confidence that Lockhart found it almost irritating. Lenin believed in his own power, his own security. He had the Cheka, and also the Latvian rifle regiment who were his loyal ‘Praetorian Guard’ – the entire theatre was surrounded and infested by them. He was safe from fanatics’ pistols, he believed, and his new regime was secure against political radicals.

  Spiridonova was not finished; she also lashed the German party in their box, shaking her fist at them and insisting that Russia would never become a colony or vassal of Germany. Sitting next to Lockhart, George Hill had to restrain himself from cheering.15 Lockhart, knowing that the Left SRs were no more friendly to British intervention than the Bolsheviks, felt less encouraged.

  The anti-German theme was taken up by Boris Kamkov, another Left SR and superb orator. He too addressed the German box, and thundered at them: ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat has developed into a dictatorship of Mirbach.’ He denounced Lenin’s shameful kow-towing to the German imperialists, ‘who have the audacity to show their faces even in this theatre’. Wh
ile Lockhart marvelled at Kamkov’s passion and suicidal foolhardiness, the Left SRs in the audience cheered and yelled ‘Down with Mirbach!’16

  Again and again the German occupation of the Ukraine and the Skoropadskyi Hetmanate government were cited as evidence of Germany’s nature and its intentions for Russia.

  Mirbach seemed unfazed by the denunciations. Like Lenin, he regarded the threats of the Left SRs as nothing but oratory. Both were making a grave error. Neither realised that, away from the theatre, Spiridonova and her comrades had been getting ready to put their principles into action. They had already taken over the requisite sections of the Cheka and were ready to strike.

  At about three o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday 6 July, the third day of the Congress, two Cheka officers arrived at the German Embassy in Denezhnyy pereulok,* a well-to-do street in the west of the city. The senior of the two was Yakiv Blyumkin,† head of the counter-espionage section of the anti-counter-revolutionary department. Blyumkin, a Ukrainian Jew from Odessa, was young – just turned twenty – but had an impressive record of service in the armed forces of the Revolution, and had been given one of the most powerful positions in the Cheka. His official role was to keep watch on the activities of foreign agents and diplomatic missions, principally the Germans. Like several other key officers of the Cheka he was also a member of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and a close comrade of Maria Spiridonova. She had helped plan the operation that Blyumkin was here to carry out.17

  Blyumkin and his partner brought with them a document authorising them to consult with the German Ambassador, signed and sealed with the full authority of the Cheka and its head, Felix Dzerzhinsky (the very same blade-faced villain to whom Lockhart had taken such a dislike). Count Mirbach’s aide, impressed by the warrant, ushered the two men straight into the Ambassador’s presence, in the drawing room of his residence.

  In fact, Dzershinsky’s signature was forged, the seal used illegally, and the warrant had been written out by Blyumkin himself, using an official form.

  The two Chekists exchanged a few words with Mirbach, then Blyumkin drew a revolver and, without hesitation, fired several shots at the Count. Wounded, Mirbach tried to escape, and German guards returned fire as Blyumkin and his comrade clambered out of the window. Blyumkin fractured his leg in the escape and was hit by a German bullet, but still made sure of his victim by lobbing a hand grenade into the room. The two Chekists made it out of the embassy grounds and were picked up by a waiting car which rushed them to their headquarters.18

  They had done their job well. The death of Count Mirbach was announced later that day. Immediately the Cheka and the Bolshevik government started to detonate from within. Dzerzhinsky himself attempted to arrest Blyumkin and the Left SR Chekists, but was instead arrested by them and held captive.

  So began the uprising of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Despite the violence, it was never intended as a coup, but rather an attempt to force the Bolsheviks to rescind their policy of appeasing Germany and exploiting the peasants.

  On the very same day, apparently unconnected to the events in Moscow, Boris Savinkov, the anti-Bolshevik militant leader who was being secretly backed by the Allies, finally launched his long-delayed uprising. Following the abandonment of his May Day coup, he had prepared a new strike against the Bolsheviks, and on 6 July his forces seized control of Yaroslavl, a small but strategically important city on the Volga on the road between Moscow and Vologda. Savinkov’s uprising was being funded by the French mission at Vologda to the tune of millions of roubles, with the full knowledge of Lockhart.19

  The Bolshevik press had a field day with allegations that Britain and France had helped both Savinkov and the Left SRs, whose uprising spread the next day to Petrograd. In the early hours, appalled by the possible repercussions from Germany, Lenin telegraphed his deputy, Stalin, about the implosion within the Cheka. ‘The assassination is clearly in the interests of the monarchists or the Anglo-French capitalists,’ he claimed, and with cold fury condemned the perfidious Left SRs: ‘We are about to liquidate them mercilessly tonight and we shall tell the people the whole truth: we are a hair’s breadth from war.’20

  In Petrograd, Moura witnessed the uprising of the local Left SRs with a mixture of contempt and fear. Contempt for its poverty of spirit, and fear for the danger that Lockhart must now be in. Hearing rumours of riots in Moscow, and the tales that were being put about that the Allies were involved in the assassination, she postponed her already delayed trip to Yendel, and wrote to him, pouring out her fears. ‘You know what that might mean,’ she said, referring to the rumours of Allied involvement. ‘I am terrified, terrified.’21

  On Sunday evening, the day of the Petrograd uprising, Moura and Francis Cromie went together to look at the scene of insurrection. For anyone anticipating the downfall of the Bolsheviks, it was a disappointment.

  The Pazhesky Korpus‡ was a prestigious military academy in the centre of the city, off the Nevsky Prospekt, about half a mile from the British Embassy. It had been commandeered after the Revolution as the headquarters of the Left SR military wing, who were supposed to defend Petrograd against German and White Finnish attack.22 The building was occupied by a confused band of several hundred soldiers. Most were young, many were mercenaries. Their ranks were depleted by the number of dedicated Left SR fighters who were away serving against counter-revolutionary forces in remote parts of Russia – the Caucasus, Siberia. When the Red Army approached the building and threatened them with arrest unless they handed over their weapons, the Left SRs – who had little idea of what had actually been going on in Moscow – fought back. A siege began. The Red Army attacked in strength, mounting guns in a shopping arcade across the street and hitting the Pazhesky Korpus with artillery fire. The Left SRs shot back with rifles.23

  Standing with Cromie among the terrified but enthralled onlookers as the smoke of battle drifted in the streets, Moura was unimpressed – ‘after 40 minutes their courage failed them and they surrendered,’ she wrote to Lockhart, ‘it was ludicrous to look at’.24 Some of the defenders gave themselves up; others fled across the rooftops. By nine o’clock it was all over. So ended the Left SRs in Petrograd, while in Moscow, more organised and better led, they struggled on.

  Cromie didn’t take it quite as lightly as Moura. Since hearing the news about Mirbach, he had begun destroying his official papers; a crisis was approaching, and he deemed it unsafe to keep records.25 This business was all new to him. Accustomed to commanding at sea, he was navigating unfamiliar waters now, sailing into the dark realm of conspiracy and espionage, dealing daily with SIS agents, propaganda and anti-Bolshevik movements in the Baltic provinces, and it made him edgy.

  He wasn’t entirely cut out for this sort of affair, Moura believed; he hadn’t the natural discretion for it. She took advantage of his gossipy temperament and his susceptibility to her charm, and made him her most prized source of information about the British missions. She passed her discoveries along to Lockhart, warning him of any hostilities and backbiting, and reassuring him that the most important people – Cromie himself, for one – were true. Even while she fretted over the dangerous aftermath of the Mirbach murder and counted the days until her departure for Yendel, she continued to gather intelligence.

  One item alarmed her. A story was told by Major McAlpine (a member of the military mission who was anti-Lockhart) that Moura had been ‘seen in Moscow walking about with a member of the German Embassy’. She ridiculed the idea: ‘As I have not been with any male person except the 6 Englishmen,’ she told Lockhart, ‘I wonder who of you has been taken for a German. It is really funny.’ Despite making light of it, she was rattled by the story, and made sure to point out that her friend Colonel Terence Keyes of the SIS knew how anti-German she was – he had joked about her having murdered Mirbach herself before fleeing to Petrograd. ‘In my national inner self,’ she wrote, ‘I wish it were I . . .’26

  With boundless, reckless courage, Moura rarely accepted the tru
e gravity of any situation. But Lockhart, under extreme stress as conflict and danger flared around him – and around the future of British interests in Russia – was less inclined to be flippant. Missing her sorely, concerned about the baby, and startled by what sounded like a lot of extremely loose gossip going on in the British mission in Petrograd, he arranged to speak with her on the telephone, both to reassure her and to upbraid her.

  Moura was thrilled speechless. ‘I am moved to tears at the thought that you are there on the other side of the line,’ she wrote immediately after, ‘and I cannot take your head in my hand and kiss your eyes and your lips and let you take me in your arms’.27

  He grilled her about what she had been saying to people, what she had been hearing. The situation in Moscow was more delicate than ever; Lockhart and Cromie were beginning to involve themselves in covert anti-Bolshevik activities which Moura didn’t yet know of; activities which Lockhart was not even telling his superiors in London the whole truth about. He demanded to know what she had said to Cromie, and warned her to be careful in her conversations. She too was involved in covert operations in the Ukraine which could put her in a difficult situation if her British companions in Petrograd learned of them and misconstrued their purpose.

  She chided him in turn for mistaking her levity for carelessness. ‘You funny Boy,’ she teased him afterwards, ‘first of all getting anxious when I spoke of letters being searched – what did you think? – that I put Cromie in the confidence, or what? You are extraordinary!’ She assured Lockhart that she only believed half of what Cromie told her – ‘and am more careful with him than you think’. Indeed, it was Cromie who had a problem with discretion – ‘he is a kind of a gramophone for all the infernal gossip in the Embassy,’ she said. ‘That’s why I cultivate him.’28