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

by Deborah McDonald

  It was a strangely cynical way to refer to a friend for whom she felt real affection, but Moura, despite her lightness of tone, was shocked and indignant that her beloved Baby-Boy could doubt her. And perhaps slightly alarmed that she was a little less immune to scrutiny than she had believed.

  But the one thing that worried her deeply was Lockhart’s safety. In Moscow the Bolsheviks, who were regaining control of the Cheka and vigorously purging the Left SRs, were falling over themselves to make amends to the Germans – although they drew the line at having a battalion of German troops guard the Embassy. Despite the propaganda being spread that the Allies had been behind the assassination, however, the foreign ministry offered Lockhart a bodyguard to protect him from German reprisals.

  Moura wasn’t very reassured.29 She could sense the anti-British feeling rising on the streets of Petrograd. Her journey to Yendel – the subterfuge to protect her unborn child from shame – could not be cancelled, and it seemed increasingly possible that Lockhart might have left Russia or been caught up in some new conflagration by the time she returned. She wrote him letter after letter during those days in Petrograd, until she could delay no more.

  ‘If I remain there longer than a week,’ she wrote, ‘I pray I will not – but if – you must beleive§ that it will only be if there is some difficulty about trains and passes. Please please, Baby, don’t think of anything else.’30

  By the eve of her departure her hopes had sunk, but her defiance and courage had risen to meet them. ‘How I hate it all,’ she wrote, dreading the deception she was about to foist on her husband, ‘when I just want to cry for you and let all the world hear, that I love you so . . . Do you know what your love has done? It has changed me from being a woman to be a man, with a man’s sense of decency, sense of honour, sense of what is fair and what isn’t. No lack of determination about me now sir. I know what I want and I’m jolly well going to get it.’31

  With that thought she went to sleep, knowing that she would have to be up at dawn to begin the irksome journey.

  Notes

  * Money Lane.

  † Ukrainian sp.; Russian sp.: Yakov Blumkin.

  ‡ Pages School.

  § Despite her linguistic gifts, Moura never mastered the spelling of ‘ie’ words.

  9

  Across the Border

  July 1918

  Monday 15 July, Narva, Estonia

  In its way, this was a harder journey than any she had made before, harder even than her duplicitous, dangerous trips into the Ukraine. Danger was a thing that Moura could take in her stride; humiliation and debasement wounded her to the soul. She could never have imagined, even a year ago, that the journey to Yendel could be anything other than a pleasure. Now the thought of what she would have to do there filled her with loathing.

  It had been a long, weary day. Rising in the dark before dawn, she had gathered her minimal luggage – for once she would have to travel as lightly as possible. At 5.30 she boarded the mail coach – the same antiquated troika that had taken the children to Estonia, and still the only reliable transport between Petrograd and the border zone. It had once been considered fast, but in an age of steam and combustion it was an infuriatingly slow relic. Hour after hour it trundled along behind its three horses, stopping at every hamlet, changing the beasts, and starting off again at what felt to Moura like walking pace.

  West of the little town of Yamburg,* the marshy coastland began – the band of lakes, wetlands and dykes that joined Estonia to Russia. Tantalisingly, the now-disused rail tracks ran beside the road, straight across the marshlands. Here began the border zone, the demarcation line. Here the mail troika stopped, and those crossing from Russia to Estonia – or Germany as Moura thought of it now – were met by an escort of German soldiers. Moura felt insulted, soiled even, by their proximity. She felt a profound shame that her people could be so pitiful as to submit to German occupation – they were ‘utterly lost like children, letting themselves be bullied by these swine’.1

  As the travellers plodded along the straight marsh road towards the border town of Narva, one of the soldiers took a fancy to her, and sidled up beside her. Moura kept her head averted, shuddering. ‘Sind sie deutsch?’ he asked.

  Moura turned a hard, blank gaze on him, trying to control her feelings and attempting to give the impression of not understanding the language. The soldier stammered awkwardly, ‘Vy russkiy?’ he asked.

  ‘Da,’ she confirmed coldly and (she hoped) defiantly. Yes, she was Russian – how could anyone have the gall to think she was German? Did she look German? How dare he.

  At last she was safely across the border, vouched for by the same friendly official who had helped Micky cross with the children. In Narva she headed for the railway station. Now at last for some properly civilised transport! In the waiting room she sat down and wrote a letter to Lockhart, pouring out her feelings in blunt pencil on the single sheet of thin paper she had with her.

  ‘If there is any telepathy worth speaking of,’ she wrote, ‘you, my Baby – must feel the agony I am going through. I don’t know how I have been able to bear this day.’ She struggled to express how besmirched she felt – as if having to deal with Germans was somehow a betrayal of Lockhart and his country – ‘my personal pride crushed to the ground, trampled upon every second of the day’. Only the thought of little Peter helped her cope with it.

  Already she was dreading the weary journey back, but not as much as she dreaded the arrival at Yendel, and what she had to do there. Cramming words into the remaining margins of the paper, she pleaded: ‘Baby, good-bye, my baby love, my love for ever, take care of yourself and be with me. God bless. I kiss you. Moura.’

  She folded the thin sheet and stowed it away, hoping for an opportunity to send it. Most likely it would have to wait for her return. Would she even make it back? Would Lockhart still be in Russia? For all she knew, he might be ejected from the country or forced to flee – beyond her reach forever – or thrown into a Bolshevik prison. Moura didn’t even like to think of the possibility that he might be killed.

  Diplomacy was as good as dead. Lockhart continued to meet with his contacts in the foreign ministry, but all pretence of cooperation had been dropped. Their negotiations and discussions had become those of two nations on the verge of hostility – still civil, even personally cordial, but each with his hand on the hilt of his sheathed sword.

  Lockhart had become wholly committed to Allied intervention. The only way to reopen the fight against Germany on the Eastern Front was in the face of Bolshevik opposition. So be it. The problem he faced now – the constant, stumbling obstruction that made him want to tear his hair out – was the dithering of the Foreign Office. The very people who had derided or hindered his plan to get Russia back in the war through diplomacy, who had pushed the strongest towards direct intervention, now dragged their feet over a thousand and one logistical and political sticking points.

  Uprisings and anti-Bolshevik conflicts were flaring all over Russia. The Whites, the Mensheviks, the Left SR regiments in the field, all were giving the Red Army a hard time, and by midsummer virtually all of Siberia was in anti-Bolshevik hands. And still the Foreign Office, the War Cabinet and General Poole struggled to decide how to take advantage. Having pushed for intervention, they found that they didn’t have enough troops.

  The key to it all was the Czechoslovak Legion. A huge corps of tens of thousands of seasoned troops, the Legion had served in the Tsar’s army against the Germans. After the signing of the peace, as an independent corps the Legion had been granted clearance by the Bolsheviks to leave Russia and go to France, there to continue fighting alongside the Allies. With Germany controlling the northern and southern sea routes, it was decided to let them go the long way round, via the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok. It wasn’t an easy route. Rail transport was patchy, and much of it was being used to transport German and Austro-Hungarian ex-prisoners of war from Siberia back to their home countries. There were constant d
elays along the route, and the Czechoslovak soldiers grew increasingly restive and more and more difficult to handle – both for the Bolsheviks and for their own commanders. Trotsky ordered that they be forcibly disarmed, which added to the friction. The Legion stopped heading east, and starting heading west again, fighting as it came.

  In Murmansk, the British wanted the Czechoslovak Legion like they wanted breath. Such a huge corps would solve the problem of the shortage of Allied troops at a stroke, and enable intervention to go ahead. Plans were drawn up for seizing the vital Archangel–Moscow axis and thereby controlling northern Russia; all the plans involved using Czechoslovak regiments and coordinating them with local anti-Bolshevik forces, such as Boris Savinkov’s little army of rebels.

  In Moscow, Lockhart monitored the situation and helped as he could, at the same time badgering Whitehall to get on with the job. Anti-British feeling was growing in Moscow, and Moura’s letters reported a similar deterioration in Petrograd.

  It was in early July that the British scheme began to go badly wrong. In Murmansk, General Poole, despairing of the arrival of either the Czechoslovak Legion or an American force, had postponed his main landing at Archangel until August. But communications between Moscow and Murmansk were intermittent, and Lockhart – who had been secretly monitoring the rebels – had been unable to warn Savinkov in time to prevent him launching his uprising at Yaroslavl (a key point where the Moscow–Archangel route crossed the Volga) on the day of the Left SR action in Moscow.2 His few hundred fighters were embattled in the city by the Red Army, and were now being relentlessly whittled down.

  Elsewhere there was still hope. A Red Army general in southern Russia came out in support of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, and turned his troops against the government, with the intention of creating a breakaway republic of the Volga and declaring war on Germany. The Red Army was being pulled to pieces from outside and in, and meanwhile the Czechoslovak Legion aggressively continued its long journey westward, heading towards the next great turning point in the revolutionary war.

  In the Legion’s path stood the Urals city of Ekaterinburg. It was a flat, drab place, unremarkable; but it was about to become the most infamous and haunted city in Russia. In a blockish, dullish but quite comfortable merchant’s house in the centre lived the former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children, eking out the eventless months of their imprisonment, with no knowledge of what would eventually be done with them. That question was inadvertently decided by the approach of the Czechoslovak Legion. As its regiments began to surround Ekaterinburg, on the night of 16/17 July the head of the local Cheka took the decision to execute the entire family – parents, children and their few remaining servants. The murders were carried out inside the house that very night, in a single violent onslaught.

  The news reached Moscow the next day, and Lockhart was the first person to telegraph it to the appalled outside world.3

  His own situation was growing graver by the day. The British alliance with the Czechoslovak Legion was a given – which put Britain in the position of being indirectly at war with Russia – and the Bolsheviks’ view of Lockhart was now downright suspicious. Only the friendly relationships he had developed with certain middle-ranking members of the government, together with his reputation (no longer accurate) for being pro-Bolshevik, protected him. All British personnel in Moscow and Petrograd had been forbidden to travel, and there was no longer any secure way of communicating directly with the outside world. It seemed an age since he had heard anything from Moura. His concerns about her safety were beginning to turn desperate.

  20 July, Yendel

  She wouldn’t be able to go through with it. It was worse than she could ever have imagined. The feelings she had had on the approach to the border, when the German soldier tried to flirt with her, were nothing compared with the indignation and disgust she felt now.

  Djon, her so-called husband, the former officer and diplomat of the Tsar and loyal son of Russia, had gone over wholeheartedly to the Germans. He had transformed himself, effectively, into a German. As if there weren’t already enough of them in Estonia; their soldiers were everywhere. There was even a German officer staying at Yendel – here in the place that had once been her home, the playground of her British friends! Rather than being shunned as an enemy occupier, he was welcomed by her husband, lunching and dining with the family. Moura was appalled.4

  Whether the officer was aware of her disdain or not, Djon certainly noticed it. Soon they were back to their old ways, arguing about politics. Djon accused her of being on the side of the Allies, which was half-true, but also rich; he had been their friend too until it suited him not to be. And what of his loyalty to Estonia? The master of Yendel’s new allegiance would win him few friends among the local people. The German occupiers in Estonia were behaving in much the same way as those in the Ukraine. Baltic Germans were favoured over ethnic Estonians in the government, workers were being laid off and wages reduced, newspapers and Estonian cultural societies were suppressed, and colonists from Germany were being offered farmland by Baltic German landowners, many of whom wanted Estonia to be fully incorporated into Germany.5 This former province of the Russian Empire, which had lacked independence but at least had some cultural identity of its own, was being thoroughly Germanised, and it made Moura sick.

  Djon offered her a choice – either him or her convictions.6

  Even if she had been capable of subjugating herself to any man, she could not have done so for Djon. Before coming here, she had worried about the morality of using and deceiving him in the way she was planning to. Above all, it would involve deceiving her children too. But now she felt unable to go through with the deception for entirely different reasons. Moura shrank from her husband’s touch. This man, who had been her romance, her life, for whom she had borne two children, repelled her physically and morally.

  She wrote to Lockhart: ‘I want to scream and say I am not going to bear it any more. It’s only the thought of him, of our little boy that stops me – but I don’t know, Babykins, if I’ll be able to stick to it after all.’7 All she wanted was to abandon everything and hurry back to Russia, to her one and only love.

  The single shred of comfort was that the children were safe so long as Estonia was under military rule. The countryside had been brought to order, and the peasant bandits and saboteurs were gone, for the time being. But she missed her children, missed being able to embrace them, and she worried about their future. But even they weren’t a strong enough tie to hold her at Yendel against the pull of Lockhart, all those hundreds of miles away in Moscow.

  Casting her plans aside, throwing Djon’s ultimatum back in his face, and laying down her maternal duty, she departed from Yendel, heading back towards the border. The future could take care of itself; for the present, she wanted freedom. And Lockhart.

  The days of the British mission in Moscow were numbered. The future of the Allies in Russia was grim – unless they stiffened their backbones and came marching in as conquerors. The Czechoslovak Legion was dominating central Russia, but the Allies had nothing to match it with. In between, isolated at Yaroslavl, Savinkov’s uprising was withering. It had spread to nearby towns, but failed to build up the support and weaponry needed to hold out against the Red Army. On Sunday 21 July, after two weeks of battle, Savinkov’s few hundred surviving fighters surrendered.8 Once again, Boris Savinkov himself escaped, and would rise again to trouble the Bolsheviks, but the Allies’ plans had taken a debilitating blow. Any force landing at Archangel now would have little chance of getting through to Moscow. Unless it came in sufficient numbers.

  On 25 July, in a panic move, the British, French, American and Italian embassies which had been impotently holed up at Vologda since the spring, monitoring the situation but playing little direct part in any actual diplomacy, suddenly struck camp and fled to Archangel, where two ships were waiting to evacuate them. The move was prompted by a message from General Poole indicating that his force w
ould be landing at Archangel imminently. The Ambassadors were keen to avoid becoming hostages of the Russians, and their urgency was so great, some British stragglers arrived late, and had to run down the quay and clamber aboard as the ships were pulling away.9

  ‘So here ends the Vologda episode,’ Lockhart noted sourly in his diary, ‘a thoroughly stupid one at best.’10

  Lockhart and his handful of staff were now isolated in Moscow, while Cromie and his little group were similarly cut off in Petrograd. Neither Lockhart nor Cromie had been given any warning of the Ambassadors’ departure, and the Bolsheviks certainly had not; they guessed correctly that military intervention must be imminent. Despite reassurances from Georgy Chicherin, Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Lockhart knew that he and his people had effectively become potential hostages against Allied action. They could be seized at any moment.11

  Following his meeting with Chicherin, Lockhart returned to his rooms at the Elite and began preparing everyone for departure. It was agreed that after he had gone, Captain George Hill and Sidney Reilly would stay on in Russia and continue their counter-revolutionary missions under cover.12 Everyone else must leave.

  It was ten days now, Lockhart calculated grimly, since Moura had left Petrograd bound for Estonia, and still he had heard nothing.13 Ten days. He had one of her last letters with him. ‘If I remain there longer than a week,’ she had written, ‘you must beleive that it will only be if there is some difficulty about trains and passes. Please please, Baby, don’t think of anything else.’ She had promised that as soon as she was back in Russia she would come straight to Moscow – ‘if it is possible still’.14

  If it is possible. She knew as well as he did the risk that he might not be here that long. Ten days of silence, of not knowing; three whole weeks since he had last seen her and held her. It was unbearable. Could he depart without seeing her again? How would he ever find out what had happened to her if he left now?