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

by Deborah McDonald

  Wherever we went we encountered busts, portraits, and statues of Marx. About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful beard . . . It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapital in its inane abundance, and the human part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind.41

  In Marxist Russia everyone starved and froze and dreaded falling sick. Medicines were unobtainable. ‘Small ailments develop very easily therefore into serious trouble . . . If any one falls into a real illness the outlook is grim.’42

  The commune at Kronverksky Prospekt was spared the worst of these privations. In the evenings the inhabitants and their guests would gather in the dining room, where in the middle of the table stood a large kerosene lamp; in its glow, people would sit and talk art and politics, or listen to Gorky’s tales of his life, which he turned into the bravura performance of a gifted storyteller and dramatist.43

  Gorky accompanied Wells and Moura on one of their outings. It was a doubly meaningful one for Moura – a visit to the Petrograd storehouse of the art and antiques commission. This was the state organ which seized and evaluated works of art, whose secret purpose was as a resource for the valiuta programme. Gorky was probably ignorant of the programme; neither would he have known that Moura was now involved in it. But the visit had an extra meaning for her. The building that had been taken as the commission’s storehouse was the old British Embassy on Palace Quay.

  Two years had passed since Cromie’s death, and almost as long since Moura’s last visit, when the place was a clutter of broken furniture. Now, to Wells’ eyes, it was ‘like some congested second-hand art shop’:

  We went through room after room piled with the beautiful lumber . . . There are big rooms crammed with statuary; never have I seen so many white marble Venuses and sylphs together . . . There are stacks of pictures of every sort, passages choked with inlaid cabinets piled up to the ceiling; a room full of cases of old lace, piles of magnificent furniture.44

  It had all been catalogued, but nobody seemed to know what would be done with ‘all this lovely and elegant litter’. While Gorky could only hope for it to be preserved, Moura probably knew that a good portion of it would end up sold abroad.

  As the days passed, Wells’ relationship with Moura was nurtured and persistently cultivated by him until she agreed to consummate it. ‘I fell in love with her,’ he would recall, still bewildered many years later, ‘and one night at my entreaty she flitted noiselessly through the crowded apartments in Gorky’s flat to my embraces. I believed she loved me and I believed every word she said to me. No other woman has ever had that much effectiveness for me.’45

  But for the time being, it was no more than a fling. After just a couple of weeks’ stay, Wells and Gip departed. After a visit to Moscow, they returned by way of Petrograd and travelled on to Reval to catch the boat to Stockholm on their way home to England.46

  Reval and Stockholm. How those names must have struck a chord in Moura, and what a dissonant, unsettling chord it was. The country where her reunion with Lockhart had failed to occur, and the land where her children were still living, beyond her reach. Wells agreed to pass a message to them on his way through Estonia, letting them know that she was alive and well. And England, where Lockhart had his home. It was now two years since she had seen him, more than a year and a half since she had last heard word from him. And it was over three years since she had last seen her children.

  The time was coming – again – to try to put all that right.

  The days of the Gorky commune in Petrograd were numbered. By the end of 1920 Gorky’s relationship with Zinoviev, the head of the Northern Commune, was getting worse by the day. ‘Things reached a point where Zinoviev ordered searches of Gorky’s apartment,’ recalled Vladislav Khodasevich, who had joined the commune in November, ‘and threatened to arrest certain people who were close to him.’47 Moura, whom Zinoviev suspected of all manner of espionage, was among those he had an eye on.

  She had told Wells that she was happier now than in the old days before the Revolution, because ‘now life is more interesting and real’.48 She always had a tendency to say what seemed suitable to the moment. Perhaps she meant it a little, thinking of her stifling marriage to Djon. But in reality, Russia was a nightmare, and she was waiting for something to wake her from it.

  It came in the spring of 1921. Life for Gorky in Russia was becoming untenable. Lenin was finding him more and more of a liability and put pressure on him to go abroad, ostensibly for the good of his health. Indeed, the extreme conditions in Petrograd were making him ill. The destination settled upon was Germany.

  Moura had been forbidden to leave Petrograd as a condition of her release from jail the year before. And yet in April she was granted a passport and given a permit to travel to Estonia. She always remained silent about how this was achieved. Perhaps Gorky intervened, as he did for many would-be émigrés – but if he did, no trace remains of it.49

  Gorky had settled on Berlin as his new home, and preparations were made for his move. His son Max, his personal secretary Pyotr Kriuchkov and Maria Andreyeva went ahead to prepare a home for him.

  Moura was notionally included in this party, but she would be travelling via Estonia. Maria Andreyeva, now working openly for the Commissariat for External Trade, had a purpose in Berlin – saleswoman par excellence with the wealth of imperial Russia in her carpetbag. So it may be that Moura’s potential as an agent in the valiuta programme, which had won her Andreyeva’s protection, was also the reason for her being allowed to leave Russia. Under the terms of the peace treaty of 1920 Russia had full use of Estonia’s railways and the port of Reval, which was needed for shipping antiquities and precious metals abroad (Petrograd’s port facilities had been damaged in the Revolution). Reval had already become a major artery for Russian gold flowing out to Stockholm.50 An additional agent who had friendly contacts with foreign diplomatic services would undoubtedly be valuable there.

  On the day before Moura was due to travel, she received a piece of news that almost prostrated her with shock. Who it came from is unknown, but it was news of Lockhart, the first she had heard in two years. She had been looking forward excitedly to the freedom of communication that she would enjoy abroad, and anticipated bombarding her beloved with telegrams and letters as soon as she reached Estonia. But on that last day in Russia, word reached her that Lockhart had achieved his heart’s desire without her. His wife had given him a son.

  All Moura’s hopes were blasted to pieces; it would be a month before she could master her feelings sufficiently to write to him.

  There is no use asking you why, and how and when, is it? As a matter of fact, of course, all this stupid letter is of no use at all – only that there is something in me that aches so intensely that I must shout it out to you.

  Your son? A fine boy? Do you know – as I write those words – it seems to me that I will not be able to live with that thought. I am ashamed of my tears – I thought I’d forgotten how to cry. But there was ‘little Peter’, you know.51

  There was a poem by Burns – ‘A Red, Red Rose’ – that Moura and Lockhart had once shared and which they had sworn by when they parted in Moscow.

  . . . Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

  And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:

  I will luve thee still, my dear,

  While the sands o’ life shall run.

  And fare thee well, my only Luve

  And fare thee well, a while!

  And I will come again, my Luve,

  Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.

  ‘The rocks, for me, have not melted wi’ the sun,’ she wrote. ‘And never will.’

  Lockhart was gone from her – he had broken the bond, and her heart with it. ‘But if we meet again,’ she wondered, ‘in this small and rather disgusting world – how shall I greet you?’


  It was fitting, perhaps, that the close of the Russian period of her life should coincide with the door closing on Lockhart’s love. It had been born of Russia, and tempered and pulled asunder by the forces of Russia. And yet she would never, until the sands of life had run, be able to give him up.

  Notes

  * New Life.

  † currency.

  16

  Baroness Budberg

  1921–1923

  May 1921, Estonia

  The Narva train steamed into the Baltic station of Reval. Or Tallinn as Moura must now learn to call it. In a display of nationalism, the old Finnish-Germanic name had been abolished, and the traditional Estonian one revived. The train had passed through the tiny stations at Yendel and Aegviidu, tantalisingly close to home, but Moura hadn’t alighted. Although she yearned for them and hadn’t seen them for three years, the time hadn’t yet come for her to be reunited with her children. Her movements were no longer hers to control. There was business to attend to.

  Still, it had been an easier journey than either of her previous entries into the country: easier than the crossing from Helsingfors or the long walk across the frontier zone with German soldiers as an escort. This time she had everything – a passport, a visa to enter Estonia, a permit to leave Russia and semi-official work to do.

  Moura stepped down from the train and found a porter to carry the single battered suitcase which contained all her worldly belongings – her felt hat, her threadbare fur coat, her old-fashioned slippers, and a few odds and ends. Walking out of the station, she glanced around the square, looking for a cab. Before she could so much as raise a hand, two uniformed men stepped up either side of her. ‘You’re under arrest,’ said one of them in Russian. They gripped her arms and pushed her into a carriage. While one got in with her, the other climbed up on the box and whipped up the horse.1

  This was becoming almost a way of life for Moura. She didn’t panic or berate the policeman. Calmly she said, ‘Everything is in order.’

  ‘What is in order?’

  Moura listed her passport, visa, permits – all the official documents that authorised her presence in Estonia.

  The officer was unimpressed. ‘You’ve violated the law. You’re under arrest. Keep quiet.’

  She was put in a cell and left for hours. She was fed, which cheered her up. The meal – a fatty meat soup with white bread – was better than anything she had eaten in Petrograd in a very long while.

  The interrogation, when it came, was no surprise and no great ordeal for a woman who had twice seen the inside of Cheka jails. She had heard about the arrest of the official who had helped her cross the frontier in 1918, and the dossier the Germans had put in front of him, itemising her alleged work as a spy. Now she saw for herself the dossier the Estonians had on her. She was known to be an associate of Gorky; she had previously been the mistress and agent of Yakov Peters.2 She was undoubtedly a Bolshevik spy, and had entered Estonia for that purpose.

  Moura knew they could have no hard evidence of any of this. But what they told her next shook her profoundly. News of her arrival had preceded her. The brother and sister of her late husband, Djon von Benckendorff, had petitioned the authorities, demanding that Moura be deported back to Russia and that she be barred from visiting her children. They regarded her as a Bolshevik agent, and some even suspected her of complicity in Djon’s murder. Several other Benckendorff and Schilling relatives had lent their voices to the demands.

  Immediately she asked for a lawyer. The police provided her with a list of names to choose from. Moura studied it with a sinking feeling; some of the names were Russians – they would probably be old Tsarists who would be prejudiced against anyone with Soviet connections. The other names were all those of the Teutonic families who had ruled the Baltic region since the Middle Ages. They would all be against her; indeed, many of the men on the list were related to the Benckendorffs. She hadn’t a hope.

  There were just two other names, both of them Jews. Moura was infected with the casual anti-Semitism that was virtually universal in her world; like most of her class and kind, she viewed Jews with a sort of sardonic tolerance, not unlike her view of peasants,3 and she picked a name despondently. Her lawyer, as it turned out, was a good one, and a kindly man who sympathised with her plight.

  The police released her, apparently for lack of evidence. They were content to let her be passed, according to custom, to a court of Baltic barons – an Ehrengericht* of the so-called Gemeinnutz Verband.† Despite the nation’s independence, the upper class of Estonia was still profoundly Germanic, and despite the socialist reforms and the redistribution of land that had occurred since 1918, the nobility still had influence. The court was convened under Count Ignatiev, the elected head of the Baltic nobility.4 Its purpose was to determine her connections, if any, to the Soviet regime. With the help of her lawyer, Moura began to make her case. The proceedings would drag on for months.

  Meanwhile, she was more or less free. Time was running out; as a Russian citizen she was only allowed a three-month stay. At first, while the court deliberated, her Benckendorff relatives would not allow her near her children. They had their own suspicions about her story. Why had she not left Russia with the children in 1918? Why had she not taken her mother out via Finland the following year? Why had she visited Estonia and not stayed with her husband and children? And what precisely was the nature of her relationship with the Bolsheviks? The Benckendorffs, like all their Baltic ilk, had been almost religiously devoted to the old imperial order, and ‘regarded the Communist regime which had murdered the Tsar as a criminal conspiracy’.5

  With a mixture of truth, omissions and lies, she offered up her story. She had to remain in Russia to care for her mother; truthfully she told them that the Bolsheviks had continually refused her mother a permit, and that there had been a hundred and one difficulties with Swedish and British visas. This was all true. But she flatly denied any relationship with the Soviet state or its spies, and kept resolutely quiet about her relationship with Lockhart. If the Benckendorffs thought it suspicious that Djon had been murdered at a time when Moura was seeking a divorce and had visited Estonia, they didn’t voice it.

  Finally, reluctantly, she was allowed back into the Benckendorff fold. She could visit the children. She left Tallinn and made the short journey to Yendel.6 At least one person at Yendel was looking forward to Moura’s return. Micky, who loved her like a daughter, had been growing increasingly excited as the days passed, and her excitement had passed to the children.

  Moura arrived at night. On the journey from the station, along the familiar arrow-straight driveway, she passed by the estate farm and the manor house. Neither belonged to the family now. Along with all the other landholdings in Estonia, Yendel had been taken over by the state, and was now an agricultural college. The family had been left with a small farm and the quaint little lakeside lodge of Kallijärv.

  After Moura had arrived and been greeted by Micky, she went to bed – her own soft bed in her own room, in a quiet, secluded country retreat. After the life she had led during the past few years, it was the answer to a prayer. She would be reluctant ever to rise from this bed. As she grew older, her bed would always be dear to Moura – the centre of her world.

  The morning after, Micky took the children to see their mother. They were full of anticipation, caught up in Micky’s enthusiasm and curious to know what this unfamiliar mother might be like. Only Kira was old enough to have clear memories of her. Of Moura’s own children, Pavel had been four when he last saw her. For Tania, who was now six, it was as if she were meeting her mother for the first time.7

  They were taken into Moura’s room, where they found her sitting up in bed. Tania didn’t recognise her at all. She felt nothing for this complete stranger. She would recall that her mother ‘was larger than I had expected’, and she felt a little disappointed that ‘this rather healthy-looking person did not correspond to the stories of hunger and privation we had been told’
.8 Micky had told them that Moura had caught burrowing lice during her time in prison in Moscow, but Tania could see no sign of them on her skin. The children weren’t allowed to ask questions about why she had been in prison; it was ‘all finished and done with’.

  There was no glad reunion – everyone was awkward and embarrassed. Micky clucked and fussed around Moura, and shooed the children out once they had taken a good look. Their mother had been through an ordeal, they were told, and was exhausted physically and emotionally.

  Moura barely rose from her bed during that first week at Kallijärv. Anyone she wanted to see was brought to her. Nobody in the household or the extended family would speak about Moura’s past in front of the children, but Tania heard enough snippets and whispers to make her mother sound mysterious and wicked. The little girl was fascinated and puzzled.

  Not long after Moura’s arrival, all the family went together to church – one of the big Russian Orthodox feast days that followed Easter, either Ascension or Pentecost. Moura went with them. When Tania trooped up with the others for communion, she noticed that her mother stayed behind, at the back of the church. To Tania’s mind, only those who had the blackest sins on their conscience – those which one wouldn’t dare admit to in confession – would refuse the sacrament, and she wondered if Moura had committed murder or robbery.

  Moura’s conscience might well have been troubling her. She took her religion seriously – at least her personal faith in God had been invoked many times in recent years as she struggled through her ordeals and crises. And yet she sinned with a defiance that bordered on bravado. Maybe her faith had taken a blow; she had prayed hard for everything to come right with Lockhart, and had got nothing but heartache in return. And yet that needn’t stop her making an insincere show of taking communion. That she refused must have been a measure of her state of mind and conscience.