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

by Deborah McDonald

  Quoting the poem in her letter to Gorky, Moura implied that she might seek a similar farewell from him:25

  Goodbye, my friend, goodbye

  My love, you are in my heart.

  It was destined that we should part

  And be reunited one day.

  Goodbye, my friend, no handshake, no words.

  Don’t be sad, don’t frown.

  There’s nothing new in dying now

  Though living is no newer.26

  A silence fell. Gorky in his room above the Bay of Naples and Moura in snowbound Kallijärv brooded on their feelings.

  What happened next wasn’t recorded. Perhaps a telegram, a telephone call, perhaps merely a simple calming and subsiding of their feelings. A week later, Moura wrote again to Gorky. She had been ill, she said, and apologised for the delay in setting out; she would soon be on her way back to Sorrento.

  When Moura returned in early 1926 the relationship continued. Wounds were patched up but not healed. In February Gorky noticed her concealing a letter when he walked into the room.27 By April she was travelling again, attending to his publishing and reviewing his parlous financial affairs. Payments were not coming through from Russia, which was where his largest audience was. He was in such dire need of cash he had considered selling some of his beloved jade figurine collection.

  While Moura was away, the cracks appeared again, and they were soon scolding each other for not writing, not being sincere. Moura told Gorky that she thought she had convinced him, during the winter, that she planned to remain as his ‘wife’ and had no desire to leave him. She said that she had ‘decided not to see R any more’.28

  Not only did she have to deal with Gorky’s paranoia; she had heard that her sister Alla’s husband had tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide. Like Alla he was addicted to morphine, and had long-standing problems.

  That summer Moura’s children finally got to meet the man who had been dominating their mother’s life for so long, the august and remote figure from whom they received Christmas presents but whom they had never seen. Tania, who was ten years old now; Pavel, who was eleven; and Kira, sixteen, travelled by train with Micky to Italy. It was hot and stuffy, and after a long journey they reached Sorrento in late afternoon. The children were taken to meet the great man that evening. Tania’s first impression was that he was immensely tall and thin but emanated an aura of strength. The children had been nervous, but were soothed by his kind eyes and mild manner, and found that they could relax in his company. He left an impression in their minds of an embroidered Tartar skullcap and enormous drooping moustache, and that he was easily moved to tears and seemed to be working all day. He tried to participate in the children’s games but was often forced to give up as too much exertion brought on his coughing. ‘There was something so human and even touching about this huge, gruff man,’ Tania would recall. ‘I thought him quite wonderful, serious and gay, gentle with us children and compassionate to everybody.’29

  If Moura hoped that introducing Gorky to her children would placate him, she might have been right. But the next rift between them came from an entirely new direction. Gorky had again roused public controversy, and this time Moura was on the public’s side.

  On 20 July 1926 Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the terrifying head of the Cheka, whose health had rarely been good and who had deteriorated after steering the course of the Red Terror, finally died. Gorky had been his friend in their outlaw days before the Revolution, and had remained on good terms. Under pressure from Yekaterina, Gorky was persuaded to write a eulogy. ‘I am absolutely overwhelmed by the death of Felix Edmundovich,’ he wrote. ‘I importuned him about various matters and, because he was gifted with a sensitive heart and a strong sense of justice, we did a great deal of good.’30 The piece was printed in the Soviet press. Russian émigrés across the world were outraged. This was worse than eulogising Lenin. They or their friends and families had suffered under the fist of Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka. A ‘sensitive heart’? How many innocent Russians had received bullets in the back of the head from his executioners? How many had starved and died in his prisons?

  Moura had been one of those imprisoned. But she tempered her disapproval, only reproaching him guardedly.31

  The children stayed at the Gorky household for two months, and saw more of their mother than they were used to (usually she stayed only two or three weeks in Estonia and those visits were broken up by trips to Tallinn). Moura seemed oblivious to the fact that her long absences upset them. Every August prior to her arrival, preparations were made in Kallijärv to receive her. Her room was vacated and cleaned and a basin, water jug and portable bidet were set up. Flowers were picked and the house made ready for her presence. On arrival she would throw open a suitcase full of gifts for everyone – a blouse for Micky, silk stockings, coloured pencils, a gramophone, a postcard album . . . After all were opened they would sit down to breakfast. Moura would take the head of the table and dominate the conversation. She expected ‘to be adored, and treated as the “oracle from the west”, she made the most of the general atmosphere of heroine-worship’, Tania recalled.32

  After a few weeks of playing games and swimming in the lake, the time would come for her departure. Micky would become tense at the impending loss. Pavel and Tania grew depressed, knowing that she was soon to leave. When her bags were packed, according to an old Russian custom, the others would all assemble for a moment of silence to bless the traveller on her way. As Moura always left late, the children would be tired and emotional. Their Aunt Zoria, who together with Micky took care of the children in Moura’s absence, disapproved of these emotionally charged, prolonged, almost theatrical departures.

  In the late autumn of 1926 Moura’s marriage to Budberg was dissolved in a Berlin court without any fuss and in the absence of both partners.

  Throughout the rest of that year and into the next, the relationship with Gorky continued to fizzle and crackle, and at intervals blew up in a flurry of complaints and accusations. His letters upset her; he had started accusing her of mismanaging his business affairs, laying the blame for his financial troubles on her rather than where it belonged – on the political situation in Russia and the acrimonious relationship that was growing between him and the émigré community, especially its writers.

  But they still couldn’t let each other go. All through the Saarow and Sorrento periods, Gorky had been working at his epic tetralogy, The Life of Klim Samgin. When the first instalment was published in Russia in 1927, it was dedicated to Moura – or ‘Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya’ as he still called her. This huge, slow, intense story of the life of a mediocre liberal lawyer among the intelligentsia of pre-revolutionary Russia would be his last book. It was intended as a satire on Russian émigré intellectuals – a few years later he would comment on the way in which, living abroad, they ‘spread slander about Soviet Russia, foment plots, and in general, behave basely; most of those intellectuals are Samgins’.33

  Moura, though she would never quite let go, was getting ready to move on. She had continued her correspondence with H. G. Wells. She asked for favours, sometimes satirically, trying to appeal to his humour as well as his politics. She instructed him to contact the ‘Rulers of the world whoever they may be’ and ask them to help Estonia with its economy and enable it to resist Bolshevism.34 She talked of Russian and German translations of his work, and flirted coquettishly: ‘don’t be so entirely business-like. And tell me when I shall see you!’35 Moura had never let go of the idea of getting to England in some way, and hopefully settling there. Wells knew all the right people and had money, power and influence.

  Britain was looking more attractive with every passing year. In 1927 the attentions of the Italian police intensified. They were following her. She also believed that they were opening her correspondence, and indicated this to Gorky with a code, in Russian, ‘Mary had a little lamb / And everywhere that Mary went / the lamb was sure to go.’36 Having been held and questioned by the Italian police a
couple of years previously, her paranoia was not without foundation.

  The Italians were not alone in their suspicions. MI5’s file on her had been active for several years now, and the French intelligence service, the Deuxième Bureau, were taking note of her and listening to gossip among the Russian émigrés. ‘This woman seems to be a double agent of the Soviets and the Germans,’ their report stated. ‘She travels constantly across all of Europe.’ It went on:

  Considered as suspect. Reported as having obtained a number of visas for the Western countries and as being the fiancée of Baron Budberg, former secret agent of the emperor, then became the friend of Maxim Gorki and Zinovieff and agent of the Soviets.

  Of very great intelligence and of considerable education – she speaks fluently and without accent English, French, German and Italian – seems to be a very dangerous spy in the service of the Soviets.37

  Some witnesses claimed that she had been travelling back into Russia, and that a special office in Berlin provided her with ‘a special entry authorization, of the kind that no trace of her trip is left on her passport’. The Deuxième Bureau considered it likely that Moura could be turned: ‘She returns very often to France on the pretext of visiting her sisters. The Baroness B would work without doubt for us if we would pay her.’

  What neither the Deuxième Bureau nor MI5 knew at this time was who the Baroness was spying on. In fact, it was the former members of Skoropadskyi’s Ukrainian Hetmanate government, now living in exile in Berlin. She had resumed the double agent role she had begun in summer 1918. Her sister Assia’s husband, the Ukrainian Prince Basil Kotschoubey, was an active member of the movement, and Moura used him as a source of information which she passed back to the Soviet Union.38 The source had dried up by 1929, when Pavlo Skoropadskyi himself had become aware that she had been betraying the Hetmanate in 1918.39 Her contacts with the Ukrainian exiles ceased.

  The truth about Moura’s activities was always mingled with hearsay. Some of the gossip she knew about, but some was confined to the files of secret intelligence agencies. And only Moura herself knew how much truth, if any, was in the rumours. If she really did go back into Russia after leaving it in 1921, carrying information on Gorky or her fellow émigrés, she managed to conceal it absolutely from everyone who knew her closely, and Gorky’s only suspicions of her were her supposed liaisons with the youthful ‘R’.

  Moura’s life with Gorky – though not their relationship – was gradually moving towards its close. During 1928 Stalin, who had muscled his way to the top of the Soviet leadership after the death of Lenin, began trying to persuade Gorky to return to the country of his birth. If he would not come to live, then he should at least visit. Moura tried to dissuade him; she told him that she was not interested in going back and that he would have to go alone.

  Money had become an increasing worry for Gorky. Stalin promised that in Russia he would be given property, cars and a luxurious lifestyle. A bombardment of letters came from all corners of the Soviet Union – Gorky’s admirers were distressed by the absence of their famous writer. The letters, which were designed to appeal to Gorky’s vanity and timed to coincide with his sixtieth birthday, had been organised at Stalin’s request by Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the State Political Directorate – the GPU, which had superseded the Cheka.40

  Although Moura had personally spoken against visiting Russia, she now joined in the propaganda campaign. In Berlin she politicked with influential figures in the literary and émigré communities, repairing the damage he had been causing with his attitude to the ‘Klim Samgins’. Letters came in from all the giants of the literary world – Theodore Dreiser, John Galsworthy, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel and H. G. Wells, among others – all praising him, calling him a ‘genius of world literature’ and a ‘powerful life force in the new Russia’, and keeping quiet about the atrocities of the Soviet regime and the fact that Gorky had become an apologist for them. On his birthday, 25 March 1928, the New York Times printed an accolade with fifty signatures attached to it.41

  Gorky was flattered by the attention and the adulation. He liked what he heard about many of Stalin’s latest projects, not least the idea of agricultural collectivisation, which he saw as the answer to changing the ‘half savage, stupid, heavy people of the Russian villages’ into an ‘agricultural proletariat’.42

  But more than anything else, Maxim Gorky – Alexei Maximovich Peshkov – was homesick. In May 1928, after an absence of seven years, in company with his son, Max, he made his first visit to Russia.

  During that first summer sojourn he met Stalin and Yagoda for the first time. An elaborate masquerade was set up whereby Gorky and Max were asked to don wigs and make-up to disguise themselves to enable them to take a walk around Moscow. Gorky was unaware that most of those with whom he came in touch during that day were part of an elaborate sham which culminated in a specially prepared dinner at the railway station – supposedly an ordinary meal, but nothing like the normal fare that the average person could eat.

  Gorky was willing to be deceived; he wanted to believe that the Soviet Union was a good place to live. His days of denouncing the Bolsheviks were long past. In return, Stalin valued him for his popularity and his potential to unite and placate the common people.43 So began a courtship that would eventually bring Gorky home from exile for good.

  The renewal of Gorky’s relationship with Soviet Russia coincided with the end of his intimate relationship with Moura. But she continued to handle all his business affairs – translation rights, film deals, publishing – as well as those of other writers.

  At the same time she encouraged the attentions of H. G. Wells.

  Wells was gradually disconnecting himself from the ties to the women in his life. Rebecca West was in the past, and his wife, Jane, was ill. He had been in his holiday home on the French Riviera near Grasse with his lover Odette Keun when Gip sent him the news that Jane had cancer. Wells returned home and stayed with her until her death in September. Now that he was free, Odette could see no reason why Wells would not marry her. But with her volatile temper, the demands she made on him and the violent quarrels that had always punctuated their relationship, he had no intention of rushing into marriage. She would often open Wells’ mail, and was shocked to find that he had been writing to Moura. Wells knew he should make a clean break from Odette but couldn’t summon up the courage or the will.

  Moura’s motivations for cultivating Wells were complex. He was influential, and as a literary woman she couldn’t help admiring him, and as a romantic she was attracted to him, but there was little possibility of really loving him. Unlike Gorky and Lockhart, Wells had only a moderate regard for her intellect or her talents. He thought her bright and shrewd, but believed that she thought ‘like a Russian: copiously, windingly and with that flavour of philosophical pretentiousness of Russian discourse, beginning nowhere in particular and emerging at a foregone conclusion’. She was ‘a cultivated person who thinks after the manner of literary criticism and not along scientific lines’. He compared her intellect unfavourably with his wife’s and his daughter’s, who ‘had science in their education and think in English forms’.44 Wells believed strongly in rationalism, even as applied to politics. Some of his younger contemporaries, such as George Orwell, considered this a fatal flaw that blinded him to human nature.

  Wells must have given his opinion on this to Moura, for in catching up with her correspondence with him after the whirl surrounding Gorky’s visit to Russia, she wrote placatingly that she was trying ‘to change my asiatic habits to western ones’.45 She had always taken it in good humour when he criticised her prose style or her English (‘Did I really say “publishment”? What a shame!’).46 In later life his pedantry would set her teeth on edge, but for now it just amused her.

  In July Moura was back at Kallijärv. There, after an interval of four years, she wrote to the one man who had valued her mind and her talents above all others, the one man who had never r
eproached her for ‘asiatic habits’ or treated her with jealous possessiveness.

  ‘Dear Baby,’ she wrote. ‘How are things with you?’ With grim humour she alluded to the breaking of the vow she had made four years earlier: ‘The Russian proverb is right when it says that the grave alone will cure the hunchback.’47 She wondered if he might be in Paris or Berlin anytime soon, and if he would care to meet. She was keen to hear what had happened to the ‘famous book’ he had been planning to write, and how he was progressing with his memoirs.

  When he replied, the sight of his name seemed to ‘sweep away ten years and transform me into the happy young fool that used to tear open your envelope with trembling fingers’. On 28 July she wrote again, reminding him that it was ten years to the day since ‘I started on foot from Narva to join you in Moscow’.48

  While she continued to flatter, humour and charm H. G. Wells, Moura reverted to the habit that had marked the beginning of her affair with Lockhart ten years earlier – passing him information. Gorky was back in Sorrento after his trip to Russia, and Lockhart, who was now earning a crust writing a gossip column for the London Evening Standard, had heard a rumour that he had ‘quarrelled with the Bolshies’. She denied it, and described Gorky’s ill health and his need to work on completing the remaining volumes of his epic novel. ‘Please don’t use my name when you give this,’ she warned.49