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

by Deborah McDonald

  His relationship with Constance became largely one of letters. The one with Martha Gellhorn came to nothing, but Wells continued his search for the elusive ‘shadow lover’, that person who would mirror him both sexually and intellectually and look after him into his old age. She remained unobtainable and he would have to settle for the often-absent Moura to fulfil that role from her flat at 81 Cadogan Square (whither she and Tania had moved after their home in Knightsbridge was pulled down).

  While he fumed over Moura’s absences and deceptions, Wells managed to continue his work. Among other things, he co-wrote screenplays based on two of his stories. The Man Who Could Work Miracles and Things to Come (based on The Shape of Things to Come) were both released in 1936, both produced by Alexander Korda, the British-Hungarian movie mogul. Moura knew Korda, possibly through the émigré community in London, or perhaps through the film deals she had negotiated on Gorky’s behalf during the 1920s. Korda had left Hungary in 1919 to escape the counter-revolutionary White Terror. (Michael Curtiz, director of British Agent and Casablanca, was also a Hungarian émigré who left in 1919.) It was Moura who introduced Korda to H. G. Wells and initiated their collaboration.

  Korda was also acquainted with Lockhart, who dined with him at Sibyl Colefax’s house in May 1935, together with the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson. The Prince of Wales showed his political colours at the gathering; according to Lockhart the Prince ‘came out very strong for friendship with Germany: never heard him talk so definitely about any subject before’.18

  For the time being H. G. and Moura enjoyed being part of the movie crowd, especially if it included royalty. And Wells would not have to wait much longer for Moura’s visits to Russia to end.

  At the beginning of 1936, H. G. sailed home from a trip to America. As he walked down the platform at Waterloo station, dodging the inevitable reporters, he saw Moura waiting for him. She jokingly accused him of having another lover while he had been away. Yes, he replied in kind; he had been unfaithful to the very best of his ability. A weight fell away from him. He believed at last that he had lost the obsession with her and that their relationship could now enter a more relaxed phase, free from his obsessive jealousy.19

  Moura continued to dart in and out as she pleased. They spent weekends away together, had scintillating conversations and made love in a comfortable rather than passionate manner.

  At the end of May H. G. noticed that Moura seemed depressed and would begin crying for no reason that he could fathom. She would not tell him the cause of her distress.

  In March she had secretly travelled to the Crimea for a short visit to Gorky at Tesseli. In April, back in England, she sent what was to be her last letter to him. ‘My dear friend,’ she wrote, ‘it is now almost a month since I have left you and yet it seems that I will wake up, come to disturb you at your desk, help working in the garden and everything else that makes life pleasant.’ She told him it had struck her ‘how inseparable and valuable my relationship to you is, my dear’.20

  Then, not long after receiving Moura’s letter, Gorky heard news that both of his beloved grandchildren were ill with influenza. Despite his own poor health, on 26 May he left his nurse and companion, Lipa, to go to Moscow to visit them.

  Some said that he became ill on the train as a result of a cold draught from the windows; others that he was ill before he left Tesseli. Still others believed that Gorky did not become ill until several days after visiting the children, and that he caught their infection. Influenza in a person with Gorky’s tuberculosis would be very serious. In Pravda it was stated that he was stricken with illness on 1 June – after he had returned to his home near Moscow. Seventeen physicians gathered around his bedside.

  In Moscow, the first round of Stalin’s infamous show trials, by means of which he would eventually purge all his rivals and their allies and supporters, were about to get under way. Ultimately, most of the prominent Bolsheviks still surviving from the era of the Revolution would be arrested, tried and executed. There would be only two notable exceptions – Stalin himself and Trotsky, who was in exile abroad. Proceedings had begun in secret the previous year, with the arrest and interrogation of Lev Kamenev, the former deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and Grigory Zinoviev, the former head of the Petrograd Soviet and Northern Commune. After Lenin’s death, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev had formed a triumvirate which had ruled the Soviet Union for a while. In the struggle for dominance that followed, Stalin was the victor, and from the mid-1920s he had become effective autocrat of the USSR. But they were still alive, still a threat and needed to be purged. They were arrested and interrogated under the direction of Yagoda (who would himself be purged during the third round of trials in 1938).

  Kamenev had been Gorky’s friend. Zinoviev had been his bitter enemy. Now, facing trial and execution, they both appealed to him for support. Gorky was still worshipped by the masses, and had never been able to ignore a plea for help, even from an old enemy. Stalin, who planned many more such trials and executions, realised that Gorky had become more of a liability than an asset. But to dispose of him through trial and execution would be unthinkable. For Stalin, Gorky’s illness, if it should prove fatal, would be a blessed coincidence.

  The NKVD had a sophisticated toxicology department in which they developed poisons and biological weapons including pneumococcus bacteria capable of inducing pneumonia. Rather than putting Gorky on trial and upsetting the Russian people, what better than exposing him to a deadly infection?21 For a man known to suffer from lung disease, such a death would be expected anyway and nothing sinister would be suspected. Several other members of Gorky’s household, including the superintendent, his wife and the cook, all became ill with what was diagnosed as angina. They displayed symptoms similar to Gorky’s, although none had had direct contact with him. Yet of all those who sat with him throughout his illness not one fell ill.

  Within days, Moura arrived at his bedside. Another extraordinary coincidence. How had she been informed of his illness, obtained a visa and organised the journey so quickly? Possibly it was a pre-planned visit that just happened to coincide with Gorky’s sudden illness. Or possibly not. According to a close friend, she was collected from her home in Knightsbridge by a black limousine which had been sent by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador. She flew to Berlin and then on to Moscow on 5 June; her entry into the USSR was not marked in her passport.22

  Not for the first or last time, Tania was required to provide a cover for her mother’s absence; she wrote to tell H. G. that Moura had become ill while visiting her sister in Paris and had to recuperate in a nursing home. H. G., either suspicious or worried – possibly both – kept pestering Tania for the name of the home so that he could contact her. Tania hated telling him all these lies. She had begged Moura to let her reveal the truth. At first Moura refused, but after a couple of days she relented. Tania was allowed to tell H. G. that Moura had heard news of Gorky’s illness and had left the nursing home hurriedly to visit him prior to his likely death. ‘Thank goodness no more lies required,’ Tania wrote in her diary. ‘Still have to pretend I knew nothing of all this till today. Fed up being intermediary every time. Makes me look a complete fool.’23

  Did Gorky really want Moura there at his deathbed? He was being nursed by Lipa, who hated Moura. Given the speed of her passage from Knightsbridge to Moscow, it was quite possibly on Stalin’s direct orders that Moura was invited into Russia so that she could bring with her the remaining archives. But although she brought some papers with her, much still remained unaccounted for.

  Gorky’s illness became worse, and by 8 June he was not expected to live. His close friends and relatives began to gather to pay their last respects. Yekaterina, Timosha and Moura were among them.

  Gorky opened his eyes and said: ‘I am already far away, it is very hard for me to return . . .’ After a pause, he added: ‘All my life I have thought how I might improve this moment . . .’ Kriuchkov entered the room and announced that Sta
lin was on his way . . . ‘Let them come, if they can get here in time,’ said Gorky.24

  He was injected with camphor, which rallied him for a while, and by the time Stalin arrived Gorky seemed so much improved that he was surprised at having been brought to see what he had supposed to be a dying man. He demanded that everyone leave; he wanted time alone to speak with Gorky.

  Despite rallying for a while once more on 16 June, Gorky suffered a relapse. On the night of 17 June a raging storm began and hailstones pelted the roof. Gorky was kept alive with oxygen but by morning it was clear that nothing further could be done. He died at eleven o’clock. Moura, overcome by grief, lay beside his dead body for some time.

  The funeral was a rushed affair, carried out the next day. Gorky had wished to be buried next to his son, but instead a cremation was hastily arranged and the ashes placed in the Kremlin wall. Despite the rush, a massive crowd, estimated at eight hundred thousand, attended the funeral procession in Red Square. Word of his death had travelled fast. People were hurt in the inevitable crush. Moura attended the funeral as part of his family, sitting between Yekaterina and Maria Andreyeva, his other long-term lovers; in front sat Timosha with his granddaughters Darya and Marfa. André Gide made a speech at the funeral. According to Moura, while Gide was in mid-speech, Stalin turned to the writer Aleksei Tolstoy and asked, ‘Who’s that?’ Tolstoy replied, ‘That’s Gide. He’s our great conquest. He’s the leading writer of France and he’s ours!’ Stalin grunted and said, ‘I never trust these French fellows.’25 Stalin was right; on his return to France, Gide wrote a long anti-Communist work entitled Retour de l’URSS.

  Moura’s role in the last illness and death of Maxim Gorky was never clear. There was a rumour that she administered a fatal dose of poison during his last days. But even if she could be persuaded to do such a thing (the mortal fear that Stalin inspired might be enough to make her comply) with several NKVD personnel and a nurse at hand it was unlikely that Moura would be chosen for such a task. And her love and admiration for Gorky, while nowhere near as strong as her love for Lockhart, were sincere. But she did not come away from the business with her hands clean. She might well have been brought there on Stalin’s or Yagoda’s instructions. And part of the plan might have been that she bring the Gorky archive that was in her keeping. But she did not bring it all, and if she hoped to get something in return, she did not get all of that either.

  During the course of Gorky’s illness, Moura and Pyotr Kriuchkov prepared a will in Gorky’s name, assigning Moura the rights to the archive in her possession and to the foreign royalties on his published works, and everything else to Kriuchkov. He refused to sign it. So Moura did what she is alleged to have done on numerous previous occasions – she forged his signature. Moura gave the document to Yekaterina, with the instruction to hand it on to either Stalin or Vyacheslav Molotov, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. Yekaterina read it, and was appalled that Gorky had left nothing to her. She claimed later that she had given it to Stalin, and that he gave it to ‘someone else’. It disappeared and was never seen again.26 Nonetheless, Moura, who had been receiving Gorky’s foreign royalties under power of attorney, continued to receive them for a further three years before the right expired under Soviet law.

  Moura’s only account of the whereabouts of Gorky’s archives – including not just the letters but manuscripts as well – was that she left them in Kallijärv, where they were burned when the Nazis invaded the country in 1941. H. G. Wells believed that Moura had dealt with Gorky’s papers in exactly the way she had promised to when she left Sorrento in 1933; despite the pressure on her, she had kept them out of the hands of the NKVD, and thereby preserved dozens, if not hundreds, of lives.

  But again Wells was deceived. Shortly after attending the funeral Moura returned briefly to London, but on 26 July she flew abroad again. She let it be known that she was going to Estonia. However, there is evidence that she had returned to Moscow in late September to put Gorky’s archive ‘in order’. This probably meant that she brought another instalment of archive material back into Russia with her, possibly from a cache hidden in Estonia. The evidence is that in March 1937, Yagoda, via Pyotr Kriuchkov, gave her £400 in payment for this work.27 Shortly afterwards, Yagoda was arrested on Stalin’s order, and charged with corruption and spying. Moura did not visit Russia again until after Stalin’s death.

  What happened to the rest of Gorky’s archive? Did it really burn in Estonia? Or is it true that when the Soviet Union annexed Estonia in 1940, the NKVD searched for and found the Gorky papers that Moura had secreted there? Whatever went on in Estonia, it seems that much of the archive Moura took out of Italy in 1933 remained in her keeping for the rest of her life.28

  22

  A Very Dangerous Woman

  1936–1939

  Saturday 13 October 1936, London

  The lobby and staircase of the Savoy Hotel were a carnival of literary eminence that evening. The Poets, Essayists and Novelists Club (PEN) was giving a banquet to celebrate the seventieth birthday of its former president, Mr H. G. Wells. The guest of honour stood at the top of the stairs; on one side of him was J. B. Priestley, performing the office of master of ceremonies; on the other was Baroness Budberg, performing the role of stand-in wife. Priestley’s wife was also there, lending an air of respectability.1

  H. G.’s dinner was held in the Savoy ballroom; it seated five hundred, and PEN had received eight hundred applications from its members. Almost every notable British writer had come (J. M. Barrie had sent his apologies; he was too old for such things, he felt, although he was only six years older than H. G.).

  Leaving the crush at the head of the stairs, Moura entered the ballroom and walked among the tables. The people responsible for the seating plan had worried over where to place Baroness Budberg; should they treat her as his wife or not? She had done much herself for PEN, trying unsuccessfully to persuade the Russian authorities to allow its writers to join. Her place was marked at the head of the main table, next to H. G. Nearby were name cards marked for J. B. Priestley, Lady Diana Cooper, George Bernard Shaw (who was one of the speakers), Julian Huxley, Christabel Aberconway, Vera Brittain, J. M. Keynes, Somerset Maugham, and dozens of others. It might prove awkward at such a large gathering, with such intense attention focused on H. G., so Moura took her card and swapped it with another, further down the table among the humbler names.

  On this one occasion, Moura had no desire to be the centre of attention. This was an evening for H. G. and his friends. The menu for the evening was illustrated with a drawing by the Evening Standard political cartoonist David Low, showing Wells leaping youthfully over his seventieth milestone. Everyone knew that it was Moura who kept him on his toes.

  Elsewhere in London, Moura was receiving attention of a darker, more sinister kind. A week earlier, David ‘Archie’ Boyle of the Air Ministry’s intelligence section had received a long letter from Air Vice Marshal Conrad Collier, Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Moscow. It was marked Most Secret and contained some worrying observations.2

  Collier described a recent conversation with Maurice Dayet, the First Secretary of the French Embassy, in the course of which Moura Budberg’s name had been mentioned. Dayet said he thought she was a very dangerous woman. He had heard that she had been in Moscow for Gorky’s funeral, where she met with Stalin on at least three occasions and to whom she presented a gift of an accordion (which Stalin was known to be fond of playing). She had no Soviet visa but had obtained a special laissez-passer directly from the Soviet Embassy in Berlin.

  Dayet had also heard that earlier that year she had been at a social event where Duff Cooper, the British Secretary of State for War, was a guest. He had discussed many issues of political importance in front of Moura, which Dayet considered to be of great concern to British security. A couple of weeks after Duff Cooper’s indiscretion, Moura had made one of her trips to Moscow, where again she met with Stalin.

  Furthermore, Collier added, D
ayet had said that although Moura had not been seen in France for the previous three years, her last visit had coincided with an espionage case involving a naval officer who had been charged with the loss of important ciphers. The woman believed to be at the head of this conspiracy had never been caught, but was known as ‘Mary’. In Dayet’s opinion, this woman was Moura Budberg. It is true that Moura had told H. G. that she was taking ‘the cure’ in Brides-les-Bains, a spa town in the French Alps, in October 1934.3 Possibly this was yet another of her cover stories.

  Air Vice Marshal Collier added his own observation that he knew Baroness Budberg slightly, as his son had attended her adopted daughter Kira’s wedding.

  On 14 October (the day after H. G.’s Savoy dinner) Collier’s letter was passed to Major Valentine Vivien, head of SIS’s Section V, which handled counter-espionage, with a covering memo referring to some case notes from 1935 and noting that ‘I confess that I have always felt very doubtful about Budberg and have never regarded her case as having been satisfactorily cleared up.’ The memo recommended that inquiries be made about Kira, to determine whether she was ‘entirely reliable’.4

  The letter and memo prompted a flurry of inquiries in Whitehall’s intelligence sections. They wanted to verify the source and it was suggested that the French Deuxième Bureau should be contacted. One SIS informant, identified only as ‘L. F.’, mentioned that his wife had known Moura for over twenty years, and that he himself had met her for the first time earlier that year. L. F. corroborated much of the detail in Collier’s letter, including her friendship with Duff Cooper, and added that she was an intimate friend of Paul Scheffer, the German journalist. L. F.’s wife had warned him, he wrote, prior to his meeting with Moura, that she liked to be considered the best-informed woman in Europe, that she talked a lot, knew an immense number of people, and that he should ‘watch his step’ when speaking to her. L. F. confirmed that Moura had certainly heard things from members of government that should not have been mentioned in her presence.5