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

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A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy Page 10

by Deborah McDonald


  In the afternoon, Dzerzhinsky sent a car to collect Robins and Lockhart, and arranged for his deputy, Yakov Peters, to give them a conducted tour of the scene of the raids.

  Peters was an unforgettable character. Latvian by birth, he was a fanatical revolutionary. He had lived in exile in England for some years, and stood trial at the Old Bailey in 1911 as one of the participants in the Sidney Street siege, in which three policemen had been shot dead by a gang of radicals. Peters was acquitted of murder and in 1917 returned to Russia to take part in the Revolution. He had a broad, round face with an upturned nose and a downturned mouth like a sickle blade, and looked on the world with an intense, burning stare. As a Chekist he was utterly implacable, entirely without pity or passion. He would execute and torture freely if needed, but took no delight in it. The security of the state was what counted, and like both Lenin and Dzerzhinsky he believed that terror was the most effective way to achieve it.11

  But he had a civilised side, and was soft-spoken. Later that year, Lockhart would be forced to get to know Yakov Peters much more closely, and despite everything he knew about the man, and the people he had summarily condemned to torture or to death, and everything Lockhart himself suffered at his hands, he found it difficult to dislike him.

  Peters had a soft spot for the British and Americans, and rather liked Lockhart and Robins. He seemed to enjoy taking them from house to house along Povarskaya Street, exhibiting the corpses and the devastation that resulted from the Cheka’s merciless handling of counter-revolution. Lockhart couldn’t summon up much feeling for the dead and the punished; the squalor they had created and in which they had lived in these luxurious, comfortable houses – filth everywhere, paintings slashed, faeces on the carpets – disgusted him.12 This district had once been his home, during his days at the Consulate. He’d shared an apartment with Jean just one street away from this very spot. These houses, soiled and degraded, had belonged to his neighbours and acquaintances.

  But the woman shot dead in the drawing room of the Gracheva house was different. Prostitute or not, she was young, and presumably innocent. Peters commented coldly that perhaps it was for the best that she had died, but whether he meant because she was a prostitute or merely that she wasn’t a very attractive one, he didn’t say.13

  This was a day that would remain in Lockhart’s memory forever. It proved one thing – that the Bolsheviks, for all their vacillating over the war, were fully capable of screwing down a steel clamp on their cities. They might create a powerful nation yet. It wasn’t clear at this moment whether that was a reassuring or a terrifying prospect.

  Sunday 21 April 1918

  Russia was green again. The snows had thawed and the leaves were budding on the trees that flickered past the train window.

  Moura had been stuck so long in Petrograd, it was strange to be in motion again. About this time last year she had travelled to Yendel, hoping that the revolutionary madness was over and the world might settle down again. Now Yendel was cut off and the world had tumbled back into an insanity without cure. She wondered if she would ever see her children again. Moura was willing to admit that she didn’t have much of a maternal instinct, but by her own reckoning she loved her children. Whether she loved them enough to sacrifice herself for them hadn’t yet been put to the test.14

  It was a long haul to Moscow, all day and overnight, bringing back memories of the interminable trek to the family estate at Beriozovaya Rudka when she was a child. That was almost twice as far as Moscow – about eight hundred miles – and after the death of her father there was never any joy at the end of it. How different things were now, in every way. Every mile was bringing her closer to the moment when she would see Lockhart at last.

  When the train slowed through the northern suburbs of Moscow, Moura’s heart beat a little faster. As soon as it jolted to a halt in Nikolayevsky station* in a cloud of steam and smoke she collected her valise, straightened her skirt, and stepped down onto the platform. She was gallantly assisted by Commander George Le Page, a heavily built, bearded and genial naval officer who had travelled down on the same train. Le Page, a Guernsey islander by birth, was a member of Francis Cromie’s mission, and had come to Moscow on urgent business with Lockhart.

  Naval affairs were not going well for the British or the Russians. Cromie – ‘old Crow’, as Moura called him – had been depressed for the past two weeks, having finally had to destroy his beloved submarine flotilla. At the beginning of April it had been confirmed that Germany was sending an army division to take control of Finland, where the conflict between Red and White Finnish and Russian forces was still spluttering away. The Royal Navy flotilla, still sheltering at Helsingfors after the retreat from Reval, was under threat. With no operational crews, there was no way to mobilise the submarines. Cromie travelled up to Helsingfors on 3 April. The business community there, who had helped sponsor the German invasion, offered him £50,000 if he would prevent the Red Russian fleet from intervening in the German landings. Had he been a mercenary, Cromie could have become a rich man – just recently the anti-Bolshevik Russian White Guard had offered him five million if he would hand over the flotilla to them.15

  Whatever their value on the open market, the subs would be priceless to the Germans. Cromie ordered his second-in-command, Lieutenant Downie, to destroy the flotilla. Over the next five days, while the German division landed and closed in on Helsingfors, the subs were towed out into the ice floes, charges were set and detonated. Each sinking was followed a few minutes later by a titanic explosion as the sea water rushed into the breached hull and blew up the massive batteries.16 Cromie stayed on in Helsingfors to carry on the scuttling of three British merchant vessels.17 Exhausted after days of ‘hard labour as engineer, stoker, deck hand and skipper combined, with a crew of useless army officers’, he ‘got out of Helsingfors in the nick of time’ with the help of his White friends.18 He was deeply upset by the loss of the submarines, and felt he would never forgive the White Finns for it.19 With the flotilla scuttled, the last vestige of Captain Cromie’s naval role had ceased; from now on, he was wholly a diplomat and intelligence agent.

  Moura, working every day in the offices of the British Petrograd mission, took it all in. Intrigue thrilled her, and she was always hungry for information. Some of her inquisitiveness came from a need to understand what was happening to her country and what its future might be, but it was also exhilarating to feel oneself a part of world-shaping events.20 Her interest had attracted notice, and one or two members of the British mission were worried about her friendship with Lockhart – ‘Have Lockhart warned if there is any suspicion of Benckendorff,’ one of them wrote.21 But Moura never gave them any real cause for suspicion, and was allowed to continue in her job.

  She and Le Page took a cab to Petrovka Street. Moura, who wasn’t very familiar with the city, looked curiously at the passing streets. It was less European than Petrograd – more onion domes and squat Asiatic arches, slightly fewer Palladian façades – yet it wasn’t vastly different. But as she would soon learn, the atmosphere was changing, becoming more controlled, with fewer radical dissenters, less crime and an intense climate of fear.

  So this was the new nest of the Bolsheviks. Moura wondered how she would like it. It was like a different country from Petrograd. She wondered whether it had changed Lockhart, and how she might feel about him when she saw him again after so many weeks of anxious waiting.

  A week had passed since the attack on the Anarchists, and Lockhart’s workload showed no sign of letting up. He was still having to manage almost all of it alone.

  He had been without Captain Hicks since a few days after their arrival in Moscow. Lockhart had despatched him to Siberia to investigate reports that there was a German bandit army running loose, made up of former prisoners of war who’d been armed and mobilised by the Bolsheviks. The report came from SIS, and its claims were flatly denied by Trotsky, who happily gave his blessing for an investigation. Hicks had been gone over a month now
, and had travelled all over Siberia, visiting prison camps in company with an officer from the American Red Cross. Not a single armed German had been found.22 Lockhart laid the blame for this farce at the door of his enemy, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour and his ludicrous policy-making – ‘what we are playing at God alone knows,’ he wrote tartly in his diary, ‘but one cannot expect much with a Foreign Minister of 74’.23

  Hicks was due back any day now, and Lockhart would be very glad to see him. ‘Hickie’ had become an indispensable colleague and friend. He was also much more of a dab hand with ciphers.

  Meanwhile, there was work. Sunday morning was entirely taken up by meetings in his rooms at the Elite. Nothing unusual in that. What was unusual was the feeling of suppressed excitement tingling away under his skin. At ten o’clock, Le Page arrived from Petrograd.24 There were fears on all sides about the Russian Black Sea fleet, which was vulnerable to being seized by the Germans operating in the Ukraine. The British were worried for obvious reasons, and the Bolsheviks weren’t sure of the loyalty of the sailors.25 Le Page had served with the fleet before the Revolution, and knew it well. He needed Lockhart’s opinion on the political situation and access to Trotsky (who had taken up his post as war commissar despite Russia’s continuing failure to reopen the war against Germany).

  There was other worrying news from Petrograd. Major McAlpine, a member of the military mission that was evacuating supplies who fancied himself an expert on the Russian situation, was sending reports to London criticising Lockhart’s policy of ‘blindly backing’ the Bolshevik government.26 McAlpine wasn’t the only one stirring up trouble, either; several officers (thankfully not Cromie or Garstin, who remained loyal) were campaigning against him. ‘Stupid idiots,’ Lockhart commented acidly in his diary.27 But with the continuing peace and the imminent arrival of a German Ambassador in Moscow, it was getting harder to resist the view that the Bolsheviks were not to be trusted.28

  Lockhart spent a long time in conversation with Le Page, but inside he was boiling with impatience. He was only interested in the visitor who had arrived with Le Page. After the disappointment of the letter Garstin had brought last week, Lockhart had been thrilled to get a second note, scribbled hastily on a page torn out of a pocket pad: ‘Dear Lockhart, Just a few hurried lines in the office to tell you am better . . . Do write again and keep a room for me in the Elite for about Sunday. Best love, Moura B—’29

  After Le Page had gone, there were still more meetings to be got through. Would they never end? On and on they went. Moura was here, in this very building, and he was being kept from her. It was nearly one o’clock when the last visitor shook hands and was ushered out of the door. Lockhart paused in front of the looking-glass, adjusted his tie, pushed back his hair, shot his cuffs, then dashed to the landing. Gathering himself, he descended the stairs soberly to the next floor, where there was a suite set aside as the mission’s living and dining room. He paused outside the door, took a breath, and let himself in.

  The room was aglow with midday spring sunshine. Standing near the window, her dark, waved hair alive with light, was Moura. Lockhart paused, then walked towards her in silence, so overcome he couldn’t trust himself to speak. When those eyes turned on him, and she smiled that smile, he knew that this was a bond unlike any other, that this was a woman he could never let go. ‘Into my life,’ he would recall, ‘something had entered which was stronger than any other tie, stronger than life itself.’30

  From this moment on, there would be no more pretence, no more stolen kisses, no more formality. For Lockhart it would be a passionate adventure; for Moura it would begin as a struggle to accept the feelings that he had woken in her.

  That evening they went to the ballet, a performance of Coppélia at the Bolshoi.31 Lockhart had once sat in a box here and watched Kerensky whip the aristocratic audience into a frenzy with his swoon-inducing oratory. (He had little idea that the woman sitting close beside him now had been Kerensky’s mistress for a short time.) Coppélia was a much calmer affair. The aristocrats in the boxes had been replaced by high-ranking Bolsheviks, but the ballet was the same as it had ever been, and it was possible to forget that the Revolution had ever happened.32

  Whether Lockhart was conscious of any irony in the subject of the ballet – and if so, whether he identified at all with Franz, besotted with a woman brought to life in his own imagination, or wondered if there was a Dr Coppélius pulling strings anywhere behind the scenes – he never recorded it. His adoration of Moura was complete. For her part, Moura still didn’t know quite what to make of her feelings. She wasn’t a woman who loved, any more than Coppélia was. Or at least, she had not been until now. When she looked back on this time, she came to believe that she was waking up, coming to life.

  The illusion that they were back in the pre-revolutionary era was dispelled when the curtain came down and the orchestra struck up the ‘Internationale’ instead of the old ‘Bozhe, Tsarya khrani’.

  Walking out of the theatre into the chill spring night, Lockhart and Moura headed back to the Elite. There was nowhere else to go now that the city was being brought to heel. During their first few weeks in Moscow, Lockhart, Denis Garstin and visiting SIS agent George Hill had gone to an illegal cabaret, appropriately called the Podpolye,† in a cellar beneath the Okhotny Ryad, a street linking the Bolshoi Theatre and Red Square, just a block away from the Kremlin itself. In this underworld, champagne could be had and a rich, anti-Bolshevik audience listened to radical, decadent songs performed by the actor, composer and film star Alexander Vertinsky, who incorporated into his art the gypsy music that Lockhart found irresistibly sensuous. Vertinsky’s melancholy style struck a deep resonance with the audience, a class demoralised and without hope. One night the Podpolye was raided by a gang of bandits – former Russian army officers reduced to thieving. While filling their pockets with the clientele’s cash and watches, the bandits, noting Hill and Garstin’s uniforms, declined to take their belongings – ‘We do not rob Englishmen,’ said the bandit leader to Lockhart, and apologised on behalf of his country for the contemptible state it had got itself into.33

  There were no more cabarets now. The Bolsheviks had already criminalised them, and the purges which destroyed the Anarchists had also cleaned out the city’s underground nightlife.

  With the music of Coppélia still dancing in their heads, Lockhart and Moura arrived back at the Elite. With Hicks still away, Lockhart had the suite of rooms all to himself. He had booked Moura a room of her own, but she was in no particular hurry to retire. During the week that followed her room was destined not to be used very much.

  He wrote her poetry, just as he had for his Malayan princess. Moura was delighted by it. There were more evenings at the ballet, and outings. Lockhart had a motor car at his disposal, and he made full use of it. With the coming of spring, a favourite destination was the deserted palace at Arkhangelskoye, a few miles west of Moscow. The former country retreat of the Yusupov princes, it was an idyllic spot, a bijou palace set in woodland on a bend of the Moskva river. Although the estate lands had been taken over by peasants, the house had been left miraculously untouched. No looters, no squatters; just an elegant peach-coloured palace unlived-in and stuffed with priceless furniture and art. Hardly anyone in Moscow had transport, and for this brief springtime the place could be enjoyed in tranquil solitude.34

  By the time that week came to an end, Lockhart and Moura had crossed the boundary where romantic flirtation turned into a physical bond, and left it far behind. They had become lovers.

  My dear . . .

  Moura paused, her pen hanging over the note paper. How should she address him? Not as ‘Lockhart’, certainly, not now. But he never went by any other name. Her pen inscribed a hesitant line, and at the end of it wrote . . . Locky. She smiled.

  She was back in her own apartment in Petrograd after a week spent in Moscow, and still trying to make sense of things.35 She couldn’t even decide on the proper tone to take in a letter. ‘A hurried
line to tell you I miss you so very very much . . . Thanks so much for my week in Moscow. You don’t know how much I enjoyed it.’

  This was hopeless – was she writing to one of her Benckendorff in-laws? Or was she speaking to the man who excited her above all others, the man she had just opened herself up to, whose body she had welcomed into hers?

  ‘All this is fatuities,’ she went on impatiently, ‘that with natures like mine exist to hide the real true feelings. But you know I care for you very very much, or all that has happened wouldn’t have happened.’

  But what exactly had happened between them? Why could she still not work out what these feelings were? She wrote on, swinging erratically between the roles of friend and lover. She promised him ‘a deep, great friendship for the man who “likes Russia, has a great big brain and a kind heart”’. She implored him, ‘do not class me with the rest, will you, with the rest who trifle and with whom you trifle – but keep a separate little place for me, where I will remain a long time’.

  Still it wouldn’t come out right. She was like a singer trying to master a new, elusive tune, and the notes were all wrong.

  Abandoning sentiment, Moura fell back on her first instinct – inquisitiveness. She mentioned the worrying rumours that a German invasion was imminent, and that Petrograd would be unable to resist it. Did Lockhart know whether the Germans would come?

  Stumbling on, she resumed the casual tone that was her accustomed voice, the one she used with all her friends. ‘I hope to be able to come some time during Easter week.36 I am looking frightfully forward to it . . . Well – good-bye – or better au-revoir. Take care of yourself. Tell me what I should bring with me, I cannot get your hat, you never gave me the key.’

 

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