While preparations for departure went on around him, Lockhart sank into a torpor. He delayed setting off. The next day there was still no word from Moura, but still he lingered. A form of madness was taking him over. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t deal with official business, couldn’t concentrate on any thought but her. He sat in his room for hours on end, dealing out hand after mindless hand of patience and ‘badgering Hicks with idiotic questions’.15 The ever-patient, ever-loyal Hicks understood. He was fond of Moura, and had his own romantic interest in staying – in the form of young Liuba Malinina; along with Moura she had become part of the little intimate circle around Lockhart and Hicks.16 But patience and devotion must reach their limit. Another day came, and still there was no news. Departure could not be delayed forever; soon Lockhart would have to make the decision to go.
On Sunday afternoon, three days after the flight of the embassies from Vologda, a week since the collapse of Savinkov’s uprising, the telephone rang in Lockhart’s room. He picked it up, and with a rush of exquisite joy heard a familiar voice crackling down the line. It was Moura, and she was back in Petrograd, safe and sound and breathless with adventure. She was catching the train to Moscow that night. She would be with him tomorrow.
Lockhart’s depressed lassitude fell away from him. ‘The reaction was wonderful,’ he would recall. ‘Nothing now mattered. If only I could see Moura again, I felt that I could face any crisis, any unpleasantness the future might have in store for me.’17
As soon as she was back in Lockhart’s arms, Moura poured out her story. The journey from Estonia had been a dreadful ordeal – a full six days from Yendel to Petrograd, some of it on foot through terrible danger and hardship, sneaking or charming her way past German border guards. (She heard months later that the official who had helped her cross the border had been arrested for abetting an English spy, and was shown a dossier about her.)18 But here she was – safe and as full of love as ever. In celebration, the couple drove out to dine at the Yar, another of the opulent night-restaurants in Petrovsky Park.19
Overjoyed to have her back, Lockhart perhaps didn’t think to query her tale. Six days was a long time to travel two hundred miles, even with the certainty that she must have had to walk the twenty-two versts* from Narva to Yamburg, which she had known beforehand she would have to do (‘won’t I be nice and thin,’ she wrote).20 An air of mystery would always surround this journey. In later life she would magnify the account further, claiming that she had walked the entire way from Yendel to Petrograd.21 Any possibility that she might have been anywhere else en route, or spent less time at Yendel than she claimed, was never raised by Lockhart – at least not that he ever wrote down. He was the only source for her having told this story upon her return.22
The final leg of her journey had been as quick as could be. She had boarded the train for Moscow immediately, whereas before she had always had to wait for passes and tickets to be obtained through her diplomatic friends. Now, with the authority of the Cheka behind her, she could travel however she wished within Russia. It was all the more surprising, then, that the journey between Yamburg and Petrograd should have taken so long.
No doubt it was wholly coincidental that the day after Moura’s arrival in Moscow, a stunning and unsettling event took place hundreds of miles away in Kiev. On Tuesday 30 July, Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, the detested commander-in-chief of the German forces in the Ukraine, the man who was in effect Hetman Skoropadskyi’s overlord, was assassinated. A bomb was thrown into his car from a passing taxi, mortally wounding both him and an aide. The aide, a Captain Dressler, bled to death; Field Marshal Eichhorn, with multiple wounds, lingered for a few hours in hospital before dying of a heart attack.23
The reactions to the murder were varied and interesting. The assassin, a twenty-three-year-old student from Moscow named Boris Donskoy, was arrested at the scene. When he was interrogated by the German military authorities, the first question the interrogator asked him was, ‘Do you know Lockhart? Do you know who I mean?’ They relayed a report on the interrogation to Moscow, where Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin gave a précis to a startled Lockhart. Chicherin and his deputy, Lev Karakhan, were gleeful about the whole business – in their personal view it served the imperialists right for acting against the wishes of the proletariat.24 One could almost imagine that there were elements within the Bolshevik government who had wanted the German Field Marshal dead.
At first Donskoy denied any connection to Lockhart or anyone British. He was a member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, acting in response to the crushing of his comrades in the wake of the Mirbach assassination. But by Saturday 10 August, when he was publicly hanged in Kiev on the orders of a German military court, Donskoy was claiming that his group of Left SRs had been ‘bought’ by representatives of the Allies.25
Both Trotsky and Lenin were furious. Despite what some commissars might be saying behind closed doors, Lenin valued Russia’s peace with Germany, and had already begun making speeches declaring that Germany was Russia’s only friend, and that ‘Anglo-French imperialism is now threatening the Soviet Republic on a large scale’; he now spoke out against Eichhorn’s assassination, calling it an Allied attempt to provoke German intervention in Russia.26
At the same time, George Hill – whose agents had been active in the Ukraine since the spring – had one of his occasional meetings with Trotsky, with whom he had long enjoyed a cordial and fruitful relationship. In front of the British officer’s eyes, the furious Trotsky tore up Hill’s travel passes and dismissed him from his office. The breach didn’t end there. Later that evening, Hill received a tip-off from one of his contacts in the Cheka: Trotsky had ordered his arrest. An experienced agent and survivor of two attempts on his life by German assassins, Captain Hill was prepared. Leaving behind most of his possessions and taking only his trusty sword-stick, he slipped away from the Elite Hotel and made his way to one of the safe apartments he had secretly set up. He had become a hunted man, and from now on would be living on his wits – a form of subsistence he was thoroughly used to.27
If Hill or his Ukrainian agents had any connection with the Eichhorn assassination, he never admitted it in print. Likewise, if Lockhart knew of it, or if Moura did not spend all her time away shuddering at her husband’s touch or walking long distances, they both thoroughly covered their tracks. One person who hadn’t quite erased every trace was Francis Cromie, who was busy cooking up intrigues against the Bolsheviks on every front. On 26 July he wrote to Admiral Hall, head of naval intelligence, that he had ‘sent a trusted agent to Kiev to keep in touch with Black Sea intrigues’.28
According to the Western press, Bolshevism was doomed. Even Lenin’s own speech to the Central Committee on 28 July was laden with darkness. He spoke of the ‘hard and humiliating peace’ with Germany, and of how the imperialist Allies and the White and Left SR counter-revolutionaries were beginning to ‘forge an iron ring in the East, in order to suffocate the Soviet Republic’. Even German newspapers were predicting that ‘Bolshevism must collapse’.29
Moura, keeping both eyes open and her dainty fingers on every pulse, would be ready if it did. And equally she would be ready if it did not. Whoever prevailed, whoever perished, she would be sure to survive. She had come a long way since her naive attachment to Kerensky – the ruler turned fugitive turned exiled pariah. (Moura had been faintly amused to read in the Red papers lately that Kerensky had been ‘beaten by the workmen’ in London when he appeared there publicly for the first time.30)
She had learned how to keep pace with the tide – to run with the wolves and with the hunters. What she had not yet learned was how not to suffer a broken heart.
Notes
* Now Kingisepp.
* 1 verst = ⅔ mile.
PART 2
Love and Survival: 1918–1919
Those were exceptional times, when life was the cheapest of all commodities, and when no one could see twenty-four hours ahead. We had flouted a
ll conventions. We had gone everywhere together, sharing our dangers and our pleasures during a period in which months were equivalent to years.
Robert Bruce Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, 1934
10
The Lockhart Plot
August 1918
If Bolshevism was going to collapse, now was the time for the foundations to crack and the cornerstones to give way. The British military force, which had been the subject of rumour and speculation for two months and more, finally began landing at Archangel on Friday 2 August. The Allies were determined to open up their Eastern Front against Germany, and would fight their way through the Bolsheviks to do it.
Through that hot summer weekend, the news leaped from town to town and from newspaper to commissary office like a fire-front, growing as it went. General Poole had landed with ten thousand men, it was said – no, twenty; no, fifty; no, one hundred thousand Allied troops had come ashore and would soon be swarming down the Vologda–Moscow route to join up with units of the Czechoslovak Legion on the Volga. At the same time, seven Japanese divisions were coming through Siberia; together the Allied force would hammer the few loyal divisions of the Red Army and throttle Bolshevism in its cradle.
Some of the less level-headed commissars began to panic, and moves were made to prepare to destroy the Bolshevik archives. Lev Karakhan at the foreign ministry told Lockhart that the government would go underground and fight if necessary. In the meantime, they looked to their new friend for help. At a meeting in the German Embassy, the new Ambassador, Karl Helfferich, turned down the Bolsheviks’ urgent plea for a Russian–German military alliance to meet the British offensive. Instead he secretly wired Berlin to suggest that Germany act now to destroy Bolshevism. His suggestion went against official German policy, but received a sympathetic hearing from many in the government. But it was impossible. Germany was reeling from the failure of its spring offensive on the Western Front, and hard-pressed to resist the enemy advances there; chaos and war on its eastern borders would be unthinkable. And so, unwilling to share his predecessor’s fate or be caught in Moscow by an Allied invasion, Helfferich departed for Berlin, having spent barely a week in Moscow.1
The Bolshevik leaders began to know real fear, and struck out more harshly than ever against anything they perceived as a threat. A few days after the Archangel landing, the arrests of British nationals in Moscow and Petrograd began. Overnight, Lockhart and his people had become enemies of the state.
Since her return to Moscow from Yendel, Moura had begun living with Lockhart, held at his side by the force of events as much as by her reluctance to be parted from him.
It would always be believed afterwards that there were other ties holding her in Moscow. Her days of spying in the Ukraine were over, but the Cheka had a more pressing use for her.2 Possessing the heart of the British agent made her an ideal spy; living with him placed her in a perfect position. It would later be believed – though never proven – that she passed information from inside Lockhart’s mission to the Cheka.
If she was guilty, her motives were deep and complex, and sprang from the will to survive. Her love for Lockhart was profound, and it both excited and bewildered her. But for Moura the survival instinct was more profound still, and she was learning to lay her bets with cunning and caution.
Survival was a powerful imperative, and for a woman of the aristocratic class living in the Red surge of 1918 it was a difficult trick to pull off. Other people of her class and kind – aristocrats, bourgeoisie, the wealthy, the propertied and landed – were a monster that Bolshevism was determined to slay. And they were willing to do it literally. Those who hadn’t the will or the wit or the means to escape Russia were dispossessed and became enemies in their own homeland. The campaign against them had been slow to rise, but was gathering momentum as the spring of 1918 turned to summer. The Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People had been drafted by Lenin in the wake of the Revolution and passed by the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918. It gave the new state a name – the Russian Soviet Republic – and was its first functional constitution.3 It conjured the Red Army and the Soviet bureaucracy into existence, repudiated Russia’s sovereign debt and abolished private ownership of property and capital, bringing all of Russia’s land, industry and banks into state ownership. Most rural lands and city buildings had been seized by the state before the end of January, under an earlier decree, but private homes and personal wealth were mostly untouched, aside from widespread incidents of robbery and squatting. But from the spring of 1918 onwards, that began to change.
Members of Moura’s class were officially termed ‘former people’. They had lost their power and lands, and now the time had come to dispossess them of everything that was left. By the height of the summer more and more were homeless or living jam-packed into shared rooms, and consigned to forced labour; there was even talk now of putting the more troublesome elements, such as priests and landowners, into concentration camps.4
Owners of safe deposit boxes were forced to turn over their contents. The more foresighted among the wealthy had hidden their valuables in sealed-up walls in their homes, or buried them in their gardens.5 Living in Petrograd, Moura had been severely pressed for money to pay the astronomical prices for food, fuel and clothing to sustain herself and her elderly, ailing mother. In the spring she had raised cash by selling shares through her employer, Hugh Leech, and had borrowed 10,000 roubles from Denis Garstin to tide her over; Lockhart had been appalled when he learned of it. ‘Don’t be cross that I didn’t ask you,’ she wrote to him, ‘because I purposely don’t want any questions of money between us, Baby Boy, don’t you see?’6 But she would put pleas for flour and sugar in the margins of her letters, and her mother’s health was a constant worry.7 Maria Zakrevskaya knew about her daughter’s friendship with Lockhart and thought him rather young; ‘What a clever face – but he looks 18!’ she had said when Moura showed her his photograph. When Moura went away to Yendel, filled with foreboding, she had arranged that if necessary her mother could wire Lockhart and he would look after her financially.8 (The fact that she felt it necessary to make such a provision could be taken as evidence that she expected something more dangerous than a journey to see her husband – such as a side-trip to Kiev perhaps.)
Moura had managed to avoid the worst of the living conditions that people of her class were being reduced to. She no longer had her own (or rather Djon’s) home, but she had managed to save her mother’s apartment at 8 Shpalernaya ulitsa,* close to the river and the British Embassy. How she achieved this, she never revealed.9
More terrible than the dispossessions was the hostility of the Bolshevik state and the Cheka. As their hold on power looked like it might be broken, their attitude to the ‘former people’ grew ever more intolerant. The era of the Red Terror was beginning, and its atmosphere was already growing in the summer heat. Later that year, one senior Cheka officer would declare: ‘We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted . . . against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? . . . And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused.’10 Class war was the way forward, even if the class was already all but defeated. ‘There is no other way to liberate the masses,’ said Lenin, ‘except by crushing the exploiters by violence. That is the occupation of the Cheka, and therein consists their service to the proletariat.’11
And somehow Moura avoided the forced labour, the theft of personal belongings, eviction, and arrest and interrogation. All this despite her prominence, her background and her known closeness to the British imperialist missions in Petrograd and Moscow, who by the summer of 1918 were believed by the Cheka to be involved in counter-revolutionary activities. She herself had been a servant of the Cheka, but following the Left SR uprising of July, the organisation was purging itself of potential counter-revolutionary infiltrators. Moura must ha
ve looked like a potential candidate.
Something saved her. History would conclude that she had struck a deal, over and above the arrangement that had sent her spying in the Ukraine. Men at the very top of the Cheka – its leader Felix Dzerzhinsky and his deputy Yakov Peters – were watching Captain Francis Cromie and Robert Bruce Lockhart very closely and very quietly, and as July gave way to August and Moura settled in Moscow, they were beginning to penetrate the British agents’ innermost dealings.
Lockhart’s mission and domestic ménage had altered since Moura was last with him. All that remained was Lockhart himself, his secretary George Lingner, young Lieutenant Guy Tamplin, and of course his loyal right hand, Captain Will Hicks. George Hill had gone into hiding, and Denis Garstin had long departed, ordered north to join the military establishment at Archangel several weeks prior to the landings.
The scene had changed too. At the beginning of August Lockhart had been notified by the authorities that he could no longer stay in the Elite Hotel. It was being requisitioned for Soviet use – in this case by the General Council of Russian Trades Unions. He had already been forced to find premises for his diplomatic business, and had ended up with an office in a building on Bolshaya Lubyanka ulitsa,† cheek by unneighbourly jowl with the Cheka headquarters (there really seemed to be no escaping their presence).
There was a hidden, accidental significance in both the Russian security service and Lockhart’s mission occupying this ancient street. If you followed the Bolshaya Lubyanka out past the northeastern suburbs, you would find that it became the main road which led to Yaroslavl, Vologda and Archangel. If the Allied army came to Moscow, the Bolshaya Lubyanka was the road upon which they would march.
A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy Page 15