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

by Deborah McDonald

  And what of Moura’s own husband? How staid and tedious Djon seemed in comparison to the men Moura admired and loved. Here again was Stevenson, so apt to the moment:

  To be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce.12

  There was Djon to a T – hiding away at Yendel, saving up his life for a doomed Germanic future and for the imperial social order that would never return. If he were to die violently, like Cromie (some hope!), the comparison would be complete.

  But it was in the book’s third essay, on falling in love, that Stevenson’s words truly cut into Moura’s heart and spoke to her innermost soul:

  Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other’s eyes . . . They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God’s creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile . . . and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature. And all the while their acquaintances look on in stupor, and ask each other, with almost passionate emphasis, what so-and-so can see in that woman, or such-a-one in that man? I am sure, gentlemen, I cannot tell you.13

  Neither could Moura explain how love had caught her so unexpectedly, changed her, made her act against her innate self-regard. ‘The fact that you are far away,’ she wrote to Lockhart, ‘hurts with an acute pain that is almost unbearable and theories of courage and reason are swept away.’14

  Her heart quailed at the sorry sight of Cromie’s blood, and the ghostly atmosphere of the old Embassy. Every room was a mess; the place had been looted for valuables by Red Guards and ransacked for evidence by the Cheka. In the ballroom Moura found damaged furniture and despatch boxes piled up, their locks broken, and a safe, also broken open. ‘What a pitiful sight,’ she wrote. ‘Even for my half-British heart it was too much and lifted a storm of indignation in me.’ She found Cromie’s letters and left. ‘My heart fell so . . . all my world contains you alone and how all the rest has lost any importance.’15

  All she could do was work to bring about their reunion. It would have to take place in Stockholm, and would require a bewildering array of permits, passes, visas, documents and money. Putting forth all her charm, Moura acquired a permit to travel between Moscow and Petrograd, and cultivated the diplomats of every neutral nation, as well as Soviet ministers. She visited Yakov Peters, and relied on his influence to keep her safe from further arrest; she was concerned that the Petrograd Cheka (which now had a female chief, a fact that worried Moura) might have suspicions about her and take it upon themselves to snatch her. She had only just learned that the Estonian official who had helped her cross the border in July had been arrested by the Germans.16 This kind of talk made her nervous.

  There was gossip about her of a more trivial nature too. Everyone, from Moscow to Petrograd to London, knew about her affair with Lockhart, and her husband’s ‘high-falutin relations’ had begun ‘rather turning up their noses’ at her. Her friend Miriam wasn’t permitted by her parents to be seen in public with Moura. ‘I don’t mind one little bit, really,’ she wrote to Lockhart. ‘And it will all blow over sometime.’17

  What worried her far more was that he might have heard damaging gossip about her from people he met on his way home through Finland and Sweden. The dreaded, spiteful Thornhill, who had been with the British force at Archangel, was abroad again, with his inexplicable grudge against her. Now that Lockhart was beyond her reach, it terrified her that something might happen to lessen his love for her. ‘I’d go like a shot to Stockholm for a week and come back again,’ she wrote, ‘if it weren’t that gossip clings to me like flies to Tanglefoot paper – and people would surely call me a spy on either side.’18

  It hurt her that he seemed to write so rarely. Weeks and months went by with no word. She knew perfectly well that their letters could only pass in and out of Russia when a friendly diplomat was available to carry them, but the long silences pained and worried her.

  Lockhart’s journey home had been long and fraught. He had travelled in a group with his surviving comrades – George Hill (who had evaded capture and resumed his own identity), Lingner, Tamplin, and of course Hickie and his new wife Liuba. They talked over their experiences, trying to make sense of it all.

  The recriminations started coming at them as soon as they were out of Russia. Their fellow refugees blamed Lockhart for their plight, and let him know it to his face. It was a foretaste of the hostility he would experience when he got home.

  In Sweden he succumbed to the Spanish flu pandemic which had been killing people off at a rate to compete with the war. He survived it, just as he had survived his brush with the epidemic of Bolshevism, and arrived in England by way of Aberdeen on 19 October. At King’s Cross he was surrounded by reporters before he’d even got off the train – they got into his compartment and questioned him excitedly, demanding to see the revolver with which he had shot Lenin.19

  He was more worried about the interrogation he was going to receive from his wife and family. His affair with Moura was known about at the Foreign Office, and his enemies would have spared no effort in spreading it more widely. The person he most feared, though, was his formidable Scottish grandmother, who was a more effective investigator than any Chekist. She would inevitably subject him to a stern dressing-down, ‘richly illustrated with Biblical metaphors, on the inevitable consequences of sowing in the flesh’.20 His concern was practical – he would be dependent on this old lady for financial support if he failed to get a new posting from the Foreign Office.

  That seemed a likely outcome – his cosying-up with the Bolsheviks, his collusion with Lloyd George behind Balfour’s back and his nefarious dealings with intelligence agents had made him deeply unpopular in the Foreign Office.

  While he waited for the future course of his career to reveal itself, he recuperated from the effects of his ordeal and his illness. He went through the motions of patching up relations with Jean, and spent time at Bexhill-on-Sea and Exmouth, where he fished and played golf. He wrote a long, detailed report on Russia and Bolshevism, and recommended that if Britain were to continue its intervention, it must do so in proper numbers. The war with Germany had ended now, and the required troops would be available – he suggested two forces, each of fifty thousand men, invading by way of the Black Sea and Siberia. His report was received well in the Foreign Office (whatever they thought of his diplomacy, Lockhart couldn’t be faulted for his knowledge and his intelligence), but his proposal was dismissed.

  As he convalesced, as he dined out with Jean, clubbed with his friends, paced the golf courses, and politicked with the intelligence services and the Foreign Office, he thought constantly of Moura. He loved her still. He recalled how she had sustained him during his imprisonment, and saved him from despair. ‘Had this cataclysm of our arrest not intervened, I think I would have stayed in Russia for ever. Now we had been forcibly torn apart . . . For all I knew I might never see her again.’21

  He wrote to her, and experienced the same frustration she did at the long intervals caused by their reliance on the travels of friendly diplomats. Moura’s letters kept him going – ‘the mainstay of my existence’.22 He hoped that either Moura could get out of Russia or the Bolsheviks would fall. There was no telling which of those possibilities was the more remote.

  Some believed that Bolshevism must end soon; others (including British conservatives and King George V) feared that it would spread throughout Europe. Germany looked a likely next victim. Lockhart th
ought so too, but noted that ‘I think Germany, too, will have her Bolshevik phase, although it will be different from the Russian process.’23 He hadn’t wholly lost his ideals, and his sympathies were with the fledgling Labour Party. Lunching with some friends at his club, they realised that they wouldn’t know which side to take if it ever came to war between the ‘White’ and ‘Red’ sides in England. ‘Decided that we should all prefer to remain in bed.’24

  One way for him to be reunited with Moura would be if he were to return to Russia in an official capacity. In late November the Foreign Office proposed to give him a posting to Petrograd as ‘assistant commercial attaché’. But it was more a calculated insult than an opportunity, and completely unthinkable.25

  It would also have been fatal. The furore over the Lockhart Plot hadn’t gone away. Despite the efforts of Yakov Peters to downplay Lockhart’s involvement, on 25 November the Revolutionary Tribunal formally indicted him, along with a batch of other counter-revolutionary agents and agitators, on charges of espionage and conspiracy. Lockhart and Sidney Reilly, along with their French colleague Grenard, were found guilty in absentia and sentenced to death. If they were ever apprehended on Soviet soil, the sentence would be carried out.26

  Lockhart could never return to Russia as long as the Soviet state endured. And Moura couldn’t come to England – at least not yet. Their only hope in the meantime was a reunion in Stockholm; and then, in time, Moura might succeed in arranging all the prerequisites for their permanent reunion. She needed money, she needed to be free of Djon and ensure the safety of her children and mother. It all looked insurmountable.

  In the meantime, Lockhart fought with the chronic ill health that had dogged him since his return, hoped for a career opportunity which would make him an independent man again, and wrote his letters to Moura.

  The impenetrable ring around Russia was growing stronger by the month. Lenin, who was now well enough to resume making speeches, declared that the Red Army would soon be three million strong. Although there were still rumours that the Allied force in the north would win through to Moscow and Petrograd, nobody with any sense believed it any more. Moura certainly did not. (Her sources, while belying Lenin’s grandiose claim, confirmed that the army now numbered many hundreds of thousands of effective troops.) And as the Bolsheviks, whose position had seemed so precarious a few months ago, strengthened their hold it became all the more imperative – and all the more difficult – to get out.

  Moura had most of the documents she needed. The one thing that eluded her was a permit for her mother to cross into Finland. Without that, it would be impossible for the elderly Madame Zakrevskaya to leave Russia, and therefore impossible for Moura to join Lockhart in England. As soon as she could she would go to Estonia (provided she could get across the border) and begin divorce proceedings. She had received a letter from Djon, who claimed that his friends the Germans were ‘making things unpleasant to him’ because of the belief that she was spying for the Allies. So great was the inconvenience she had caused him, she joked that he might try to kill her if he had the opportunity.27

  Now that Germany had lost the war the Red Army was fighting its way into the Baltic provinces against resistance from nationalist armies, and Moura’s children in Estonia were in the path of the fighting.

  Her mother was unwell and vulnerable. Without Moura’s influence, her home would be requisitioned and Madame Zakrevskaya would starve. In early October the flat had been searched by government officials and all their provisions seized, supposedly for redistribution. In the ‘new burgeoning world’ (as Yakov Peters had called it) you were only entitled to eat if you were a member of the working classes. Moura had had to take a job as an office manager, which shortened the time she could spend on oiling the wheels for her departure.

  She put prodigious energy into cultivating foreign diplomats. The most important was Asker, the Swedish Consul-General. He was also the friendliest, and had negotiated heroically on behalf of Lockhart and the other prisoners. He was a small, neat man with precise manners and a pretty young wife. He liked Moura, and delighted her by addressing her effusively as ‘Baroness’, but she puzzled him; he had the sort of mind which ‘likes to register all he sees – and somehow he cannot register me and that perplexes him’.28

  Even in the shambles of the new Russia Moura managed to scrape together a social and intellectual life, forgetting her troubles in books and concerts – she went with her Red Cross friends to hear Feodor Chaliapin sing, and accompanied the elderly Princess Saltikoff to a Wagner concert in the Winter Palace – ‘it was such a pleasure to sit with the old lady and listen to fine music. And Wagner is just restless enough to suit me, now.’29

  And all the time she laid her plans for Stockholm and the reunion with Lockhart. Every month the plan altered as the political situation changed or belated news of his health came through. And each time the meeting got delayed, Moura lost a little of her stock of hope.

  One December evening she walked home from work by way of the Palace Quay and the Summer Garden. The Russian winter had returned, and everything was covered in soft white snow. The great park was deserted, and she sat down on a bench, dreaming of Lockhart and their sleigh-rides along the banks of the Neva. Moura always remembered those joyful, playful rides when she walked through this part of the city, near the Embassy and the river – that period had been the bright morning of their love. ‘What children we were then,’ she recalled sadly, ‘what old, old people we are now. But how infinitely thankful I am to Providence that I have met you, my Baby, what happiness you have given me, how you have taught me to love.’30 But as the weeks had gone by, her nerves had frayed. Now, sitting on the bench amidst the snow and the loneliness, she could feel herself coming apart. Just that morning she had been sorting through some of her belongings and had come across her children’s old baby clothes. ‘Those tiny things brought back such a longing for little Peter,’ she wrote to Lockhart, ‘for a child that should be yours and mine.’

  But the prospect of Lockhart fulfilling his promises to her seemed frail and unreliable now. ‘I am nervous and jumpy and morbid and my glorious confidence in you sometimes gives place to the most utter depression and torturing surmises,’ she wrote. ‘And I am jealous, Baby. But you will be true to me, Baby, won’t you? If you fail me – it will be the end of everything for me . . .’31

  14

  Se Mettre en Quatre

  December 1918–May 1919

  There were two Christmases again this year. The first came on 25 December. Russia ignored it – despite the Bolsheviks’ anti-religious stance, the Church kept to the Old Style calendar. Moura marked the date – the anniversary of the embassy party – in private silence. She knew now for sure that the English would not be coming back to Russia to save her. Intervention was dead. The Allies, still holding on at Archangel, would never beat the growing Red Army, and the rumour of a British fleet steaming through the Baltic was nothing but a myth. Russia would have to steer its own course into the future.

  Moura noted sardonically the Bolsheviks’ perplexity at the Tory victory in the recent British general election. They had been convinced that socialism must spread throughout Europe, and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t happening. But guided equally by wishful thinking, Moura convinced herself that a new revolution must occur in Russia within the month and sweep away the rotten Bolsheviks.1 She was usually more astute than this.

  Perhaps the stress and privations of her life were degrading her percipience. She was getting thinner all the time, plagued by a persistent cough, and the temperature indoors hovered around 6°C. Firewood cost up to 500 roubles a bundle (a month’s wages for a workman), and was difficult to get even at that price. Moura sometimes spent whole days trekking through the snowbound city looking for fuel.2 The authorities were shutting down the tramways and the electricity supply to homes. ‘No food comes from anywhere,’ Moura wrote, ‘and from to-day they are giving oats and bran-smash instead of bread. So gradually we will
all develop into little cows and horses.’ To her horror, shops had begun to appear in the city selling dog meat; Moura took extra care when she was out with Garry, frightened that he might be snatched.3

  Two visitors came calling during that British Christmas, one less welcome than the other. One was a Red Army officer who knew of her contacts with British intelligence. He claimed to represent a network of White Guard infiltrators who were preparing to betray the Red Army to the Allied forces. Three quarters of the artillery were ready to go over to the White side, and many infantry regiments. Moura asked him if he didn’t think that Russians could overthrow the Bolsheviks without foreign help. ‘It revolted me to see this man refusing to admit that anything could be done without foreign intervention and I don’t believe he is right either.’4 Neither did she think there was much substance in his claims, but she passed the information to Lockhart, as she did with every rumour and snippet of political news that she thought might interest him.

  Perhaps unconsciously she was repeating what she had done in the early months of their relationship, when, responding warmly to his admiration for her intellect and insight, she sought to impress him with opinions and information. She stoked up her consumption of literature in all her various languages – ‘I’ll read and read and read,’ she had promised him, ‘and become such a blue stocking that all your knowledge will be nothing next to mine.’5 She also enrolled at the university to study for a diploma – as ‘a tonic . . . in order to keep a more or less balanced mind – which otherwise would go to pieces in this atmosphere’.6

  Her endeavours began to pay off. The other visitor in late December was much more promising. The literary critic, satirist and anglophile Korney Chukovsky, mop-haired and thickly moustached, called on her with an offer of work translating English poetry. Like Moura, Chukovsky had worked for the British missions as an interpreter.7 He was now involved with a new venture which had been set up to publish Russian translations of the greats of English literature. Thrilled, Moura decided immediately to accept, but kept him dangling. Next day she called at his office to discuss the proposal. There she was introduced for the first time to the man who was heading the publishing house – novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist and contender for the title of greatest living Russian, Maxim Gorky. Aside from Lenin, there was probably no man in Russia more well known or more admired.