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

by Deborah McDonald

  Moura had been stranded here for a couple of days, trying to make her way back into Russia after the travels and travails of the past few weeks. She felt that Lockhart was slipping irretrievably away from her. She had phoned the Hotel Fennia to find out whether he had sent her any more telegrams, but there was nothing.

  Today, it being Easter Sunday, she went to Terijoki’s little church. When the service was over she set out to walk back to the little pension she was staying in. She had quickly grown to loathe her terrible room there, with its geraniums and white lace curtains, where at night the moon shone in on her. She was in no hurry to get back, and she walked slowly.30

  The path from the church led – as most paths in Terijoki did – through a wood of tall, tall trees. The weather was warming – so much that the thawing snow was making rivers in the main streets. There was green grass underfoot, and blue sky in the gaps at the tops of the trees. As she looked up, Moura recalled strolling arm in arm with Lockhart in the tree-lined avenues of Sokolniki Park in Moscow. Suddenly, with the blue sky in her eyes, it was as if he were there. She felt his real, physical presence as powerfully and vividly as a hallucination . . . and then, just as suddenly, he was gone.

  As soon as the moment passed and she felt the return of her perpetual, crushing loneliness, she broke down. For the first time in all the months since he had gone away, Moura abandoned herself to the ferocity of her grief. She threw herself on the wet, cold ground and sobbed her breaking heart out.

  When the fit had passed, she picked herself up and went back to her room. A few days later she crossed the border into Russia. It closed behind her with a finality that must have been almost audible.

  Less than two weeks after her return to Petrograd, Moura found herself suddenly free of the two ties which had held her back. On 7 May she received the news that Djon had been murdered. She wrote Lockhart a short, frantic letter – ‘My husband has been killed on the 19th of April by some Esthonians out of revenge’.31 At the time she was writing, Moura was struggling to keep her feelings under control in front of her mother, who was in hospital, scheduled for an operation the next day. ‘Can you see what a strain it is?’ Moura wrote to Lockhart. ‘I can make no plans, I cannot think of anything yet, Baby. I must try and get the children away from that place as soon as possible’.

  Why had there been no word from him, no letters, no telegrams?

  I don’t understand your silence, Baby. For God’s sake

  be frank with me, Baby, play fair with me as I always

  have and always will with you.

  May God keep you safe and well.

  And remember, Baby, how much I love you.

  Yours for ever

  Moura

  She never received a reply. Within the week her mother died. Moura was utterly alone.32

  Who killed Djon von Benckendorff? Was Moura present? Did she pull the trigger? On 18 April, the day of the murder, she wrote to Lockhart from Terijoki and added the postscript: ‘I have started my divorce the day before yesterday.’33 To do so, she must have met with Djon – either in Reval or at Yendel – to obtain his signature. Two days later he was dead.

  Moura certainly had a powerful motive to wish herself rid of Djon quickly before the political situation, together with her reputation for espionage, trapped her permanently inside Russia. But there must have been many around Yendel who hated the master of the estate for his Germanism. He might well have been one of those Baltic German landowners who turfed out ethnic Estonian peasants and gave tenancies to Germans.

  Moura’s letter from Terijoki on the day of the killing was a kind of alibi, but not a very strong one.

  But even assuming she didn’t fire the shots that killed him, she could have wielded an influence. Few people knew the political situation in Estonia better than Moura; she knew the people of Yendel and would have understood their grievances. And she was extremely skilled in persuasion and manipulation, as she had proved with the commissars at the bank – ‘One really has such a tremendous privilege over them all, for even the cleverest ones are perfect infants in arms as far as any training of the mind goes.’34 If there were locals with a grudge against Djon, she would have been quite capable of influencing them. And having spent most of the past year in the company of men who habitually armed themselves with revolvers, she might even have been able to supply the means.

  In the end, the truth – whatever it might be – was never discovered. Moura’s close family – her children – never suspected her. And only the most tenuous evidence remained of her ever having been in Estonia in April 1919. The letter she wrote Lockhart from the Hotel Fennia, which would have marked the eve of her crossing to Reval, has a page missing – a page which appears to be about to mention her visit: ‘The worst, the longest bit in our parting is over,’ she wrote, still trying to convince herself that it was worth going on with the plan, ‘we have only a little more to wait. I hope to get . . .’35

  What did she hope to get? Did Lockhart remove the page to protect her from suspicion? If so, it would not be the only letter of hers where he appears to have excised indiscreet pages.

  At the end of 1919 Lockhart left England for a new posting. He had been appointed commercial secretary in the British Legation in Prague. He had turned down a second (more serious) appointment in Russia, on the grounds that ‘I had better leave Russia for a bit’.36 Either the Foreign Office didn’t know about the death sentence hanging over him there, or thought he would be safe from it.

  There had been no letter from Moura for months – the last word from her was the disturbing news of the death of her husband. Now, with the closing down of Russia’s relations with the outside world, there were no friendly diplomats who could be relied on to get letters in and out.

  He still loved Moura, but in his mind their impossible affair was at an end: ‘She had left a wound in my heart, but it was healing.’37 Perhaps he was thinking of Magre, as Moura had guessed he would, unconsciously echoing the words of the poem in his recollection – ‘C’est une tache au coeur dont aucune eau ne lave. / Je voudrais oublier, je voudrais m’en guérir’ (It is a stain on my heart that no water can wash away. / I want to forget, I want to be healed).

  At the same time, Moura was setting about trying to heal herself. For her, it would be a lifelong quest.

  No man would be allowed to come so close to her again; no man would be loved or idolised; and no man would ever be allowed to possess her.

  Except Lockhart. No matter where she went or what she experienced, she would never regain the part of herself that belonged to him.

  Notes

  * Bend over backwards (lit. ‘go on all fours’).

  † Now Oslo.

  ‡ Now Zelenogorsk, Russia.

  PART 3

  In Exile: 1919–1924

  Her I loved naturally and necessarily and – for all the faults and trouble . . . she has satisfied my craving for material intimacy more completely than any other human being. I still ‘belong’ so much to her that I cannot really get away from her. I love her still.

  H. G. Wells, ‘Moura, the Very Human’ in H. G. Wells in Love

  15

  ‘We’re All Iron Now’

  1919–1921

  Late September 1920, Petrograd

  The city was all but dead; its heart had stopped beating and yet it was still somehow breathing and stirring.

  When H. G. Wells arrived in Petrograd in that autumn of the third year of the Revolution, he could scarcely believe the transformation. He had last visited in 1914, before the start of the war, when the imperial capital was still a teeming, thriving metropolis of well over a million souls, with glittering palaces and streets packed with shoppers and strollers. That had all gone, and in its place was desolation.

  A Russian acquaintance in London had suggested that Wells, well known to be sympathetic to the spirit of the Revolution (although emphatically not a Communist), would be interested to see how things were working out since his last visit.
And so, near the end of September 1920, he had set off with his nineteen-year-old son George Philip (known as ‘Gip’) for a two-week tour of the new Russia.

  It was a profoundly dispiriting experience. The palaces were still there, but most stood empty. Perhaps because of his family background in shopkeeping, it was the closed shops that struck Wells’ heart most keenly. He reckoned there were no more than half a dozen still functioning in the city. The rest were dead. They had ‘an utterly wretched and abandoned look; paint is peeling off, windows are cracked, some are broken and boarded up, some still display a few fly-blown relics of stock in the window, some have their windows covered with notices . . . the fixtures have gathered two years’ dust. They are dead shops. They will never open again.’ It had killed off the city streets. ‘One realises that a modern city is really nothing but long alleys of shops . . . Shut them up, and the meaning of a street has disappeared.’1

  Eschewing the Hotel International, where foreigners usually stayed, Wells was put up by his old friend Maxim Gorky. He found himself entering a peculiar domestic scene, a sort of commune in which Gorky presided over a ménage of writers, artists and intimate friends, all crammed together in a huge apartment on the fourth floor of a block on Petrogradsky Island, overlooking Alexander Park.

  Among the inhabitants was a young woman who was apparently Gorky’s live-in secretary and (though Wells didn’t realise it) his mistress. Despite her drab, makeshift clothing and a rather unsightly broken nose, she was an attractive, captivating creature, and Wells was pleased to learn that she had been approved by the authorities to act as his guide and interpreter during his stay. Her name was Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya, but everybody knew her as Moura.

  Wells, who was almost as prolific a womaniser as he was a writer, would always remember this meeting as one of his life’s great encounters.2

  How Moura came to be living in the Gorky commune, and how she had passed the sixteen months since her last contact with the world outside Russia, is mostly a blank page. Or, to be more precise, blank with a few daubs and doubtful sketches on it, and only a few definite impressions.

  After her desperate final letter to Lockhart in May 1919, in the wake of Djon’s murder and on the eve of her mother’s death, with the Estonian nationalist forces pushing the Red Army back to the very outskirts of Petrograd, Moura slipped into obscurity. Not a written word in her own hand survived, and few contemporary accounts. Most of what was handed down to posterity was hearsay, much of it wrong.3

  By the end of that May, Moura was alone in the world. Lockhart was beyond her reach, and her mother dead, either from surgical complications or from the illness which the surgery was intended to treat.4 With her children in Estonia, she had no other family left in Russia.

  Moura’s plight grew desperate when she finally lost her struggle to hold on to her mother’s apartment. Now that the elderly lady was dead it would no longer be possible to work on the sympathies of the government officials. Moura found herself on the streets, forced to throw herself on the charity of acquaintances. She said later that she was given accommodation for a time by the elderly General Aleksander Mosolov, who had once been head of the Court Chancellery under Tsar Nicholas II.

  When the summer of 1919 drew to an end, a full year had passed since her last period with Lockhart – the nightmare of their imprisonment and the last few blissful days together in the Kremlin. Winter was approaching and she still had no proper home. She had found extra work as assistant to her old friend Korney Chukovsky, who, in addition to his publishing work, ran a studio, library and children’s theatre for the House of Arts.

  Then another mystery occurred. In late summer she was arrested and held by the Cheka. The reason is unknown, but people were being arrested constantly for crimes as slight as being out late at night or failing to carry the requisite identification papers. Chukovsky was concerned about her, and when Maxim Gorky came to him one day in an incoherent rage about a friend of his who had also been arrested, Chukovsky asked him to use his influence to help Moura too. Gorky threatened to make a scandal and repudiate the Bolsheviks if the prisoners were not released.5

  Once Moura was free, Chukovsky took her, as he had done the previous December, to see Gorky. She already knew the great man quite well through her translation work for his World Literature publishing house.6

  This meeting took place at his apartment. It was a peculiar place, on the fourth floor of a block at 23 Kronverksky Prospekt, a vast crescent on Petrogradsky Island (where Moura and Lockhart had liked to come on their sleigh-jaunts). The block itself was a rather ugly alpine-looking conglomeration of rustic stone and stucco, with hefty arches and hexagonal windows, reminiscent of the manor at Yendel. The atmosphere within was a world apart. Gorky had become a saint-like figure. Since the Revolution, he had been one of the mainstays – perhaps the principal saviour – of the arts in Russia. He had used his influence to help found the House of Science and the Houses of Literature and Art – institutions which fostered the intellectual life of the new Russia. And on his own initiative he had begun the World Literature publishing venture, which sought to import the fruits of foreign authors into the Russian language.

  Within his domain he was like a baron in his manor, surrounded by companions and supplicants. His appearance had become eccentric. One of Moura’s contemporaries, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich, described him as looking like ‘a learned Chinaman in a red silk robe and motley skullcap’ which set off his sharp cheekbones and Asian eyes. His formerly thick hair had been cropped to the scalp, his face was deeply lined, and he wore spectacles on the tip of his nose. There was always a book in his hands. ‘A crush of people filled the apartment from early morning to late at night,’ Khodasevich recalled. ‘Each of the people who lived there had visitors, and Gorky himself was positively besieged by them.’7 Living in or passing through were writers, scholars, publishers, actors, artists and politicians. People in trouble flocked to the apartment to plead with Gorky to protect them from Grigory Zinoviev, the powerful head of the Petrograd Soviet and Northern Commune, or to help them get food, transport or countless other favours. Gorky listened to every plea, and was tireless in his efforts to help.

  In an echo of her first meeting with Gorky at the office of World Literature, Chukovsky brought Moura to see him in the afternoon. Weak tea was served from a samovar in the large, well-furnished dining room. This was the only public room in the apartment – all the rest were bedrooms belonging to the many residents.8

  Gorky had been charmed and intrigued by Moura ever since their meeting nine months earlier. ‘He was a brilliant speaker,’ she would write years later, recalling that first meeting, and ‘in the presence of a strange, new young woman, he displayed a special eloquence’; Chukovsky had whispered to her afterwards that Gorky had been ‘like a peacock spreading his beautiful feathers’.9 He gave her a permanent position as his secretary and interpreter, and invited her to move into the apartment.

  Moura reverted to her maiden name, and became Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya once more. Perhaps she wanted to erase the memory of Djon; perhaps she hoped that by registering officially under that name she might break the ability of the Cheka or of intelligence agencies abroad to keep track of her. Many people came to believe that she was still in the service of the Cheka, and was briefed by them to spy on Gorky and pass back information about his attitudes and contacts.

  His relationship with the government was a rocky one. His politics were leftward and pro-revolutionary, but he was neither a Communist nor a Bolshevik. Having supported the Revolution and helped work towards it for decades, Gorky’s views had altered. He had seen the behaviour of the common people during the battle and did not like it. ‘You are right 666 times over,’ he wrote to a friend who had predicted this; the Revolution was ‘giving birth to real barbarians, just like those that ravaged Rome’.10 The government that had emerged was a government of corrupted rabble and tyrants. He wrote a series of essays in his newspaper, Novaya Zhizn,* rou
ndly condemning the Bolsheviks as enemies of free speech: ‘Lenin, Trotsky and their companions have already become poisoned with the filthy venom of power,’ he wrote; they were no more friends of democracy than the Romanovs had been. Following a shooting of demonstrators by Red Army soldiers in January 1918, he lamented the blood and sweat that had gone into bringing about the precious idea of revolutionary democracy in Russia, ‘and now the “People’s Commissars” have given orders to shoot the democracy which demonstrated in honour of this idea’.11 That he could publish such statements with virtual impunity was a measure of his stature in Russia.

  Anger, regret and dissatisfaction were mingled in Gorky’s character. His surname had been chosen with feeling – born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, as a young man he had assumed the name Gorky (meaning ‘bitter’) – although perhaps Kisly (sour, acidic) might have been equally apt.

  He dreamed of a republic of the arts and sciences; neither a democracy nor a socialist state (he feared and disliked the peasant class), but a society governed by intellectuals, artists and creative thinkers, with himself at its heart. As Moura had commented dryly to Lockhart some months earlier, ‘He thinks himself a d’Annunzio of Russia.’12 Gorky had been close to Lenin for many years, but had an antagonistic relationship with him, and a hostile one with some powerful figures, including Zinoviev. But such was his stature and popularity, none dared touch him directly. Although Novaya Zhizn was closed down on Lenin’s orders in July 1918,13 his person was inviolate, and most commissars – even his enemies – judged it politic to grant any favours he cared to ask.

  In this climate, it would not be surprising if the regime chose to spy on him. And Moura might have been their agent. On the other hand, the rumour that she was their eyes and ears in the Gorky household might just have been more of that gossip that clung to her ‘like flies to Tanglefoot paper’, as she put it.14 And yet, her occasional complaints about the gossip could equally have been the natural indignation of a guilty conscience.