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

by Deborah McDonald

  Although Moura had been given a start as a translator of books into Russian, Gorky used her mainly as a translator-secretary, concerned mostly with business matters.15 Thus she began to acquire the all-round knowledge of the publishing and translating businesses that would be her principal means of subsistence throughout her life.

  There were twelve rooms in the apartment, of which four small chambers were reserved for Gorky’s private use – bedroom, study, library, and a little museum where he displayed his collection of Oriental artefacts. The rest of the apartment consisted of the communal dining room and bedrooms. Moura shared a room with a young medical student called Maria Geintse (or Geynze), nicknamed ‘The Molecule’ and described as ‘a wonderful girl, the orphaned daughter of some old acquaintances of Gorky’s’.16 The population of the commune changed over time, but the main long-term inhabitants included the artists Valentina Khodasevich, her husband Andrei Diderikhs (known as ‘Didi’) and Ivan Rakitsky, and at a later period the poet Vladislav Khodasevich (Valentina’s uncle) and the writer Nina Berberova, who were also a couple. There were many others who came and went.

  Moura, whose closest experience of communal living had been in Lockhart’s lavish apartment, shared only with Hicks and the servants, had to adapt to an entirely new mode of living. But she had been doing that for two years now, and sharing a room in a crowded apartment was better than starving on the freezing streets. Most of the other ‘former people’ of the wealthy classes were now crammed into shared rooms in squalid conditions, and living by forced labour. In Gorky’s household there was warmth in the air and food on the table.

  At some point – perhaps immediately, more likely over the course of months – Moura became Gorky’s mistress. It would be a troubled affair; she was young enough to be his daughter, and had a flighty, fiery temperament that irked him, but like all Moura’s men, he fell in love with her.

  Gorky’s relationships with women were like his relationship with politics – erratic and idiosyncratic. He liked to be in control; he could be madly jealous, and when jealous, violent. There had been many women who had fulfilled the role of de facto wife to Maxim Gorky, but only one to whom he had been legally married – Yekaterina Peshkova (née Vozhina), a fellow revolutionary. He met and married her in Samara on the Volga in 1896; he was a young man then, and Yekaterina was eight years his senior. She bore him a son, Maxim, and a daughter, who died in childhood.17

  By 1902 he was gaining a reputation as a dramatist and worldwide fame as an author to rival Tolstoy (who knew and admired him). His play The Lower Depths was staged by the Moscow Art Theatre, the best in the country, and was taken around the world. One of the theatre’s top actresses, Maria Fyodorovna Andreyeva, became his lover.18 She was a dark-eyed beauty with reddish-golden hair and an outspoken manner. She was a political radical, and captivated Gorky. She was married to a government official, but Gorky the littérateur and revolutionary suited her better. In 1903 Gorky left the distraught Yekaterina and went to live with Andreyeva. They never divorced, and he provided financially for her and their son.

  Gorky and Andreyeva joined the revolutionary exiles on the Italian island of Capri after the failed uprising of 1905, and toured the United States. The puritan Americans hounded them and when no hotel would accommodate the unmarried couple they were forced to return to Capri.19 Andreyeva called herself ‘Countess’ and was disliked in the exile community, who believed she was only after Gorky’s money and status.

  Their relationship was strained. Andreyeva’s obstinacy and domineering nature began to irritate the egotistical Gorky, who wanted to have things his way. He considered returning to his wife but Andreyeva had nowhere to go and Gorky did not have the heart to leave her. He wrote to Yekaterina, ‘I beseech you, do not call, do not rush me . . . At the present time I do not possess the energy to take a decisive step.’ All he wished for was ‘peace in which to work, and for this peace I am prepared to pay any price’.20 In 1912 Andreyeva made her peace with the government and returned to Russia. Still a political exile, Gorky was unable to go with her.

  In 1913 amnesty was granted to the exiles as part of Tsar Nicholas II’s celebration of three hundred years of Romanov rule. While Yekaterina and their son, Max, returned to Moscow, Gorky settled for a while in a small town nearby. He saw Andreyeva regularly although they no longer lived together. Eventually Gorky moved to Petrograd, where he took the flat at 23 Kronverksky Prospekt. From the windows he could see Alexander Park, and beyond it the Petropavlovskaya fortress, where he had once been imprisoned.

  Shortly after the start of the war with Germany, Andreyeva, along with her new young lover Pyotr Kriuchkov, a lawyer, came to live in the apartment. Kriuchkov took on the role of Gorky’s secretary. After the February Revolution Andreyeva moved out again. She joined the Commissariat of Enlightenment, which was charged with promotion of the arts and preservation of artworks. With Lenin’s backing she became Commissar of Theatres and Spectacles in the Northern Commune in 1918, and in 1920 became head of the Arts section of the Commissariat for Education.21 Maria Andreyeva was becoming a woman of power and influence.

  With the founding of the Kronverksky commune, at last a kind of stability had entered Gorky’s life. But the picture was incomplete without a woman.

  There had been others before Moura came along in the autumn of 1919. Other women had served tea to guests, shared Gorky’s bed and been referred to as his ‘wife’, but Moura, officially his new secretary, would become the one to whom he was most deeply attached, and who was his most constant. Everyone liked Moura. She became head of household duties, supervising the two elderly servants and generally organising things. Gorky’s son Max was pleased with the change when he next visited, commenting, ‘the boss-free days are over’.22 She became known in the commune as Titke – Aunt.

  Her love of Lockhart was undiminished, and could never be supplanted or equalled, but in time she would develop a deep fondness for Maxim Gorky, a fondness which could only be called love.

  Under Gorky’s roof she survived the winter of 1919/20, but by February she had begun to feel restless. Something – some unidentified feeling or motivation – prompted her to make an attempt to escape from Russia.23 In February the temperature in northwest Russia drops to its lowest: an average of -10°C. In 1920, as in almost every other year, the Gulf of Finland was frozen over, from the shores of Russia to the coast of Finland. Moura, by her own account, set out one day from Petrograd and attempted to walk across the ice to Finland.24

  It was a desperate, confused and, by her own admission, foolish thing to do. What her motive was, and where she hoped to go, is unclear. She claimed that she was trying to reach Estonia to be with her children. But in that case, why not head directly for Estonia? The war with Russia was over, and Estonia had won its independence. Perhaps she believed that by getting to Finland she might give herself more than one choice. She might repeat the journey she had made from Helsingfors to Reval the previous year. Or perhaps she might find an opportunity to cross Sweden and make it to England, and thus find her way to Lockhart.

  The place she chose was the narrow neck of the gulf west of Petrograd, in the middle of which stood the island fortress of Kronstadt, the base of the Russian Baltic fleet.

  She didn’t get far. Along with several other refugees she was apprehended on the ice by a Russian patrol, and brought back to Petrograd. The group of prisoners with their military escort made quite a spectacle passing through the city streets. Moura was recognised by the porter of an apartment block where she had once lived, who was among the crowd of spectators. From him, word of her plight reached Gorky.

  The prisoners were locked up in the Cheka headquarters on Gorokhovaya Street. Moura was recognised as Maria Benckendorff, and her nefarious past brought her under deep suspicion. She had never had any direct ties to the Petrograd Cheka, and the circumstances of her arrest, in combination with her known foreign sympathies, rang alarm bells. When Gorky lodged an earnest plea for her release,
the answer was a firm no. This was remarkable – Gorky was on good terms with the Cheka, and was an old and valued friend of Felix Dzerzhinsky.25 But his pleas were blocked by the head of the Northern Commune, Zinoviev, who was Gorky’s enemy and thoroughly suspicious of young Madame Benckendorff.

  Moura’s release, when it came, was prompted by a surprising intervention. Maria Andreyeva, Gorky’s former mistress and presumably therefore Moura’s rival, wrote to I. P. Bakaev, head of the Petrograd Cheka, making a startling blood commitment: ‘I respectfully ask you and the Commission of the Cheka to release into my custody Maria Ignatyevna Benkendorf . . . I will bet my life that, having given me her word, she will not attempt to repeat this desperate undertaking, even for her children.’ If the worst should happen, ‘I give you my word to shoot me: knowing this and seeing my signature here, she will not lift a finger without your knowledge. She is a mother and a very good person.’26

  The Cheka released her, and she returned to Kronverksky Prospekt.

  How could a mere commissar of the arts and education wield such an influence with the almighty Cheka where the great Gorky had failed?

  There was probably more to Maria Andreyeva’s government role than was officially admitted. Since 1918 she and Gorky had been principal agents in a scheme to preserve Russia’s cultural heritage – its artworks and antiques. A registration commission was formed to collect (by seizure if necessary), store and catalogue objects previously in the hands of private owners. But unknown to Gorky, Maria Andreyeva, far from working to preserve Russia’s artworks, was involved in a secret programme to dispose of them for cash.27

  The Russian economy was in a desperate situation, and needed hard currency to prop it up (and to promote international revolution). The valiuta† programme was initiated to supply the need. It liquidated the assets which had been seized from the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, ranging from jewellery and gold to works of art, selling them abroad for foreign currency. Maria Andreyeva was an agent of the programme. Hence her influence with the Cheka. It seems that an unspoken part of the deal over Moura was that she be brought in as a subordinate agent. Her status, her contacts abroad, her experience of covert activities, her cultured background would suit her perfectly for such a role.28

  Released from prison, Moura settled back into her life with Gorky, chastened but unbowed. If anything, her experience had hardened her. Gorky might be powerful, but in this affair Moura was the one with the strength. In his previous relationships, he had ruled – sometimes with violence – but here it was Moura who wielded the power. She acted as if she needed nothing from him. It bewildered him, and on one occasion he challenged her over her hardness, comparing her to Alexander Pushkin’s famously unyielding mistress, known as the ‘Bronze Venus’.

  ‘You’re not bronze,’ Gorky told Moura with a penetrating glare, ‘you’re iron. Nothing in the world is stronger than iron.’

  ‘We’re all iron now,’ she replied. ‘Would you like us to be lace?’29

  When H. G. Wells arrived near the end of September 1920, Moura had been a member of the commune for a year, and was accustomed to the inflow of artists and intelligentsia who came to pay homage to her patron.

  Wells wasn’t the only eminent Englishman to visit that year. Bertrand Russell had come to Russia in the early summer, and called at the apartment on Kronverksky Prospekt. Gorky was unwell, and their interview took place in his bedroom, where Moura served tea and interpreted.30 (Russell found it a little difficult to concentrate; he was fascinated by this young woman.) There was a good deal of sympathy between the two men. Both had supported the overthrow of the old regime, but both were troubled by the brutality of Bolshevism. Unlike many apologists, Russell wasn’t willing to excuse it as a product of the ‘peevish and futile’ interference of the Allied nations; ‘the expectation of such opposition,’ he reasoned, ‘was always part of Bolshevik theory’, and ‘was both foreseen and provoked by the doctrine of the class war’.31 Like many of his Russian counterparts, Russell had served time in prison for his principles – an admittedly short term in Brixton in 1918 for his anti-war activities.

  Russell was shocked by Gorky’s appearance: ‘apparently very ill and obviously heart-broken’. ‘One felt in him a love of the Russian people which makes their present martyrdom almost unbearable,’ he wrote. He was deeply worried by Gorky’s illness and what it might portend for the future of the arts in Russia – ‘Gorky has done all that one man could to preserve the intellectual and artistic life of Russia. I feared that he was dying, and that, perhaps, it was dying too.’32

  H. G. Wells was among the many who read Russell’s impressions and worried about Gorky’s impending death. When he arrived in September, he was relieved to find his old friend well. ‘Mr. Russell was, I think, betrayed by the artistic temptation of a dark and purple concluding passage.’ Indeed, ‘Gorky seems as strong and well to me now as he was when I knew him first in 1906.’33

  Lifting his eyes from Russell’s purple passages and Gorky’s rude health, H. G. Wells gazed for the first time in his life on Moura Ignatievna Zakrevskaya, secretary, translator and – for the duration of his stay – his guide. And he was smitten.

  All his life he would be at a loss to comprehend why she affected him so. Her appearance was against her. She was thin and starting to look careworn. Clothes were virtually unobtainable in Russia, and everyone had to make do. The lady who had danced at the Sanssouci Palace at Potsdam in the company of the Tsar and the Kaiser, the lady whose extravagant couture, even with so much competition, had prompted a crown prince to exclaim, ‘Quelle noblesse!’,34 was dressed for poverty. She wore a British army waterproof coat over a plain black dress which had seen better days, and a rudimentary hat made from a twisted piece of black fabric – apparently an old stocking or a scrap of felt. But whatever her appearance, no matter how degraded her situation, in Wells’ eyes, ‘she had magnificence’. Her attitude and bearing hadn’t been eroded by what she’d been through. ‘She stuck her hands in the pockets of her waterproof, and seemed not simply to brave the world but disposed to order it about.’35

  Lockhart had been captivated by her brilliant, incisive mind, Gorky by her charm and talents, but Wells was taken by her audacious survivor’s pride and – as with all her men – the intense sexual allure she radiated. ‘She was now my official interpreter,’ he recalled. ‘And she presented herself to my eyes as gallant, unbroken and adorable.’36

  How Moura perceived Wells, she never recorded. Perhaps she noted his resemblance to Djon. He had the same blunt, stolid features and sad eyes, the same lank lick of hair across a domed forehead, the same soup-strainer moustache. Whatever she saw, and however she felt, she began their acquaintance as she meant to go on – by dealing him a hand from the ready pack of lies she was beginning to accumulate. Her uncle, she claimed, had been Russia’s Ambassador in London, and she had strong personal ties to England herself, having been educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, and since the Revolution she had been imprisoned five times by the Bolshevik government.

  Each of these untruths was tethered to reality, but by a severely overstretched length of elastic. When Wells published his account of his visit to Russia, he faithfully and innocently repeated Moura’s falsehoods as proof of how honest and open the Russian government had been with him. With her aristocratic background, her Englishness and her bad relations with the Bolsheviks, Moura would be ‘the last person likely to lend herself to any attempt to hoodwink me’. He had been warned in Britain (and in Russia) that ‘the most elaborate camouflage of realities would go on, and that I should be kept in blinkers throughout my visit’.37 The fact that such a lady had been approved as his guide showed that the Bolsheviks were not out to deceive him.

  The one true thing she told him was that she had been confined to Petrograd because of her arrest on the Finnish ice. It deepened his sympathy, and he promised to try to get a message to her children as soon as he left Russia.

  Wells, like Russell, had come to s
ee Bolshevism in the flesh, and with Moura as his companion he spent his days touring Petrograd, visiting schools and other state institutions. As well as the dead shops and deserted streets, he learned that all of Petrograd’s wooden buildings had been demolished the previous winter to feed the desperate need for firewood, leaving behind gap-toothed streets and piles of discarded masonry. There were holes in the roads where the wood-block paving had been torn up for fuel. The government appeared to be better prepared for the coming winter, and huge stacks of timber lined the quays and the centres of the main streets.38

  The trams were now running again during the day. At six in the evening, when the electricity supply was switched off, the service stopped. Although the population had halved as citizens fled abroad (if they could) or migrated to the countryside, the trams were always full to bursting, with people clinging to their outsides. There were frequent accidents. Wells and Moura witnessed a crowd gathered round the body of a child who had fallen and been cut in two.39

  It seemed that the most profitable class of person to be in Russia nowadays was a peasant. The Bolsheviks still had little power in the countryside, so while the workers and former aristocrats starved, the peasants – freed from their tyrannical landowners and the debilitating taxation of the old regime – lived easily and ate well. They came to Petrograd and Moscow to sell food on the street corners. This was illegal (food distribution was state-controlled) but the authorities rarely took action, for fear that the peasants might stop bringing food at all. When the Red Guards did try to curb the black-marketeering, there were armed clashes in which the peasants typically trounced the soldiers.40

  In Wells’ opinion, the blame for Russia’s privations lay not with Bolshevism but with capitalism – this was the inevitable outcome. Unlike Bertrand Russell, Wells did blame the interference of the Allies. The Bolsheviks, he reasoned, were the inevitable form of government that must arise in the wake of a revolution. And yet he hated it with a passion, and hated Marx as the conjuror and figurehead of it all: