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

by Deborah McDonald

  Looking back at her mother, and wondering what crime she might have committed, Tania felt her first pang of affection. ‘I felt that whatever it was I would protect her,’ she recalled. Returning from the altar, she stood beside her and stroked her fur coat, ‘to reassure her that I was on her side’. The little girl was rewarded with a smile.9

  After a period of rest at Kallijärv, Moura began spending time in Tallinn. What she was up to, Tania didn’t know, either then or later. All she knew was that her mother was put up in a flat owned by friends of the family, Baron and Baroness Bengt Stackelberg. She spent the middle of every week there, returning to Kallijärv only for weekends. She made contact with the other members of Gorky’s advance party in Berlin, reporting on her arrest by the Estonian authorities. At Gorky’s request, she was wired a sum of money from Berlin.10 Presumably it was trade ministry money, and the sender would have been Maria Andreyeva. It never occurred to Tania in later life to wonder why Moura spent the working week in Tallinn and the weekends at Yendel. If her business there was connected with Maria Andreyeva’s in Berlin, she was well placed.

  Only once in her life would Moura allude to her work in Tallinn; many years later she admitted that she was employed by a Dutchman selling gold and diamonds.11

  Since the previous summer, Tallinn had been the nexus of a gold-laundering scheme. Russian gold was transported there from Petrograd and shipped to Stockholm, where it was melted down and sold. Swedish, German and British companies were buying into the extremely lucrative scheme, and hard currency and industrial products ranging from locomotives to pharmaceuticals were flowing back to Moscow. As starvation and unrest grew worse in Russia, the trade goods were increasingly military – especially rifles and ammunition. And while British firms were profiting from the gold-laundering, the British and American governments and their intelligence agencies were trying to prevent illegal Russian gold from entering their markets.12

  Perhaps it was this that made Moura an asset in Tallinn. She knew many of the foreign diplomats and intelligence agents from the old days in Russia, and she must have had inside knowledge of the bank schemes that were being run in 1918 by her then boss Hugh Leech. There weren’t many in Russia who had Moura’s talents and knowledge, and it must have made her valuable enough for Maria Andreyeva to guarantee her freedom. There was clearly some influence working for Moura now; later that summer she even managed to make a flying visit to Petrograd to meet with Andreyeva.13

  It was also around this time that MI5 first decided to open a file on her.14

  Regardless of her connections, Moura’s time in Estonia would be severely limited. Her visa allowed her three months, and then she would have to go back to Russia.

  It wasn’t an attractive prospect. After the comforts of Kallijärv, the thought of going back to Petrograd was appalling, especially now that Gorky had moved on and she would no longer have a secure refuge. Moura’s lawyer suggested that she might try fleeing to some other country, perhaps Switzerland. But that would probably lead to arrest again. He added thoughtfully that maybe the best thing she could do would be to get married.15 Marriage to an Estonian citizen would free her from Russia’s clutches for good. The lawyer even had a candidate in mind, and introduced her to him.

  Baron Nikolai Budberg was twenty-six years old, a little younger than Moura. He had much in common with Djon. Like the Benckendorffs, the Budbergs were a large and powerful old Baltic-Russian landowning family. And Nikolai – known to his intimates as ‘Lai’ – had, like Djon, attended the military academy in St Petersburg in the days before the war. But in every other way Baron Nikolai Budberg was as unlike Djon von Benckendorff as he could be. Whereas Djon had been staid, responsible and sensible (if dull), Nikolai was the archetypal aristocratic rake. He was a notorious duellist, and had fought four duels, in the last of which he had killed his opponent.16 He was also rumoured to have been an agent for the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police.17 Having inherited his title and his wealth at a young age, he had squandered it on dissipated living and gambling. He was in a delicate situation; he had debts and wanted to leave the country, but his creditors would not allow him.18

  An arrangement was negotiated between Moura and Nikolai. They would marry, on condition that she pay his gambling debts. She arranged the money out of funds channelled to her from Russia via Berlin – possibly taken from the proceeds of the valiuta scheme. In return, Moura acquired the prestige of the title ‘Baroness’ (which delighted her) and, most importantly, Estonian citizenship and a passport. At last she would have the freedom to go where she wished.

  In later life, Moura would bristle indignantly at any suggestion that this was a marriage of convenience. She developed a sympathetic fondness for Nikolai, and believed that he loved her after his fashion. She felt that she had ‘found the only reason that could make me want to go on living – to be of use to someone. It is but a poor reason, I admit, and I think I am too much of an egoist to be satisfied with it’.19

  Moura didn’t undertake the marriage lightly. In late June, after bottling up her feelings for a month, she had finally written to Lockhart to express her grief and dismay at the news of his baby son.20 And there were her feelings about Gorky (and his about her) to be considered. On the day she left Petrograd, she had left a letter for him (he was away in Moscow at the time). Smarting and bewildered by the previous day’s news about Lockhart, she tried to kindle a feeling deeper than that between a great man and his mistress.’I want you to feel that intense inner feeling that I think happens only a few times in life,’ she wrote, ‘that the love of this girl from Kobelyak will be with you throughout the difficult, anxious, boring and dark hours of your life . . . You are my joy, my big true Joy, if you only knew how much I need you.’21 Even in this seemingly heartfelt letter, she was sustaining a fiction. Kobelyak, a town in the Poltava region of the Ukraine, was not where Moura came from; she had been born on the Zakrevsky estate at Beriozovaya Rudka, near the town of Pyryatyn, more than a hundred miles from Kobelyak. The purpose of the deception is unknown, but its juxtaposition with her declaration of love seems not to have troubled her. Throughout that summer she wrote to Gorky reminding him of her love for him, expressing her annoyance at his constant silence, and urging him to hurry up and leave Russia to escape the Bolsheviks’ latest campaign of repression.22

  In October, in the last weeks before the wedding, Moura travelled to Finland to meet up with Gorky, and told him about Budberg. The lessening of the stresses she had been under had mellowed her, Gorky found, and she had ‘generally become somewhat nicer’. As for Budberg, Gorky’s disapproval of the match seemed to be largely on ideological grounds: ‘She tells me that she intends to marry some kind of a baron, but we all protest with energy – let the baron find himself some other object of fancy – this is one of us!’23

  The wedding, held in November in the Russian Orthodox church in Tallinn, was conventional enough, but made sombre by the melancholy gloom of Moura’s Estonian relations, who compared it unfavourably with the glorious wedding to Djon in St Petersburg almost exactly ten years earlier.

  Moura’s close family were even more unhappy. Tania and Pavel had been very upset about the marriage – they didn’t like the look of Nikolai Budberg, who ‘was ugly and had a bald, egg-shaped head’. They attempted to run away from home in protest. Micky too disapproved. But nothing could stop the process or obviate the need for it. The wedding reception, held at an aristocrats’ club in Tallinn, was more convivial, with everyone – even the Benckendorffs – abandoning themselves to the inevitable and deciding to enjoy themselves.24

  Magically, the disapprobation that had surrounded Moura since her entry into Estonia vanished as soon as the knot was tied. She had become a part of a different branch of Estonia’s relic nobility, and was accepted into society. There was still gossip about her. But it wasn’t to last. Moura and Nikolai each had plans, and a few months after the wedding they left Estonia for Berlin. Again the children had to get used to being vi
rtual orphans.

  Berlin was the centre for Russian émigrés. There were three hundred thousand of them living there when Gorky joined the throng in 1921. There was a Russian theatre, publishers, scores of newspapers and Russian restaurants. The old Russian intelligentsia met to discuss politics and their wish for a return to the past.

  Gorky didn’t fit into this community, even the intelligentsia. Surrounded by these relics of the ancien régime, and no longer seeing the new regime’s atrocities first-hand, his natural sympathy for the Bolshevik cause began to return. From this safe distance he wrote to Lenin to let him know he was planning to write a book which would be ‘an apology of Soviet power’; it would argue that Soviet Russia’s successes ‘completely justify its sins, intentional and unintentional’.25 Perhaps he really believed this wholeheartedly, but probably not. However, he relied on Lenin to allow the despatch of his royalty payments, so it was as well to keep on his good side.

  Moura was yearning to join Gorky in Berlin – a city she had last seen in 1914, when she was the pampered wife of a young diplomat. Politically she was more consistently socialist than Gorky; she was also more adaptable, capable of immersing herself in foreign languages and foreign politics, handling both with a light touch. But like Gorky, now that she was back in Europe, with its obnoxious, unreconstructed aristocracy – even in Estonia where their wings had been clipped short by reforms – she began to feel more affinity with Bolshevism. She wrote to Gorky from Tallinn: ‘I want so much . . . to speak to you about Russia, which now, from a distance, I feel and see better than before.’ Arguing against Gorky’s pessimism, she insisted, ‘No, no, it will not perish. It is terrible, it is horrible, that many Russians are dying, but Russia will not die. It is going through a severe, cruel trial. But, in a rotting Europe, is not what is happening in Russia better?’26

  It was no doubt easier to believe in the ultimate rightness of the cause when one was no longer likely to be its next victim.

  While Gorky sought a cure for his health (bad in Russia, it had become worse in Berlin), he made preparations for Moura’s arrival. At Christmas he wrote to Lenin suggesting that Moura be given an official role alongside Maria Andreyeva raising funds for Russia, commending her as ‘a very energetic and educated woman who speaks five languages’.27 He didn’t know that Andreyeva was already acting in this capacity, let alone that his latest love was already involved.

  Having completed a ‘cure’ in the Black Forest by May 1922, Gorky rented a house for the summer at Heringsdorf on the Baltic coast, four hours from Berlin. Moura, having parted company from Budberg, joined Gorky there and resumed her role as his principal ‘wife’.28

  Moura was now thirty years old. She had grown her hair long – going against the current fashion for short bobs – and wore it in a low knot tied at the back of her neck, carelessly pinned up, with stray locks falling fetchingly on her cheeks and brow. In further defiance of modishness, she went without a hat. Nina Berberova, who began her acquaintance with Moura around this time, recalled her vividly: ‘Her lightly pencilled eyes were always eloquent . . . Her body was straight and strong; her figure was elegant even in simple dresses.’ She was growing accustomed to the comforts of life again, buying good clothes imported from England and expensive shoes. Her style was comfort and quality over fashion. She wore no jewellery other than a man’s wristwatch. (Who had it belonged to? Lockhart, perhaps? Cromie?) ‘Her fingers were always ink-stained, giving her the look of a schoolgirl.’29

  Moura had realised her predicted ‘blue stocking’ destiny, and was becoming ever more deeply immersed in her career in books. Using the experience and connections she had acquired, she established a small publishing house in Berlin – Epokha Verlag – which published German translations of Gorky and other foreign writers from an office on the Kurfürstendamm.

  Not long after her arrival in Germany Moura was forced to rush back to Estonia. Micky had been taken ill and needed Moura to take care of the children. They had outgrown their nanny, Mariussa, and Micky was approaching sixty now. A permanent solution was needed.

  Having them to live with her in the commune was impossible, especially as she spent so much time in Berlin on business, so Moura decided to put them in boarding schools. Her first thought was England. She lodged an application for a British visa, stating that she wished to find a school for her children in London. As referees she gave the names of Commander Ernest Boyce and Colonel Thornhill, her two British SIS associates from Petrograd (presumably she had resolved her doubts about Thornhill’s suspicions of her). She was interviewed by Colonel Ronald Meiklejohn, the new SIS station chief at Tallinn, who had served with the British intervention force at Murmansk. After considering her case, Meiklejohn reported that ‘this lady does not really desire to proceed to the UK but merely wishes to use the visa, if granted, for the purpose of convincing the Estonian Authorities and other persons who are not satisfied with her bona fides’.30 Her application was refused; she was never told why, but did discover that her referees hadn’t been consulted.31

  Moura brought the children back to Germany with her, and by the end of 1922 they were lodged at a school at Dresden. It was planned that they would go back to Kallijärv for their holidays, and Moura would join them there.

  Gorky didn’t feel settled in Heringsdorf and wished for somewhere warmer for the winter, so in late 1922 the household moved again to Bad Saarow, a lakeside spa town in Brandenburg, where he set up his entourage in a set of rooms in the Neues Sanatorium, a huge white villa on the lake’s edge.32 It was an idyllic spot, with sailing on the lake. Moura took over the running of the household once more.

  The days were regular. Rising at eight Gorky took a breakfast of coffee and two raw eggs, and would work until one o’clock. His friends would try to persuade him to take a break, but he would usually avoid it, rushing back to his work and sticking at it until supper time. Vladislav Khodasevich recalled Gorky’s working patterns; he loved the implements of writing – ‘good paper, different coloured pencils, new pens and holders’ – and kept a ready supply of cigarettes ‘and a motley collection of mouthpieces, red, yellow, and green’.33 He not only wrote tirelessly, he read and answered the countless letters in all languages that poured in from all over the world (one of Moura’s jobs was to help with the translating). He was always being sent books and manuscripts, which ‘he read with astonishing attention, setting forth his opinions in the most detailed letters to their authors’.34 He annotated every book and manuscript with comments, even correcting spellings and punctuation with a red pencil. ‘Sometimes he would do the same with newspapers – and then throw them away.’35 And he appeared to remember everything he read, in the smallest detail.

  Moura would recall that to Gorky ‘every human being aroused his curiosity, his sympathy, his attention’; he believed that ‘all instruments, all voices were needed in the great orchestra that humanity would hear when it got the world it deserved’. He had ‘an obsessive faith in work, goodness and knowledge, the three fundamental features of tomorrow’s human society’.36

  The closer she got to him, the better Moura understood Gorky’s art, and how intimately it was bound up with his own self. Moura found resonance and encouragement for her own approach to her life history in Gorky’s dramatic art. Commenting, as everyone did, on his ability to tell tales and bring characters to life, she believed that ‘In his memories all events acquire a character of history, of permanence. Artistic truth is more convincing than the empiric brand, the truth of a dry fact.’37 Thus Moura – her own impulsive self-invention, her shaping of her own tale, her magpie borrowing of incidents that belonged to others but which she made her own, all in the cause of making her life a thing of artistic veracity.

  In recalling Gorky she seemed to be speaking of herself as much as him: ‘like a tall, knotty tree, which had grown in spite of all the inclemency of the weather . . . This man, corroded through and through by a cruel life’ who nonetheless found joy in living, and had hope. ‘
Born a poet, he became a teacher, not because he liked teaching but because he liked the future.’38

  From time to time Gorky would allow indulgences. Every Sunday, if the weather was not too cold, the coachman was sent for; everyone wrapped up in their warmest clothes and set off for the cinema. Moura and Gorky would sit together on the back seat of the coach while the others crammed in wherever they could, the girls sitting on the men’s laps.

  But despite the volume of work and the social pleasures, the commune was never really the same now it wasn’t hemmed in by a deprived, dangerous outside world. It was riven by enmities, as it hadn’t been in Petrograd. When Maria Andreyeva visited, which was quite often, she tainted the atmosphere with continual complaints. Her movie director son sometimes accompanied her, and she treated him and the rest of the company with ‘scornful condescension’.39 Yekaterina, Gorky’s estranged legal wife, also visited, but never at the same time as Andreyeva; the two disliked each other vehemently.

  Moura divided her time between Gorky’s personal life, his work and holidays with her children at Kallijärv, as his peregrinations and their school holidays dictated. Meanwhile, she attended to the other men in her life – Budberg and H. G. Wells. Making full use of her new state-sponsored wealth, she had set her husband up in a flat in Berlin, where he could happily gamble the evenings (and her money) away. Young Baron Budberg seemed to believe ‘that earning money is a job suitable only to those who can do nothing else,’ she wrote to Wells.40

  With an abiding ambition to go to England one day, and conscious that Wells would be a valuable, influential friend to have, Moura had struck up a correspondence with him as soon as she was free of Russia, and had been feeling her way ever since. At such a distance and having had so little physical contact with him, she played him uncertainly – sometimes he was ‘My dear Mr Wells’, sometimes ‘Dear H. G.’. She began enticing him to move from his previous German publisher to Epokha Verlag, promising that ‘we pay better’. She also invited him to contribute to a literary and scientific ‘Russian Review’ journal Gorky was setting up.41