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

by Deborah McDonald

  It wasn’t just the feeling that had gone – she had moved beyond and above him, gone through years of ordeals and trials, and had survived, maturer, stronger. ‘Her tolerance was equalled only by her complete mastery of herself. She had a new attitude towards life, which I found wholly admirable and which I myself was incapable of imitating.’

  They sat down on the crag beside the stream to rest. He stumbled through his own story, which sounded sterile and barren in his own ears by comparison with hers. ‘I had lost even my old impudent self-reliance,’ he noted miserably.21 Broaching the awkward subject of his wife and son, he admitted that he had become a Catholic, and confessed ‘like a schoolboy pleading guilty to his housemaster’, the litany of ‘my debts and my follies’.

  ‘Oh God,’ she whispered. He was expecting reproaches, but she gave him none. She just listened silently, ‘her brows knitted, her chin resting on her hand, and her eyes fixed on the valley below, half-hidden by the heat haze’.

  What she was thinking while he talked, she never recorded, but she seemed to be wondering how the man of six years ago had become the man that sat beside her now. And in that moment she realised at last that the love of 1918 could never be recaptured.

  When he had finished talking, she said to him thoughtfully, ‘You will be thirty-seven on the 2nd of September – the anniversary of Sedan and Omdurman? You see I remember the date. At thirty-seven one is not the same – men are not the same – as at twenty-seven.’ Then, squashing down the feelings that had burned in her all these years, the longing for this man who sat beside her now, she made a plea that must have cost her dear, an act of superlative control. ‘Don’t let us spoil something – perhaps the one thing in both our lives – that has been perfect,’ she said. ‘It would be a mistake, would it not?’22

  Lockhart didn’t know what to say. ‘There was a mist before my eyes, and my temples throbbed violently. I knew that she was right, that she had gauged my character exactly.’

  She stood up and took his hands, and said firmly, ‘Yes, it would be a mistake.’

  They had been talking for hours, and the sun had lowered in the sky. As its fading light reddened the trees, Moura turned and, with Lockhart following, began making her way down the mountain path.

  PART 4

  England: 1924–1946

  She was H. G.’s match, mentally. With her quick wit and unexpectedly wide knowledge . . . she could hold her own with him. More than that, she could handle him in his sometimes querulous moods – with a laugh or a joke or even a regal snub at his expense.

  Moura was a Catherine Parr to H. G., a tower of strength to him, a fount of spiritual consolation.

  Lord Ritchie Calder, friend of Moura and H. G. Wells

  18

  Love and Anger

  1924–1929

  Indignant at the way Moura had been treated, H. G. Wells gave his opinion that Lockhart was ‘a contemptible little bounder’.1 Not that his behaviour was very different from Wells’ own towards lovers who were too troublesome to keep but too compelling to discard; but he felt a jealous protectiveness towards the one woman who had the least need of it. After all the mis-steps and ordeals of her life so far, she was quite capable of dealing with any eventuality, in her own time and on her own terms.

  When they descended the mountain that evening and returned to the villa, the air was clearer. Four old friends together, Moura, Lockhart, Hicks and Liuba talked late into the night, as they had done so often in the flat in Moscow when it felt as if they held the future of Russia in their hands. Now none of them, save perhaps Moura, had even a fingertip hold on the destinies of nations. So they made predictions.

  ‘Moura prophesied that the economic system of the world would alter so rapidly,’ Lockhart recalled, ‘that within twenty years it would be closer to Leninism than to the old pre-war capitalism.’ She predicted that it might be a compromise combining the best features of both systems, but ‘if the capitalists were wise enough, it would come about without revolution’.2

  When Lockhart wrote down that memory in 1933, he still had little idea how accurate her prophecy was, but he did guess that no radical changes would be wrought by their generation. They had sold their ideals after the war and gone back to the trough.

  It was a pleasant but melancholy weekend of discovering that youth was gone for good. They tried playing rounders, as they did when killing time in the gardens of the British Consulate in Moscow in the long summer when the Cheka was itching to arrest every Briton and Frenchman in Russia. They couldn’t keep it up for long; Lockhart’s health, never good, had been ruined by overindulgence, and the others weren’t much fitter.

  On Sunday evening, Lockhart had to return to Prague. Moura was heading to Estonia via Berlin, so they travelled together for the first leg. There were no sleeper cars, and the train was overcrowded. They sat together in a crammed first-class compartment and talked through the night. Speaking Russian for privacy, they reminisced about their months together in Russia – about Trotsky and Chicherin, Yakov Peters and the Reilly plot, and ‘Bolshevik marriage’.

  They parted at Prague station at six o’clock in the morning. As Lockhart walked home he felt ill at ease and wondered whether he had made a wrong decision. He asked himself, ‘Was my indecision due to lack of courage, or had the flame of our romance burnt itself out?’3

  Lockhart – or rather his obtuse male vanity – believed that Moura had seemed ‘a little bitter’ at their parting.4 In fact, if her manner with him was tight-lipped, it was irritation at his inability to understand what it was she wanted from him. After their conversation at Hinterbrühl she had suggested that they avoid seeing or communicating with each other for five years, and at the end of that they would come together again.5 He felt that she was trying to bind him to an impossible promise. Always thinking in terms of romance and sexual adventure, he failed to see the importance that their love had had for her – how it had given her life and sustenance and hope for the future. A few days later in Berlin, she wrote to him, trying to explain herself.

  She chided him for having expressed his trivial regret for ‘the thrill that is gone, never to be revived’. To her mind it seemed ‘like sexual hysteria – and I should have thought you were above that’.

  During all these years I have chiefly been doing my duty towards my own self-respect, or my children, or your memory . . .

  I do not think you quite understood my plan of the other day. I had not meant to bind you in any way – I told you I didn’t. All I wanted was to have an illusion to live for – while for you – it would have given a certain satisfaction to your better self . . . But don’t let us mention it again.

  I will not tell you, what seeing you again has meant to me, I will not speak of the triumphant feeling of knowing love that was stronger than death – all this is something which from now on belongs to me alone.

  But I think that this – should be good-bye for ever. It is not because you may not want to kiss me that I prefer not seeing you again, don’t think that. But it would disturb your peace of mind . . . and as for me – it would, perhaps, spoil something which was, before God, really ‘the most beautiful romance in the world’.

  So good-bye, my dearest; I am going out of your life never to return. May God give you – yes, happiness – I say it from all my heart.

  Moura6

  It would never be known how much it cost her to write that letter, to compose herself, to guide her often wild hand to produce the neat, flowing script of a lady at peace with herself. There was artistic truth in the letter, and some dry fact. But in the real truth of life, although she had kept her dignity, she hadn’t wholly retrieved her heart from Lockhart’s possession, and never would.

  In Berlin, Moura immediately threw herself back into her work, writing a torrent of letters to Gorky about the parlous state of his literary magazine Beseda and its publisher. The whole project was close to bankruptcy due to the refusal of Soviet Russia to allow the magazine to be sold there.7 By t
he end of August she was in Estonia with the children.

  Her relationship with Gorky was turning around. Just a year ago, she had been troubled by not being with him, by the insufficiency of his letters to her; now he was berating her for not writing often enough. She told him that her health was poor, that she needed to settle the children, and assured him that whenever she was away from him, she left a part of herself behind.8 Gorky knew nothing of her meeting with Lockhart, but his legendary jealousy was stirring anyway.

  Gorky’s life had entered a new phase that year, as had that of every Russian. On 21 January 1924, while Gorky was still awaiting his visa to enter Italy, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had died. The death forced him to re-evaluate his relationship with Lenin the man and Lenin the ideologue. He sent a wreath with the simple inscription ‘Farewell Friend’. And yet, only a few days earlier, he had written to his friend and fellow writer Romain Rolland, lamenting that he was unable to return to his homeland and that his arguments with Lenin had ‘awakened a spiritual hatred for each other’.9 Gorky tried to express his complicated feelings for the dead leader: ‘I loved him. Loved him with anger.’10

  Moura worked with Gorky to produce his reminiscences of his friend, which would be published around the world in many translations. The death of Lenin, he wrote, had ‘painfully struck at the hearts of those who knew him’:

  And if the storm cloud of hatred toward him, the storm cloud of lies and slander around his name grows thicker, it would make no difference: there are no forces which could darken the torch raised by Lenin in the sweltering pitch darkness of a panic-stricken world.11

  In publishing this statement, Gorky irritated the Soviet government and scandalised Russian émigrés everywhere. How could he have written such words about the man who had forced so many of them to flee for their lives, instigated butchery, locked up their people? The government continued to send Gorky money, but he was beginning to feel the pinch, and due to the animosity of his fellow Russians he felt more of an outcast than ever. He was earning a healthy $10,000 a year in royalties, and although he spent little on himself, he had a lot of dependants, and never refused anyone’s entreaties.12

  Gorky’s former wife Yekaterina was sent by Dzerzhinsky to Sorrento to try to persuade young Max to return to work for the Cheka back in Moscow. Gorky guessed that they were using Max as bait to try to lure him back. ‘They think I will come after him,’ he wrote to Yekaterina. ‘But I won’t go, not on your life!’13 Gorky remained at Il Sorito, and the commune continued its existence.

  Moura spent most of 1925 apart from Gorky. She spent time in Paris taking care of his literary affairs, and then carried on to Berlin where she met up with Maria Andreyeva. In July she holidayed with her children in Nice, where her sister Assia and her husband, Prince Basil Kotschoubey, had a small apartment.14

  She had left Gorky behind in a depressed mood after a serious discussion about their relationship. There was friction between them, and a crisis was developing. He could sense that things had changed somehow and was trying desperately to win her round. It had taken four years – perhaps because of the circumstances of their day-to-day existence in a crowded commune – but Gorky was experiencing the same helpless addiction to Moura that Lockhart had felt and that Wells had already begun to sense after their first week together.

  Gorky told her that she was the first woman with whom he had been truly sincere, and complained that by way of reward she gave him strife and argument; he was starting to feel that things could not be put right.15 She assured him that although their relationship had gone past its ‘youthful’ stage, her feelings about him had not altered.16 But he wasn’t to be placated; he was convinced that she wanted to leave him, and told her that life without her would be unbearable.17

  Their relationship was coming under stresses from every quarter. He was being attacked in the Russian émigré press for his politics. Beseda was still barred from Russia. And Moura was almost constantly away from him, on business in Berlin, staying with the children at Kallijärv, or travelling in Europe. The Sorrento apartment had been searched by the Italian police, and in September Moura had been arrested and briefly held by them.18 Gorky’s health was declining, he was acutely conscious of his age and physical deterioration, and he was increasingly unhappy about Moura’s disregard for him and the belief that she was in love with a younger man – a mysterious entity referred to directly only once in their correspondence as ‘R’ – apparently living in Sorrento.19

  He berated her for the insincerity of her letters – sometimes she would write frankly, but at other times she seemed to be reaching for an effect, a dramatic pose. This was her way, and it always had been. When she wrote directly from her feelings, her letters were rushed, the handwriting erratic; but sometimes she would compose carefully, expressing thoughts and sentiments that were dramatically appropriate to the scene playing out in her life as she saw it. In Moura’s mind, and in her perception of Gorky’s writing, ‘Artistic truth is more convincing than the empiric brand, the truth of a dry fact.’20 But for Gorky, artistic truth was for art. In real life he wanted empiric fact; he wanted and demanded sincerity.

  And he got it. On 23 October she laid out the truth about her feelings. She insisted that she had loved him in Russia, and that it had continued through their time at Saarow. And then, gradually, she realised, ‘I was no longer in love with you. I love you but I was not in love.’ She struggled to describe what it was that had gone, and reached into her feelings about Lockhart – ‘what makes birds sing and makes you see God in your head’. She hated herself for feeling no rapture with Gorky, only tenderness. ‘I convinced myself that none of this is important, that this demon can be strangled, but it kept on growing.’ And then, being as open as she knew how, she told him that she longed to ‘sense my life being illuminated again with that wonderful kind of love that gives everything, but demands nothing, love for which alone it is worth living. I had this with Lockhart and I had it with you – but it’s gone’. Without that, she pleaded, ‘what am I good for, how can you need me?’ To her mind, it was ‘insulting to take your rapture of love – and not be in a condition to sing with you as one voice, not feel excitement from your caresses. My dear friend,’ she concluded, ‘God knows if I have left you to suffer – I have paid for this a hundred times over with my own suffering.’21

  For a while, the crisis seemed to pass. She had been sincere, and that was all he asked. But by December, the complaints resumed. Moura, deciding that the time had come to be single again, had begun divorce proceedings against Budberg. Believing the situation with Gorky to be settled, and borne down by work and family, Moura had started being ‘cautious’ again in her letters to Gorky, picking her words, and again he interpreted this as an attempt to hide her feelings. He preferred sincere harshness to false pleasantry. ‘I’m no less self-centred than you,’ he assured her. ‘I want you to be inspired with the philanthropy of a surgeon and not be tormented like you have tormented me this whole past year. In the last few months it has been especially onerous and frivolous.’22

  She was shaken and hurt by his hostility. In a flurry of increasingly emotional replies, she assured him that she loved him, apologised for the anxiety she had caused him, denied that there was a ‘secret corner of my soul’ that she kept hidden from him. And she dismissed his accusation of frivolity and torture, and reminded him that it was he who had taught her to be cautious. If he wanted ‘the philanthropy of a surgeon’, ‘would it not be better for you to be just as “surgically” open with me?’23

  Gorky, who hadn’t slept for five nights, was furious. They must part, he decreed; their relationship must end. He was unable to work without the ‘basic conditions of peace of mind’, and he couldn’t achieve that so long as Moura was there to torment him. He could take no more of her ‘caution’.

  I told you many times before that I am too old for you, and I said this in the hope of hearing your truthful ‘yes!’ You did not dare, and do not dare say it, and this has
created both for you and me a completely unbearable situation. Your attraction to a man younger than I and therefore more worthy of your love and friendship is completely natural. And it is absolutely useless for you to conceal the voice of instinct with the fig leaves of ‘fine’ words.24

  Her attachment to the younger man – the mysterious ‘R’ – might have existed only in Gorky’s imagination; an invention to explain Moura’s disaffection. No clear evidence of a relationship survived, and Moura was never good at hiding her amours. Gorky believed that her travels to Berlin to take care of his business and to Estonia to see her children were pretexts. Separation would be better, he told her: ‘You will not have to split yourself in two, not have to resort to thinking up little lies “out of concern for me”, you will not have to restrain and distort yourself.’ Having made his case, having sustained his pride and dignity, at the close of his letter he broke down: ‘After all, I love you, I am jealous and so on. Sorry, maybe you don’t need to be reminded of this . . . How heavy, how terrible all this is.’

  She had pushed him too far. She needed Gorky; needed him personally as a friend and literary mentor, and as a haven in an unfriendly world. After nursing her feelings for a week, in early January 1926 Moura wrote Gorky a portentous letter. In it she referred to the famous farewell poem of Sergei Yesenin, the Russian émigré poet who had committed suicide in Petrograd just two weeks earlier. Young and achingly handsome, Yesenin had been a hugely popular author of romantic verse, a young darling of Russia and a prolific lover of women (he had been briefly married to Isadora Duncan and had lately married a granddaughter of Tolstoy). Suffering from depression, he had killed himself in his hotel room, leaving behind a final poem to a friend. It was said that for the lack of any ink, he had written the poem in his own blood.