1 Berberova (Moura, p. 79) claims she was told by Moura that when she was first interrogated she denied the affair. The Chekist interrogator then showed her a collection of compromising photos of herself with Lockhart, whereupon Moura fainted. Aside from the dubious melodrama of this scene, there is the anachronism of covert long-lens surveillance photography in 1918, plus the fact that the relationship was well known at the time (even Moura’s mother in Petrograd knew about it). This appears to be one of the flourishes with which Moura liked to embellish her life story.
2 Leggett, The Cheka, pp. 193–4.
3 Reports by ministers of neutral nations, 3–9 Sept. 1918, in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia, pp. 2–5.
4 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 320–21.
5 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 321. Wardwell had replaced Lockhart’s friend Raymond Robins, who had doubled as Red Cross chief and unofficial diplomatic agent.
6 Lockhart, diary entry for 3 Sept. 1918, Diaries vol. 1, pp. 40–41.
7 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 324.
8 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 324; Peters, ‘The Lockhart Case’, p. 514. In his report, Peters states that he only agreed to a secret meeting on condition that Lockhart didn’t say anything slanderous about Soviet Russia – presumably an addition to cover his own back.
9 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 340–41.
10 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 326–7; Diaries vol. 1, pp. 41–2.
11 Report by W. J. Oudendijk, 6 Sept. 1918, in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia, p. 5; also Ullman, Intervention, p. 293.
12 Report by W. J. Oudendijk, 6 Sept. 1918, in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia, p. 6.
13 Letter from Petrograd prisoners, 5 Sept. 1918, in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia, pp. 6–7.
14 Report by W. J. Oudendijk, 6 Sept. 1918, in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia, p. 5.
15 Malkov, Reminiscences, p. 327. According to Lockhart (Diaries vol. 1, p. 42; British Agent, p. 329), his rooms were in the Kavaliersky Korpus. But Malkov, as Kremlin Commandant, probably knew the geography of the place better than Lockhart. Also, Lockhart’s remark that the rooms had been a lady-in-waiting’s apartment is consistent with Malkov’s account.
16 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 329–30. Lockhart’s fears are reflected in his diary entry for 8 September (Diaries vol. 1, p. 42), in which, presumably fearing that it would be read, he implied that he hadn’t the faintest idea who Smidkhen was (‘I have been put in with a Russian(?) called Smidchen who is said to be my agent!’).
17 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 9 Sept. 1918. Note: British diplomatic etiquette at the time accorded Russian officials the French-style honorific ‘M.’ – hence ‘M. Peters’.
18 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 10 Sept. 1918.
19 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 331–2.
20 Some 20 letters sent by Moura to Lockhart during his time in the Kremlin have survived; of these, 6 are in English, and the rest in Russian. The latter are mostly very brief notes. Some of the longer, more significant, Russian letters have translations interpolated in a different (?Lockhart’s) hand.
21 The claim that Moura became Peters’ lover comes from a summary report on Moura by SIS officer Ernest Boyce (11 Jul. 1940, Moura Budberg MI5 file). Kyril Zinovieff (interview, 1980, Andrew Boyle archive) believed that her favoured treatment indicated that she had become a Soviet agent.
22 Berberova, Moura, p. 63.
23 In the first part of his memoir, British Agent, Lockhart narrated the events of September 1918 more or less in the order in which they occurred, and didn’t try to explain Moura’s release. But in Retreat from Glory (p. 5) he claimed falsely that ‘I had secured her release at the cost of my own re-arrest’. Moura had more editorial control over this volume than over its predecessor and was concerned to strike out anything that made her look mercenary (letters to Lockhart, 1933–4, LL).
24 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably about 12–15 Sept. 1918.
25 The sequence of these events given by Lockhart in his memoir appears to differ from that in his diary, which in turn is slightly different from the sequence of Moura’s letters. The version given here resolves the contradictions, taking the letters and diary as the more reliable evidence.
26 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 18 Sept. 1918.
27 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 337.
28 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 18 Sept. 1918.
29 Lockhart, diary entry for 23 Sept. 1918, Diaries vol. 1, p. 44.
30 Moura, letter in Russian to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 23 Sept. 1918.
31 Moura, two letters to Lockhart, LL. Both undated: probably 23–30 Sept. 1918; one Russian, one English.
32 Lockhart, diary entry for 28 Sept. 1918, Diaries vol. 1, p. 45.
33 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 29 Nov. 1918, LL.
34 Peters, ‘The Lockhart Case’, p. 489. This version was promoted by the Soviet authorities until the 1960s, when the publication of an account written in 1918 by the political commissar of the Latvian Rifle Division revealed that the plot had been an agent provocateur operation, orchestrated from the beginning by Dzerzhinsky and Peters (see Long, ‘Plot and Counter-Plot’, pp. 130ff). Peters also compressed the timescale of his investigation to give the impression that the Cheka had acted more promptly than it had. The publication of Pavel Malkov’s Reminiscences of a Kremlin Commandant, first in 1961, then in a more detailed 1967 edition, also exposed some of the falsehoods in Peters’ report, such as the location of the arrest of Maria Fride.
35 Peters’ account was the official version, and went unchallenged until the publication of Malkov’s account of the interrogation of Maria Fride, and continued to be accepted even afterwards.
36 The breach was realised immediately, and Izvestia was told (and promptly reported) that Lockhart had been arrested mistakenly and released as soon as he was identified (Izvestia, 3 Sept. 1918, quoted by Berberova, Moura, p. 71), a lie contradicted by both Lockhart’s and Malkov’s accounts.
37 Ullman, Intervention, pp. 290–91.
38 Peters, ‘The Lockhart Case’, p. 516.
39 Peters, ‘The Lockhart Case’, p. 516.
40 Peters, ‘The Lockhart Case’, p. 516.
41 Moura remarked twice in her letters that she expected to be able to get money from the Ukraine (letters to Lockhart, 26 Jan., 14 Feb. 1919, LL and HIA), and it is presumed that this must have been from her father’s estate. Some doubt is cast on this by the fact that although at the time the plans were first made the Hetmanate government was still in place, by the time of the letters it had fallen and the Red Army was recapturing the Ukraine, so there would certainly have been no property to inherit.
42 Lockhart, diary entry for 1 Oct. 1918, Diaries vol. 1, p. 46.
43 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 344–5.
44 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Marked ‘Thursday’: certainly 3 Oct. 1918.
45 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Marked ‘Thursday’: certainly 3 Oct. 1918.
Chapter 13: The End of Everything
1 Gen. Finlayson, quoted in De Ruvigny, ‘Garstin, Denys Norman’, p. 66.
2 Garstin, letter, 6 Jun. 1918, reproduced in Walpole, ‘Denis Garstin’, p. 605.
3 Hugh Walpole, preface, in Denis Garstin, The Shilling Soldiers, p. xi.
4 Garstin, letter, 6 Jun. 1918, reproduced in Walpole, ‘Denis Garstin’, p. 605.
5 Moura, letter to Meriel Buchanan, 13 Oct. 1918, LL.
6 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 10 Oct. 1918.
7 Moura, letter to Meriel Buchanan, 13 Oct. 1918, LL. Moura must presumably have left Garry with her mother while she was away with Lockhart in Moscow.
8 Moura, letters to Lockhart, 14 Nov. and 2 Dec. 1918, LL.
9 Cross, ‘A Corner of a Foreign Field’, pp. 352–4; Buchanan, Victorian Gallery, pp. 103–45.
10 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 10 Oct. 191
8.
11 R. L. Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, I.
12 R. L. Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, ‘Crabbed Age and Youth’.
13 R. L. Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, III: ‘Falling in Love’.
14 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 10 Oct. 1918.
15 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 2 Dec. 1918, LL.
16 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 28 Oct. 1918, LL.
17 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated, written on American Red Cross paper; probably 10–15 Oct. 1918.
18 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 24 Jan. 1919, LL.
19 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 11. It is not impossible that Moura’s illness was also Spanish flu, and that she passed it to Lockart, but this is unlikely given the time lapse between their contact and Lockhart succumbing. More likely he picked up the infection during his travels. Moura’s illness was possibly an infection connected with her miscarriage.
20 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 6.
21 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, pp. 5–6.
22 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 43.
23 Lockhart, diary entry for 14 Nov. 1918, Diaries vol. 1, p. 48.
24 Lockhart, diary entry for 16 Nov. 1918, Diaries vol. 1, p. 48.
25 Lockhart, diary entry for 23 Nov. 1918, Diaries vol. 1, p. 51.
26 The Tribunal and sentences were reported in Izvestia on 25 Nov. and 10 Dec. 1918 (cited in Long, ‘Searching for Sidney Reilly’, p. 1234). Col. Aleksandr Fride was sentenced to death by the same court, and was shot.
27 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 13 Oct. 1918.
28 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 4 Oct. 1918.
29 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 24 Jan. 1919, LL.
30 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 31 Oct. 1918, LL.
31 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 16 Dec. 1918, LL.
Chapter 14: Se Mettre en Quatre
1 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 26–28 Dec. 1918, LL.
2 Moura, letters to Lockhart, Feb. 1919, HIA and LL. See also reports on conditions in Russia in 1919 in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia, pp. 30ff. Wages had been set by decree in July 1918; inflation had raised them to ten times their pre-war rates, but prices outstripped them, especially for rare commodities like tea, butter and firewood.
3 Moura, letters to Lockhart, 26–28 Dec. 1918 and 18 Feb. 1919, LL.
4 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 26–28 Dec. 1918, LL.
5 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 13 Oct. 1918.
6 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 14 Feb. 1919, HIA.
7 According to a letter from Moura to Lockhart (LL, undated: probably 1933), Chukovsky had been an interpreter for Thornhill on the Archangel front. If so, he presumably set no store by the negative opinions of Moura she believed Thornhill propagated. Chukovsky later achieved fame in Russia as a children’s author.
8 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 26–28 Dec. 1918, LL.
9 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 18 Feb. 1919, LL. The reference is to Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian writer and political idealist.
10 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 26–28 Dec. 1918, LL.
11 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 1 Jan. 1919, LL. John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) wrote his Life of Walter Scott in 1837–8 and was married to Scott’s daughter; he was not related to Robert Bruce Lockhart, though Moura might well have believed he was. A rough calculation indicates that to earn the same as a skilled workman (between 500 and 1,000 roubles per month), Moura must have had to translate about eight to twenty pages a day.
12 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 4 Jan. 1919, LL.
13 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 4 Jan. 1919, LL.
14 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 5 Jan. 1919, LL.
15 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 24 Jan. 1919, LL.
16 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 18 Feb. 1919, LL.
17 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 25 Jan. 1919, HIA.
18 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 26 Jan. 1919, LL.
19 Lockhart, unpublished diary entry, 23 Feb. 1919; Moura, letters to Lockhart, 2 Nov. 1918, 14 Feb. 1919, HIA.
20 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 14 Feb. 1919, HIA.
21 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 14 Feb. 1919, HIA.
22 Moura, letters to Lockhart, 12–13 Feb. 1919, LL.
23 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 5 Mar. 1919, HIA.
24 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 6 Mar. 1919, LL.
25 Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, Leaves of Grass.
26 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 12 Apr. 1919, LL.
27 Moura, letters to Lockhart, 12–20 Apr. 1919, LL and HIA. The account that follows is based on this series of letters. There are pages missing from the letters – possibly removed by Lockhart in order to suppress Moura’s statements about her movements at this period.
28 Maurice Magre, ‘Avilir’, L’Oeuvre amoureuse et sentimentale (Paris: Bibliothèque des curieux, 1922), p. 174 (translation Jeremy Dronfield); Moura, letter to Lockhart, 12 Feb. 1919, LL.
29 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, pp. 1–3, 8.
30 Moura, letters to Lockhart, 18 Apr. and Easter Day [20 Apr.], 1919, LL and HIA.
31 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 9 May 1919, HIA. In Tania’s account (Estonian Childhood, pp. 1–3) the murder took place on the 18th. Note: ‘Esthonia’ was the contemporary English spelling.
32 In her letter to Lockhart on 9 May 1919, Moura writes that her mother was to undergo an operation the next day. According to Tania (Estonian Childhood, p. 12), Madame Zakrevskaya died ‘in April, only a week or two after my father’. Presumably Tania was mistaken about the exact date, and her grandmother actually died from the operation on or after 10 May.
33 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 18 Apr. 1919, LL.
34 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 24 Jan. 1919, LL.
35 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 12 Apr. 1919, LL.
36 Lockhart, diary entry for 24 Oct. 1919, Diaries vol. 1, p. 54.
37 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 43.
Chapter 15: ‘We’re All Iron Now’
1 Wells, Russia in the Shadows, pp. 14–15.
2 Wells, H. G. Wells in Love, pp. 161–4.
3 Berberova, Moura, pp. 98–100; Alexander, Estonian Childhood, pp. 56–9. Berberova produced a garbled account, apparently based on a misunderstanding of Moura’s own oral tale. She states that in early 1919 Moura was homeless and given accommodation by the elderly Gen. Aleksandr Mosolov. This is contradicted by Moura’s letters, which show her living with her mother. Both Berberova and Tania state that she approached Chukovsky in the spring or summer of 1919 begging for work as a translator; he gave her none, and instead he took her to meet (for the first time) Maxim Gorky. Thus she became his live-in secretary. We know from Moura’s letters that she was approached first by Chukovsky and by the beginning of January 1919 was already translating books for him (see Chapter 14). The account given here is arrived at by resolving the contradictions and errors in previous versions.
4 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 9 May 1919, HIA; Alexander, Estonian Childhood, p. 12.
5 Chukovsky, diary entry for 4 Sep. 1919, Diary, p. 53.
6 Berberova’s and Tania’s accounts both have Moura asking for translation work in mid-1919 and meeting Gorky for the first time then. Both women seem to have misunderstood Moura’s story and conflated two events into one. Berberova isn’t precise about the time when Moura entered Gorky’s household, but Tania states that it was September 1919.
7 Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, p. 228.
8 Berberova, Moura, p. 100.
9 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 1933. Moura does nothing to clarify the chronology in this letter, in which she refers to events several years apart (e.g. the Kerensky period and her time in the Gorky commune) as if they were virtually contemporaneous. All she specifies is that the ‘peacock’ reaction occurred at her very first meeting with Gorky.
10 Quoted in Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 208.
11 Gorky, Novaya Zhizn, 7 Nov. 1917 and 9 Jan. 1918, quoted in Leggett, The Cheka, pp. 45, 304
.
12 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 18 Feb. 1919, LL.
13 Leggett, The Cheka, p. 65.
14 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 24 Jan. 1919, LL.
15 Recollections of Valentina Khodasevich (niece of Vladislav) quoted in Alexander, Estonian Childhood, p. 61.
16 Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, pp. 227–8.; Valentina Khodasevich, quoted by Alexander; Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 67.
A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy Page 45