17 Troyat, Gorky, pp. 62–3.
18 Troyat, Gorky, p. 87.
19 Troyat, Gorky, pp. 104–5.
20 Gorky, letter to Yekaterina, 5 May 1911, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 40.
21 Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, pp. 149, 293.
22 Berberova, Moura, p.105.
23 Various sources are in conflict over the date and location of this escape bid. The narrative given here is, again, achieved by resolving the conflicts between the sources.
24 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 1933; also Anna Kotschoubey (Assia), letter to H. G. Wells, 27 Dec. 1920, RBML, and Wells, Russia in the Shadows, p. 10. These three accounts contradict that given by Tania (Alexander, Estonian Childhood, pp. 65–6), which states that her mother’s escape attempt took place in December 1920 and was across the frozen river Narva into Estonia. Tania’s date is contradicted by contemporary evidence proving that it was late February or early March. Furthermore, by February 1920 crossing the frozen Narva would not be necessary to gain entry to Estonia, as it was no longer the frontier line – under the Russo-Estonian peace treaty of February 1920, the agreed frontier was several miles east of the river (Article III, Peace Treaty of Tartu, in League of Nations Treaty Series vol. XI, 1922, pp. 51–71).
25 Leggett, The Cheka, p. 251.
26 Quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 105.
27 McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, pp. 57–61 and passim. By the end of 1919, 36 million gold roubles’ worth of materials had been collected in Petrograd alone. By spring 1921 Andreyeva was carrying out the role of saleswoman openly and from 1922 was working for the Commissariat for External Trade (Fitzpatrick, Commissariat of Enlightenment, p. 293).
28 The evidence (most of it circumstantial) for Moura’s involvement is summarised in an unpublished paper by G. L. Owen, ‘Budberg, the Soviets, and Reilly’, acquired by H. G. Wells’ biographer Andrea Lynn and passed to Deborah McDonald.
29 Berberova, Moura, p. 115. The ‘Bronze Venus’ was Alexander Pushkin’s nickname for a woman with whom he had an affair in 1828 and on whom he based two of his fictional characters; she is believed to have been Countess Agrafena Zakrevsky. According to Berberova, Gorky believed mistakenly that Countess Zakrevsky was Moura’s ancestor.
30 Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 99.
31 Russell, The ractice and Theory of Bolshevism, p. 22.
32 Russell, The ractice and Theory of Bolshevism, pp. 43–4.
33 Wells, Russia in the Shadows, p. 31.
34 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, p. 33.
35 Wells, H. G. Wells in Love, p. 163. The hat was made for Moura from beaver felt, a common hat-making fabric at the time, by Valentina Khodasevich (Berberova, Moura, p. 127; Berberova’s translator has rendered the term incorrectly as beaver fur).
36 Wells, H. G. Wells in Love, p. 164.
37 Wells, Russia in the Shadows, pp. 9–10. In fairness to Moura, some of the untruths she appears to have told Wells could be his misunderstandings or mistaken memories; for instance, a distant cousin of her late husband had been Russian Ambassador in London, and she had been in a Bolshevik prison three times. But knowing her proven tendency to fabricate and embellish, it is quite probable that she told exactly the lies that Wells naively quoted.
38 Wells, Russia in the Shadows, pp. 16, 26.
39 Wells, Russia in the Shadows, pp. 15–16.
40 Wells, Russia in the Shadows, pp. 19–20.
41 Wells, Russia in the Shadows, pp. 69–70.
42 Wells, Russia in the Shadows, p. 22.
43 Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, pp. 226–8.
44 Wells, Russia in the Shadows, pp. 51–2.
45 Wells, H. G. Wells in Love, p. 164. According to Berberova (Moura, p. 123), the gossip in the commune was that Wells went to Moura’s room uninvited, and there were several versions of what happened, ranging from her giving him a ‘swift kick’ to him spending the night chatting to her. Berberova did not believe Moura had slept with him.
46 Wells, Russia in the Shadows, p. 96.
47 Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, p. 229.
48 Wells told this to sculptor Clare Sheridan, who was in Moscow awaiting a chance to make a bust of Lenin (Sheridan, Mayfair to Moscow, pp. 109 –110).
49 Vaksberg (The Murder of Maxim Gorky, pp. 105–6) is completely perplexed by this, and suggests a complicated conspiracy of Gorky’s other women (including Maria Andreyeva and Yekaterina) using their influence to separate her from Gorky. It’s possible, but if they’d wanted that, they could simply have left her to rot in the Cheka jail.
50 McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, pp. 61, 143–6; Owen, ‘Budberg, the Soviets, and Reilly’, p. 3.
51 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 24 Jun. 1921, HIA. Lockhart’s son Robin was born in 1920; he grew up to become an author, and wrote a book about Sidney Reilly. The letter gives no indication of how the news reached Moura, but her wording suggests that it was not from Lockhart himself. It could have been a communication from H. G. Wells, or from Liuba and Will Hicks.
Chapter 16: Baroness Budberg
1 Berberova, Moura, pp. 127–8. Berberova’s account is based on the story told to her by Moura. However, she wrongly places it in January; in fact it was May. According to a letter left for Gorky, she departed Petrograd on 18 May (Moura, letter to Gorky, 18 May 1921, via Scherr). In this letter, she told him that she loved him, observed that she believed in God while he didn’t, and informed him that she was going to Estonia to see her children.
2 Moura Budberg MI5 file, report on Moura by Ernest Boyce, 11 Jul. 1940.
3 There are occasional references to Jews in her letters, and while there is no hostility, there is a degree of casual contempt. The same is true of the writings of Lockhart, Meriel Buchanan, Denis Garstin and nearly all non-Jews during this period. Unlike some of their contemporaries, none of Moura’s circle regarded Jews as a threat or set much store by the fact that so many Bolsheviks were Jews.
4 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, p. 69; Moura Budberg MI5 file, report on Moura by Ernest Boyce, 11 Jul. 1940.
5 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, p. 68.
6 Berberova (Moura, p. 130) describes the reunion happening in Tallinn, but Alexander (who of course was there) says it occurred at Kallijärv on the Yendel estate.
7 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, pp. 67–70.
8 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, p. 67.
9 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, p. 70.
10 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, pp. 70–71.
11 Moura Budberg MI5 file, Metropolitan Police Special Branch note, 31 Mar. 1947. This note was a record of an interview with Moura in connection with her application for British naturalisation.
12 McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, pp. 143–6, 158–61.
13 Moura, letters to Gorky, 18 Aug.–1 Oct. 1921, GA. Some have suspected that Moura managed to make a covert, illegal visit to England at this time, but she almost certainly didn’t; in October 1921 H. G. Wells suggested to his friend Maurice Baring (who was an old Russia hand) that they visit ‘Countess Benckendorff’ in Cromer, Norfolk (Wells, letter 1335 to Baring in Correspondence of H. G. Wells vol. 3). Most likely this would be Countess Sophie Benckendorff, widow of the late Ambassador to the UK, who was then living in Suffolk.
14 The first entry in the first section (KV2 1971) is dated 9 Dec. 1921, and is an extract from an intercepted letter to Prince Pierre Volkonsky mentioning Moura’s recent marriage to Budberg.
15 Berberova, Moura, p. 130.
16 Moura, letter to Gorky, 16 Dec. 1921, GA. There is a note in Moura’s MI5 file indicating that a Russian source identified Budberg as having worked for the secret police in St Petersburg, but doesn’t specify whether this was the imperial Okhrana or the Bolshevik Cheka.
17 There is a note to this effect in Moura’s MI5 file, and the French Deuxième Bureau also noted it (Deuxième Bureau Documents Rapatriés, dossier on ‘Russian Personalities of E
migration Suspected of Informing the Soviets: Countess Benckendorff, Baron Budberg, Trilby Espenberg, 1921–1936’, Carton 608, Dossier 3529. Quoted in Lynn, Shadow Lovers, pp. 195–6).
18 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, pp. 71–2.
19 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 6 Jan. 1923, HIA. When Lockhart was writing his memoirs in the 1930s, she made him remove all reference to Budberg, protesting that she could never have ‘married a man in order to get some facility’ (Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 1933). When he wrote an essay in which he again referred to her marriage of convenience, she crossed it out, put angry exclamation marks in the margin, and emended the passage to say that ‘after her return to Estonia she married Baron Budberg, an old friend of the family’ (Lockhart, ‘Baroness Budberg’, unpublished draft, HIA).
20 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 24 Jun. 1921, HIA.
21 Moura, letter to Gorky, May 1921, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 104. ‘Kobelyak’ was a contemporary spelling; it is now ‘Kobeliaky’.
22 Moura, letters to Gorky, Jun.–Aug. 1921, GA.
23 Gorky, letter quoted in Alexander, Estonian Childhood, p. 72.
24 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, pp. 72–3.
25 Gorky, letter to Lenin, 22 Nov. 1921, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 141.
26 Moura, letter to Gorky, 1921, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 148.
27 Gorky, letter to Lenin, 25 Dec. 1921, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 144.
28 Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 150.
29 Berberova, Moura, p. 166.
30 Moura Budberg MI5 file, note added 15 May 1922. Meiklejohn is identified as the Tallinn station chief in Jeffery, MI6, p. 184.
31 Moura, letter to Wells, 28 Jul. 1922, RBML.
32 Now 15 Karl-Marx-Damm.
33 Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, pp. 231–2.
34 Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, pp. 231–2.
35 Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, pp. 231–2.
36 Moura, Preface to Gorky, Fragments, p. vii.
37 Moura, Preface to Gorky, Fragments, p. ix.
38 Moura, Preface to Gorky, Fragments, pp. ix–x.
39 Berberova, The Italics are Mine, pp. 178–9.
40 Moura, letter to Wells, 11 Oct. 1923, RBML.
41 Moura, letters to Wells, 1923, RBML.
42 Moura, letter to Wells, 26 Jan. 1923, RBML.
43 Moura, letter to Wells, 11 Oct. 1923, RBML. The Hôtel Hermitage on the Côte d’Azur was occasionally used by Wells.
44 Lockhart, diary entry for 22 May 1919, Diaries vol. 1, p. 53.
45 Wells, H. G. Wells in Love, p. 104.
Chapter 17: One Perfect Thing
1 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 6 Jan. 1923, HIA.
2 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 6 Jan. 1923, HIA.
3 Moura, letter to Lockhart, 6 Jan. 1923, HIA.
4 Moura Budberg MI5 file, 31 Jul. 1923, SIS Section 1B.
5 Moura, letter to Gorky, 7 Aug. 1923, GA.
6 Moura, letters to Gorky, 4–29 Aug. 1923, GA.
7 Moura, letter to Wells, 10 Feb. 1924.
8 Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, pp. 234–5.
9 Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 173.
10 Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, pp. 236–7.
11 Kathleen Tynan, interview with Moura Budberg, Vogue (US), 1 Oct. 1970, p. 210. This tale might be one of the many Moura invented or elaborated. But it was certainly true that Gorky and Moura were subjected to surveillance.
12 Editor’s note in Lockhart, Diaries vol. 1, p. 55.
13 Lockhart, diary entry, 30 Jul. 1923, Diaries vol. 1, pp. 56–7.
14 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, pp. 232–3.
15 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 233.
16 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 233; unpublished diary entry for 29 Jul. 1918. Oddly, Lockhart (who wrote his memoirs from his diaries) gives the date of Moura’s call from Vienna and recalls the earlier incident, but doesn’t comment on the coincidence of the dates.
17 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 234.
18 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 234. Lockhart compresses the timescale, saying that he went ‘the next night’, but this is contradicted by his diary for 2–4 Aug. 1924 (Diaries vol. 1, pp. 58–9).
19 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 235.
20 Lockhart, diary entry, 2–4 Aug. 1924, Diaries vol. 1, p. 58.
21 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 237.
22 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 237.
Chapter 18: Love and Anger
1 Wells, H. G. Wells in Love, pp. 167–8.
2 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 238.
3 Lockhart, Retreat from Glory, p. 240.
4 Lockhart, diary entry, 2–4 Aug. 1924, Diaries vol. 1, p. 58.
5 This proposition isn’t mentioned in Lockhart’s memoir and is only alluded to in contemporary letters, but it is referred to by Moura in a letter written to Lockhart some years later (30 May 1933, LL).
6 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated (labelled ‘Thursday’): probably 7 Aug. 1924.
7 Moura, letters to Gorky, 4–14 Aug. 1924, GA.
8 Moura, letter to Gorky, 20 Aug. 1924, GA.
9 Gorky, letter to Romain Rolland, 15 Jan. 1924, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 167.
10 Gorky, letter to Romain Rolland, 3 Mar. 1924, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 167.
11 Gorky, ‘A Person’, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 167.
12 Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, p. 238.
13 Gorky, letter to Yekaterina Peshkova, Jun. 1924, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 175.
14 Moura, letter to Gorky, 29 Jul. 1925, GA.
15 Gorky, letter to Moura, 2 Aug. 1925, GA.
16 Moura, letter to Gorky, 5 Aug. 1925, GA.
17 Gorky, letter to Moura, 8 Aug. 1925, GA.
18 Moura, letter to Gorky, 29 Sep. 1925, GA.
19 Researchers who have studied the Budberg/Gorky correspondence (including Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 186n, and Barry P. Scherr, unpublished notes) presume that ‘R’ (who is referred to directly just once in a letter from Moura to Gorky, 19 Apr. 1926) was Robert Bruce Lockhart. However, Moura never referred to Lockhart as ‘Robert’ or ‘R’. Intimately, he was always ‘Baby’ (or variations thereof). Early in their relationship he was briefly ‘Locky’ and ‘Bertie’, but never ‘Robert’. Therefore the identity of ‘R’ is a mystery. The only clue is in her alleged confession to H. G. Wells that she had had an (unnamed) Italian lover in Sorrento (Wells, H. G. Wells in Love, p. 168). This is the most likely explanation.
20 Moura, Preface to Gorky, Fragments, p. ix.
21 Moura, letter to Gorky, 23 Oct. 1925, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, pp. 184–5.
22 Gorky, letter to Moura, 21 Dec. 1925, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 185.
23 Moura, letters to Gorky, 23 Dec. 1925, GA; and 29 Dec. 1925, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 185.
24 Gorky, letter to Moura, 30 Dec. 1925, GA; extract quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, pp. 185–6.
25 Moura, letter to Gorky, 8 Jan. 1926, GA.
26 Sergei Yesenin, ‘Goodbye, My Friend, Goodbye’, Dec. 1925.
27 Gorky, letter (probably never sent) to Moura, 3 Feb. 1926, GA.
28 Moura, letter to Gorky, 19 Apr. 1926, quoted in Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky, p. 186.
29 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, p. 84.
30 Quoted in Troyat, Gorky, p. 160.
31 Moura, letter to Gorky, 20 Aug. 1926, GA.
32 Alexander, Estonian Childhood, p. 93.
33 Gorky, in debate with Russian writers, 12 Jun. 1931, quoted in Troyat, Gorky, p. 162.
34 Moura, letter to Wells, 12 Feb. 1926, RBML.
35 Moura, letter to Wells, 4 Oct. 1926, RBML.
36 Personal communication from Barry P. Scherr.
37 Deuxième Bureau Documents Rapatriés, dos
sier on ‘Russian Personalities of Emigration Suspected of Informing the Soviets: Countess Benckendorff, Baron Budberg, Trilby Espenberg, 1921–1936’, Carton 608, Dossier 3529. Quoted in Lynn, Shadow Lovers, pp.195–6. The reliability of this source is questionable. It specifies no dates (it’s a general summary of 15 years of observation) and appears to conflate several individuals, including one Trilby Espenberg and at one point confuses Moura with Countess Sophie Benckendorff, widow of the late Russian Ambassador to the UK, who settled in England after the Revolution.
A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy Page 46