A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (36 page)

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:

Wherever we went we encountered busts, portraits, and statues of Marx. About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful beard . . . It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like
Das Kapital
in its inane abundance, and the human part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind.
⁴¹

In Marxist Russia everyone starved and froze and dreaded falling sick. Medicines were unobtainable. ‘Small ailments develop very easily therefore into serious trouble . . . If any one falls into a real illness the outlook is grim.’
⁴²

The commune at Kronverksky Prospekt was spared the worst of these privations. In the evenings the inhabitants and their guests would gather in the dining room, where in the middle of the table stood a large kerosene lamp; in its glow, people would sit and talk art and politics, or listen to Gorky’s tales of his life, which he turned into the bravura performance of a gifted storyteller and dramatist.
⁴³

Gorky accompanied Wells and Moura on one of their outings. It was a doubly meaningful one for Moura – a visit to the Petrograd storehouse of the art and antiques commission. This was the state organ which seized and evaluated works of art, whose secret purpose was as a resource for the
valiuta
programme. Gorky was probably ignorant of the programme; neither would he have known that Moura was now involved in it. But the visit had an extra meaning for her. The building that had been taken as the commission’s storehouse was the old British Embassy on Palace Quay.

Two years had passed since Cromie’s death, and almost as long since Moura’s last visit, when the place was a clutter of broken furniture. Now, to Wells’ eyes, it was ‘like some congested second-hand art shop’:

We went through room after room piled with the beautiful lumber . . . There are big rooms crammed with statuary; never have I seen so many white marble Venuses and sylphs together . . . There are stacks of pictures of every sort, passages choked with inlaid cabinets piled up to the ceiling; a room full of cases of old lace, piles of magnificent furniture.
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It had all been catalogued, but nobody seemed to know what would be done with ‘all this lovely and elegant litter’. While Gorky could only hope for it to be preserved, Moura probably knew that a good portion of it would end up sold abroad.

As the days passed, Wells’ relationship with Moura was nurtured and persistently cultivated by him until she agreed to consummate it. ‘I fell in love with her,’ he would recall, still bewildered many years later, ‘and one night at my entreaty she flitted noiselessly through the crowded apartments in Gorky’s flat to my embraces. I believed she loved me and I believed every word she said to me. No other woman has ever had that much effectiveness for me.’
⁴⁵

But for the time being, it was no more than a fling. After just a couple of weeks’ stay, Wells and Gip departed. After a visit to Moscow, they returned by way of Petrograd and travelled on to Reval to catch the boat to Stockholm on their way home to England.
⁴⁶

Reval and Stockholm. How those names must have struck a chord in Moura, and what a dissonant, unsettling chord it was. The country where her reunion with Lockhart had failed to occur, and the land where her children were still living, beyond her reach. Wells agreed to pass a message to them on his way through Estonia, letting them know that she was alive and well. And
England
, where Lockhart had his home. It was now two years since she had seen him, more than a year and a half since she had last heard word from him. And it was over three years since she had last seen her children.

The time was coming – again – to try to put all that right.

The days of the Gorky commune in Petrograd were numbered. By the end of 1920 Gorky’s relationship with Zinoviev, the head of the Northern Commune, was getting worse by the day. ‘Things reached a point where Zinoviev ordered searches of Gorky’s apartment,’ recalled Vladislav Khodasevich, who had joined the commune in November, ‘and threatened to arrest certain people who were close to him.’
⁴⁷
Moura, whom Zinoviev suspected of all manner of espionage, was among those he had an eye on.

She had told Wells that she was happier now than in the old days before the Revolution, because ‘now life is more interesting and real’.
⁴⁸
She always had a tendency to say what seemed suitable to the moment. Perhaps she meant it a little, thinking of her stifling marriage to Djon. But in reality, Russia was a nightmare, and she was waiting for something to wake her from it.

It came in the spring of 1921. Life for Gorky in Russia was becoming untenable. Lenin was finding him more and more of a liability and put pressure on him to go abroad, ostensibly for the good of his health. Indeed, the extreme conditions in Petrograd were making him ill. The destination settled upon was Germany.

Moura had been forbidden to leave Petrograd as a condition of her release from jail the year before. And yet in April she was granted a passport and given a permit to travel to Estonia. She always remained silent about how this was achieved. Perhaps Gorky intervened, as he did for many would-be émigrés – but if he did, no trace remains of it.
⁴⁹

Gorky had settled on Berlin as his new home, and preparations were made for his move. His son Max, his personal secretary Pyotr Kriuchkov and Maria Andreyeva went ahead to prepare a home for him.

Moura was notionally included in this party, but she would be travelling via Estonia. Maria Andreyeva, now working openly for the Commissariat for External Trade, had a purpose in Berlin – saleswoman
par excellence
with the wealth of imperial Russia in her carpetbag. So it may be that Moura’s potential as an agent in the
valiuta
programme, which had won her Andreyeva’s protection, was also the reason for her being allowed to leave Russia. Under the terms of the peace treaty of 1920 Russia had full use of Estonia’s railways and the port of Reval, which was needed for shipping antiquities and precious metals abroad (Petrograd’s port facilities had been damaged in the Revolution). Reval had already become a major artery for Russian gold flowing out to Stockholm.
⁵⁰
An additional agent who had friendly contacts with foreign diplomatic services would undoubtedly be valuable there.

On the day before Moura was due to travel, she received a piece of news that almost prostrated her with shock. Who it came from is unknown, but it was news of Lockhart, the first she had heard in two years. She had been looking forward excitedly to the freedom of communication that she would enjoy abroad, and anticipated bombarding her beloved with telegrams and letters as soon as she reached Estonia. But on that last day in Russia, word reached her that Lockhart had achieved his heart’s desire without her. His wife had given him a son.

All Moura’s hopes were blasted to pieces; it would be a month before she could master her feelings sufficiently to write to him.

There is no use asking you why, and how and when, is it? As a matter of fact, of course, all this stupid letter is of no use at all – only that there is something in me that aches so intensely that I must shout it out to you.

Your son? A fine boy? Do you know – as I write those words – it seems to me that I will not be able to live with that thought. I am ashamed of my tears – I thought I’d forgotten how to cry. But there was ‘little Peter’, you know.
⁵¹

There was a poem by Burns – ‘A Red, Red Rose’ – that Moura and Lockhart had once shared and which they had sworn by when they parted in Moscow.

. . . Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:

I will luve thee still, my dear,

While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee well, my only Luve

And fare thee well, a while!

And I will come again, my Luve,

Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.

‘The rocks, for me, have not melted wi’ the sun,’ she wrote. ‘And never will.’

Lockhart was gone from her – he had broken the bond, and her heart with it. ‘But if we meet again,’ she wondered, ‘in this small and rather disgusting world – how shall I greet you?’

It was fitting, perhaps, that the close of the Russian period of her life should coincide with the door closing on Lockhart’s love. It had been born of Russia, and tempered and pulled asunder by the forces of Russia. And yet she would never, until the sands of life had run, be able to give him up.

Notes

*
New Life.

^†
currency.

16

Baroness Budberg

1921–1923

May 1921, Estonia

The Narva train steamed into the Baltic station of Reval. Or
Tallinn
as Moura must now learn to call it. In a display of nationalism, the old Finnish-Germanic name had been abolished, and the traditional Estonian one revived. The train had passed through the tiny stations at Yendel and Aegviidu, tantalisingly close to home, but Moura hadn’t alighted. Although she yearned for them and hadn’t seen them for three years, the time hadn’t yet come for her to be reunited with her children. Her movements were no longer hers to control. There was business to attend to.

Still, it had been an easier journey than either of her previous entries into the country: easier than the crossing from Helsingfors or the long walk across the frontier zone with German soldiers as an escort. This time she had everything – a passport, a visa to enter Estonia, a permit to leave Russia and semi-official work to do.

Moura stepped down from the train and found a porter to carry the single battered suitcase which contained all her worldly belongings – her felt hat, her threadbare fur coat, her old-fashioned slippers, and a few odds and ends. Walking out of the station, she glanced around the square, looking for a cab. Before she could so much as raise a hand, two uniformed men stepped up either side of her. ‘You’re under arrest,’ said one of them in Russian. They gripped her arms and pushed her into a carriage. While one got in with her, the other climbed up on the box and whipped up the horse.
¹

This was becoming almost a way of life for Moura. She didn’t panic or berate the policeman. Calmly she said, ‘Everything is in order.’

‘What is in order?’

Moura listed her passport, visa, permits – all the official documents that authorised her presence in Estonia.

The officer was unimpressed. ‘You’ve violated the law. You’re under arrest. Keep quiet.’

She was put in a cell and left for hours. She was fed, which cheered her up. The meal – a fatty meat soup with white bread – was better than anything she had eaten in Petrograd in a very long while.

The interrogation, when it came, was no surprise and no great ordeal for a woman who had twice seen the inside of Cheka jails. She had heard about the arrest of the official who had helped her cross the frontier in 1918, and the dossier the Germans had put in front of him, itemising her alleged work as a spy. Now she saw for herself the dossier the Estonians had on her. She was known to be an associate of Gorky; she had previously been the mistress and agent of Yakov Peters.
²
She was undoubtedly a Bolshevik spy, and had entered Estonia for that purpose.