A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (60 page)
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Authors: Deborah McDonald,Jeremy Dronfield
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical
BOOK: A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy
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Preface
| 1 | Wells, H. G. Wells in Love , p. 162. |
| 2 | Lord Ritchie Calder, letter to Andrew Boyle, Jun./Jul. 1980, CUL Add 9429/2B/85. |
| 3 | Andrew Boyle, ‘Budberg Outline’, CUL Add 9429/2B/127 (i). |
| 4 | Moura Budberg, Preface to Gorky, Fragments from My Diary , p. ix. |
Chapter 1: The Eve of Revolution
| 1 | Moura’s exact birthdate is a matter of doubt. Her official documents give the date as 3 March, although she celebrated her birthday on 6 March. The change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar does not account for the discrepancy. Furthermore, Moura’s daughter Tania stated that her mother’s year of birth was 1893 (Alexander, An Estonian Childhood ); in all other sources, including her passport applications, it is given as 1892. |
| 2 | Now spelled Berezova Rudka, the house has survived, but in a sad state of repair. The bright paint has faded and peeled, the gardens are desolate and the fountain is corroded and dried up. |
| 3 | Russian surnames have male and female forms. Zakrevskaya is the female form of Zakrevsky. |
| 4 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , p. 37. |
| 5 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , p. 27. |
| 6 | Figes, A People’s Tragedy , p. 158. |
| 7 | The First World War was known by various names in Russia. It was occasionally called the Second Fatherland War (the first being the war against Napoleon in 1812), but more commonly the Patriotic War or Great Patriotic War. These latter terms had also been used in 1812, and were revived again in 1941, and are nowadays mostly associated with the Second World War. |
| 8 | Sir Michael Postan, interview with Andrew Boyle, CUL Add 9429/2B/123. |
| 9 | Keane, Séan MacBride , p. 3. |
| 10 | White & Jeffares, The Gonne–Yeats Letters , p. 9. |
| 11 | Maud narrated this story in her own memoir, wherein she referred to Margaret by the pseudonym ‘Eleanor Robbins’ (Ward, Maud Gonne , p. 13). Maud herself was unmarried at this time, having turned down many proposals from her lover W. B. Yeats. In 1894 Maud gave birth to an illegitimate daughter of her own, named Iseult. She managed to bring up both girls. Eventually in 1904 Maud married an army officer called MacBride, who was subsequently discovered to have had an affair with the teenage Eileen Wilson (Toomey, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ). |
| 12 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , pp. 16–17. |
| 13 | It is not impossible that Micky was Moura’s mother. She had previously had an affair with a married older man and borne a child. And it is suggestive that Moura was born so soon after Micky’s arrival. But there is no evidence to support this conjecture. |
| 14 | Berberova, Moura , pp. 165–6. |
| 15 | Berberova, Moura , p. 359. The matter is also referred to in her MI5 file (visa application and related letter from E. T. Boyce). Some of the claims about Moura’s sexual conduct in this period come from H. G. Wells, and could be the products of mere gossip filtered through his own jealous imagination. He alleged that she had in fact been briefly married to Engelhardt (Wells, H. G. Wells in Love , p. 164; Wells, suppressed pages from H. G. Wells in Love ). |
| 16 | Quoted in Alexander, An Estonian Childhood , p. 31. |
| 17 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , p. 33. |
| 18 | Buchanan, Recollections of Imperial Russia , p. 46. |
| 19 | This recollection was told to the young Michael Korda, nephew of film-maker Alexander Korda, at one of his uncle’s functions (Korda, Charmed Lives , p. 214). |
| 20 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , p. 17. |
| 21 | Yakov Peters, who was head of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, with whom Moura became involved in 1918, claimed in a memoir that ‘according to the confession of [a] detainee and to documents found with Prince P., [Moura] had been a German spy during the Imperialist war’ (Peters, ‘Memoirs of Cheka Work During the First Year of the Revolution’, in the journal Proletarian Revolution , 1925, quoted in Berberova, Moura , p. 128). |
Chapter 2: Choosing Sides
| 1 | Buchanan describes this visit in some detail in his memoir My Mission to Russia , pp. 42–52. He gives the date as 12 January 1917 (NS). |
| 2 | Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent , p. 117. |
| 3 | Buchanan, My Mission to Russia , p. 41. |
| 4 | Buchanan, Ambassador’s Daughter , p. 143. |
| 5 | Buchanan, My Mission to Russia , p. 20; Benckendorff, Last Days at Tsarskoe , translator’s introduction, gives Paul’s title as Grand Marshal of the Court. Counts Paul and Alexander were distant cousins of Djon. |
| 6 | Sir George Buchanan’s attempt to warn the Tsar about the danger to Rasputin, which he said was based on ‘idle gossip’ ( My Mission to Russia , p. 48), has contributed to a theory that the assassination was actually orchestrated by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. An English friend of Prince Felix Yusupov (the principal conspirator, in whose palace Rasputin was killed), Oswald Rayner, was implicated in the murder, and may have supplied the revolver that was used. Sir George made inquiries about this allegation, but was assured by the head of the Petrograd division of the SIS that it was ‘incredible to the point of childishness’ (Milton, Russian Roulette , pp. 25–6). However, a case has been made that SIS agents were deeply involved if not wholly responsible (Cullen, Rasputin ). One does wonder why Buchanan would try to warn the Tsar if his worry really was based on nothing more than ‘idle gossip’. Also, the Tsar himself became convinced that a British conspiracy had been responsible. |
| 7 | Buchanan, My Mission to Russia , p. 49. |
| 8 | Buchanan, My Mission to Russia , p. 51. |
| 9 | Sir Michael Postan, interview with Andrew Boyle, CUL Add 9429/2B/123. Sir Michael Postan was born in Bessarabia, but left Russia after the Revolution. One wonders about the credibility of the claim. If there was reason to believe that she was both a German spy and a woman of such easy virtue, it seems unlikely that a man such as Sir George Buchanan, who was a very long way from being a fool, would have let his daughter be so friendly with her, or tolerated the Embassy’s military attachés having such an extensive social involvement with her. |
| 10 | Meriel Buchanan ( Petrograd , p. 93) writes that the night was ‘moonless’, but on 26 February 1917 (OS) there was a full moon which would have been low in the sky at the time of the departure from Yendel ( www.timeanddate.com/calendar/moonphases.html?year=1917&n=242 ; wwp.greenwichmeantime.co.uk/time-gadgets/moonrise/index.htm ). |
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