A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (13 page)

Less than two weeks later, Moura underwent another parting. As a precaution against the risk of German invasion, the Bolsheviks had decided to move the capital to Moscow. Besides its strategic vulnerability, they found Petrograd too European, both in character and in proximity. The Asiatic style of Moscow suited the Bolsheviks better. That meant that Lockhart’s little mission would have to abandon the apartment on Palace Quay and follow the seat of Bolshevism to the new capital, more than four hundred miles away.

All the time, the political situation – and Lockhart’s task – grew ever more tense. Lloyd George continued to believe that communication with the Bolsheviks should be maintained. But the War Cabinet feared that Germany would take over Russia
in toto
and thereby gain a strategic position in the Pacific. That was unthinkable, so the Cabinet voted to notify Japan that if it wished to intervene against Russia in Siberia, such a move would be approved. The United States gave a similar approval.
²⁷
Lockhart tried to persuade his government to offer the Bolsheviks support to fight a partisan war against Germany. Instead, it began laying plans to launch its own invasion of the northern Russian coast at Murmansk and Archangel – ostensibly as a move against German influence east of the Baltic. The Germans were still fighting, still snatching territory that had been ceded to them but which they hadn’t yet occupied. There seemed every possibility that they might continue to advance beyond the agreed borders.

The British government also began to consider the possibility of using covert measures to bring down the Bolshevik regime. The stakes were rising, and the principal players – Moura and Lockhart included – were about to be drawn deeper than ever into the game.

For the time being, they acted as if all was well. The British mission’s last week in Petrograd coincided with the festival of Maslenitsa – the traditional Russian Orthodox ‘butter week’ of indulgence before the onset of Great Lent. On Monday, Moura threw a small luncheon party in her apartment. The guests were her four remaining British friends.
²⁸

There was Francis Cromie, handsome and debonair as ever, the only one who would be staying on in Petrograd, to continue managing the British presence there. Cromie was finding it a financial strain living in Bolshevik Russia – a leg of mutton cost £2, and he complained to people back home that the ‘conditions have to be lived under to be believed’.
²⁹
But life was still easy if one were willing and able to spend a fortune, as Moura was.

Young Denis Garstin was another guest, as full of life and gaiety as always – the ‘prince of good fellows’ as one of his commanding officers had called him.
³⁰
He had been hand-picked by Lockhart for his team. Even Garstino’s indomitable nature was starting to wear thin under the strain, but he and his eternal stock of optimism were far from exhausted yet. He had recently met the scandalous Alexandra Kollontai, the promoter of ‘Bolshevik marriage’. Contrary to the lady’s reputation, Garstino had thought her a ‘little quiet woman in an untidy dark flat, full of Bolsheviks’. He had interviewed her in a tiny bedroom: ‘I told her why I disagreed with Bolshevism, and asked her, as one propagandist to another, to explain many things.’ He was impressed by her answers, and found her charming. ‘She isn’t pretty and she isn’t young,’ he declared, ‘but she bowled me over.’
³¹
The meeting had scandalised the bourgeoisie of Petrograd; a British cavalry captain in a tête-à-tête with a commissar – especially one with such a sensational reputation – whatever next?

Completing the trio of captains at the party was Hicks, who was quickly becoming the third man of the British mission, after Lockhart and Cromie. Lockhart, the sole civilian among the men, composed doggerel verses for everyone, Cromie made a lighthearted speech, and Moura served endless rounds of the traditional Maslenitsa blini
*
with caviar, washed down with shots of vodka and accompanied by gales of laughter and good fellowship.
³²

It was the last hurrah of the British players in Russia; from now on, the stakes would rise so fast they would have to fight to keep up. Before the summer had reached its end, two of the people present at that party would be dead, and the other three would be in a Cheka prison, wondering if at any moment they might find themselves in front of a firing squad.

The transfer of power to Moscow had begun. Lenin was the first to make the move. The following Saturday, 16 March, Trotsky followed. He went on a special train, escorted by seven hundred Latvian soldiers – ‘the Praetorian Guard of the new Red Napoleon’.
³³
Also accompanying him were his staff and, in places of honour, Robert Bruce Lockhart and Captain William Hicks. They dined with him en route, and he continued to assure Lockhart that he intended to fight the Germans. He had just been appointed Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs – or Minister of War, as everyone called it – and said he wouldn’t accept the post unless Russia was going to fight. Lockhart, for the time being, still chose to believe him.

Left behind in Petrograd, Moura was lonely. She had her children, but that couldn’t last for long. It was too dangerous for them in the city, and Moura reluctantly took the decision to allow Kira, Pavel and Tania to go to Yendel and be cared for by Djon.

With the border closed and Estonia under German control, it was a risky venture. The children were smuggled out of Petrograd in one of the fast horse-drawn troikas
^†
which were still the backbone of Russia’s postal service. Micky went with them. She would face the greatest danger, a British subject going into a German-controlled nation. She was provided with a false passport and enjoined not to utter a word of English until they were settled in at Yendel.
³⁴
Micky’s command of Russian had never been very good, so it was a journey beset by risks. In addition to Micky, the children were accompanied by their grandmother’s two fox terriers. Food was so short in the capital, Madame Zakrevskaya could no longer feed them.

Equipped with a day’s provisions and accompanied by a Swiss escort who had made a living out of smuggling people over Russia’s borders, the little party of fugitives boarded the postal troika and departed. Micky, daring as she was, feared for the children. Her own tongue she could control, but the children had been brought up speaking English, and at their ages – Tania three, Pavel five, and Kira seven – who could tell what they might blurt out, no matter how strictly they were warned not to?

After a long, weary journey – there was still snow on the ground, which slowed the wheeled troika – they reached the Estonian border. The children kept silent, and they crossed without being challenged by the guards. They eventually made it to Yendel, where they were greeted by Djon.

Under German protection, order had been restored to Estonia, and the Benckendorffs – Djon, the children and all their relations – settled down to a life of peace and safety. But the children were now stranded. The border between them and their mother was a frontier between hostile nations, and they could never go back.

Moura had explained her reason for staying in Russia – her mother was here, and couldn’t travel. But she had a much more pressing reason. Free now from her most important responsibility, she was looking forward to the moment when she could travel the four hundred miles to Moscow to be with Lockhart.

Notes

*
Russian pancakes.

^†
A vehicle (sleigh or carriage) drawn by three horses.

6

Passion and Intrigue

April–May 1918

Friday 12 April 1918, Moscow

A young woman lay face-down on the carpet, surrounded by the smashed fragments of expensive china and broken champagne bottles. The gorgeous Aubusson carpet was soaked with wine and pools of blood, and the drawing room’s silken walls were pocked by bullet-holes. Yakov Peters, deputy head of the Cheka, pushed the toe of his boot under the woman’s midriff and turned her over. She had been caught through the neck by a bullet, and her dishevelled hair was matted with a mass of congealed purple blood.

‘
Prostitutka
,’ Peters muttered, and shrugged dismissively. She wasn’t one of the intended victims of the battle that had seared through this house and dozens of others in the district – just a casual associate of the Anarchists who had made their dens in the abandoned homes of Moscow’s wealthy elite. But still not worth anyone’s concern.

Lockhart looked down at the woman’s rigid, mottled face. No more than twenty years old, he estimated. He glanced around at the bullet-holes in the walls and ceiling, and the wreckage of what appeared to have been some kind of orgy. There were other bodies lying about the house, some cut down defenceless, others heavily armed.
¹
The Cheka had begun wresting control of the new capital from the counter-revolutionary rabble, and this was their first large-scale operation.

It had been a strange and unsettling day for Lockhart, a shocking but also thrilling interlude in a monotonous first month in Moscow.

In the weeks that had elapsed since the move from Petrograd, life had become an almost ceaseless train of meetings and interviews. Often he had to force himself to concentrate. As day followed day and grew into weeks, his thoughts of Moura grew ever more distracting. When would she come to him, as she had promised, as they had planned? How long would he be able to bear the waiting? It had been four weeks. The journey was long, permits were required, she had her work and he his . . . but even so, the suspense was hard to bear. It hampered his work. He had written, sent telegrams, telling her so. Her hasty, tantalising replies were pored over and carefully preserved, as every note from her would be until the day he died. One visit had already been promised and cancelled. Then Denis Garstin returned from a trip to Petrograd with a letter and the news that Moura was unwell.

‘Dear Lockhart,’ she wrote, maintaining the formality they had cultivated: ‘Again it’s only a letter and not my own person. Garstino will explain how and why. But I hope you will soon see the red sweater again and do a little more and better work . . . Best love, Moura Benckendorff.’
²
The mere thought was enough to set him itching for her.

In the meantime there were meetings, and still more meetings. Most of them – with Lenin, Trotsky or the other commissars – he had to go to himself, but sometimes the mountain, in the form of fellow diplomats and agents, would come to Mahomet. Lockhart had set up his headquarters in a suite at the Elite Hotel, a refined but rather squat block which took up the whole of a side road off Petrovka Street. The Elite was one of the very few quality hotels still functioning in the city.
³
It seemed that everyone in Moscow needed to quiz, cultivate or sound out the British agent, or be sounded out by him – Russians, British, French, Americans, representatives from every part of the old Russian Empire had to speak to him, for either their benefit or his. Favours were asked or offered, information exchanged and opinions shared.

That was the daylight hours taken care of; after dark he wrote his reports and messages, labouring over the ciphers himself because his mission had no staff. Just a secretary (who wasn’t entrusted with ciphers), Lockhart himself, Hicks and occasionally Garstin. There was a loose collection of other Britons in Russia – businessmen, journalists, military men, who weren’t attached to Lockhart’s mission but had special concerns of their own, often on orders from the British government – yet more of Lloyd George’s multifarious roulette chips. Lockhart had little or no knowledge of their business, yet the Russians regarded them as his responsibility.
⁴
There were only a few he had direct dealings with. Cromie and some of the intelligence fellows in Petrograd were regularly in touch, and sometimes visited. Then there was the military mission in Petrograd and Murmansk, whose job was to prevent the huge stores of British supplies left over from Russia’s days as an ally falling into German hands. (There was constant back-room talk about the mission forming the nucleus of an invasion force – an idea which Lockhart strenuously resisted.) He also had a lot to do with the
Manchester Guardian
journalist (and later children’s author) Arthur Ransome, ‘a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache’ who was very friendly with the Bolsheviks and a good source of intelligence. Lockhart liked him a lot.

Lockhart was occasionally invited to attend meetings of the Central Committee, held in the restaurant of the Metropol Hotel. The whole building had been requisitioned as a parliament and dormitory for Bolshevik delegates, renamed the Second House of Soviets.
⁵