A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (8 page)

^§
izvozchik
: sleigh or carriage driver for hire.

^§§
Peter and Paul.

3

Red Winter

December 1917–January 1918

12 December 1917, Petrograd

Two Christmases came that year, and neither was a happy one.

A horse-drawn cab drove through the Admiralteysky district, heading towards the Palace Quay. The
izvozchik
kept his malnourished horse to as fast a pace as it could manage; it wasn’t safe to be on the streets at any time, let alone after dark, but a fare was a fare. Horses and drivers were starving for want of trade, and like every other soul in this blighted city who looked like they might have a few roubles on them,
izvozchiki
were prey to the robbers and murderers that roamed everywhere. At the bridges and street corners, little groups of soldiers sat warming themselves around braziers, but they did little to keep order. The mob was the law.
¹

Inside the cab, Moura looked out at the familiar streets. How many times she had passed through them in cars, carriages and cabs, or strolled gaily in the summer along the avenues, in the shadow of the Winter Palace and the dome of St Isaac’s. All secure within the great apparatus of the imperium; the web of aristocracy, ringed around by splendour and military might. She had never thought it could all come to this – a shabby cab rattling through haunted streets. The golden pinnacles were still there, and the Palladian buildings gleaming under the night sky, but the life was gone.

Sitting beside Moura, lost in his unhappy thoughts, was Djon, her husband home from the war, probably for good this time. The Bolsheviks had agreed a ceasefire with the Germans in November, and negotiated a temporary armistice to be maintained until January 1918. In the meantime, peace talks were under way at Brest-Litovsk in Poland.
*
Already there was discord among the Bolsheviks. Their leader, Lenin, wanted a quick end to the war, to hasten the consolidation of the Revolution, but the majority of the Central Committee, including Trotsky, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, were pressing for a plan to renew the fighting, engage the sympathies of the German proletariat, and spread revolution throughout western Europe.
²

Djon’s patriotic heart was breaking, torn three ways by the war and the Revolution. He had ties to Germany through his diplomatic past, as well as through the long and cosmopolitan ancestry of the Benckendorffs, but he had been a true Russian all his life, utterly loyal to the Tsar. At the same time, he fretted for the future of his native Estonia, caught between the two great powers. Would it continue under the Bolsheviks, or be ceded to Germany, or would it achieve its independence?

For Moura, the main effect of the armistice was to force her to be in Djon’s company far more than was comfortable. Filled with angst, shorn of the advantages of his rank, his position and his opulent lifestyle, he was daily becoming a less and less congenial spouse. There was friction, tension, frequent arguments.

Petrograd looked bleak now, not like the magical city it had once seemed. A place of confinement. There was no excitement here any more, only fear, and no chance of seeking fun and fulfilment elsewhere. There would be no more Christmases at Yendel for Moura and her friends. It had become dangerous there. Just a few weeks ago, with the family still in residence, the estate had come under attack.
³

It was a terrifying experience. In the wake of the October Revolution, the fierce spirit of Bolshevism had run here and there throughout the Russian Empire, resisted in some places, catching hold in many more. One of the places it caught fire with a vengeance was Estonia. Armed gangs roamed the countryside, looting and terrorising. At Yendel, a band of peasants – those people who had been little more to the Benckendorffs than a faceless labour force and a malodorous, sheepskin-clad presence in the railway stations – came to the manor house seeking blood and booty. Moura, terrified for the lives of her children, gathered them to her, and with the mob marching up the drive, fled the house.

On that occasion, the peasants didn’t attack the house itself. They stopped at the estate farm, whose imposing stable blocks, barns and piggeries straddled one branch of the roadway. There they set about stealing the horses and cows and vandalising anything they couldn’t take. Moura and the children hid in the gardens for five hours, freezing, listening to the shrieking of the pigs as they were slaughtered in their sties.

The idyll of Yendel was gone forever.

Fear was everywhere. There was anarchy in the countryside and crime on the city streets. But real terror came now from the state. Common Russians had always had reason to fear their government, but this was different. This time it was the bourgeoisie who had most cause for dread. With the country in a state of civil war, the Bolsheviks organised their state with astonishing speed, taking over the existing bureaucracy and purging its upper ranks of untrustworthy individuals. The Red Army, composed of the old regiments, likewise purged of unsympathetic officers, was almost instantly fit to take on and beat the scattered White monarchist forces. By early December the Bolsheviks had a political security police mobilised. Its full name was
the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage. It immediately became known by the shorter name ‘Cheka’,
^†
and its officers known as Chekists, names which soon became bywords for terror.

The same decree that created the Cheka also brought in a requirement for all wealthy citizens to be registered.
⁴
The dispossession of the ruling and landed classes was beginning. The foresighted among them began hiding their treasures. Most, though, still failed to see the full enormity of the downfall that was coming to them. For the time being, they still enjoyed what little remnants of pleasure and dignity they could salvage. They braved the streets to shop, paying stupendous prices for everything, and often getting robbed within minutes of making any purchase.
⁵
They even ventured out at night to visit one another for dinner parties, their loyal servants scraping together what dishes they could from the meagre supplies, and stoically put up with the almost constant electricity failures.

Moura and Djon’s cab turned onto the Palace Quay. Lights could be seen shining in the windows of the British Embassy – the electricity was working tonight; a happy omen, perhaps. Sir George Buchanan was giving a Christmas reception for the hundred or so staff and attachés of the Embassy, as well as for a select group of close Russian friends who had not yet fled the country. Moura and Djon von Benckendorff were among them.

It was a poignantly British affair, marking Christmas on the day it would fall in Britain – which was 12 December here. This was Sir George’s way of bidding farewell to the country that had been his beloved second home for the past seven years. It had been a triumph, being given the Petrograd posting,
⁶
but now it looked like it could be the death of him. He had always appeared frail, but now he was really unwell – ‘hopelessly worn out’, Denis Garstin thought.
⁷
The stress of being thrust into the impossibly difficult position of having to represent the British government to the hostile Bolsheviks had driven him to a physical breakdown a couple of weeks ago, and he had applied for home leave. He was a broken man, whose mind no longer functioned properly.
⁸
But he continued his work in the meantime and did his duty as host.

Most of Moura’s close friends were there – Miriam Artsimovich and her fiancé, Bobby Yonin. Francis Cromie was present, despite being on alert over his submarine flotilla, still based at Reval (but not for much longer). Denis Garstin was there – ‘Garstino’, still busy in the propaganda office and still bright and cheerful despite the Bolsheviks having knocked flat a good deal of his enthusiasm for the socialist cause. And of course there was Meriel. She was distraught, knowing very well that when her father took up his leave in the New Year, they would be leaving Russia for good, and she was holding back her tears.
⁹

It was a strange evening, and a melancholy party, despite the concert and variety entertainment that had been laid on. The electricity held out, and the chandeliers blazed all night. There was a sit-down supper consisting of dishes miraculously conjured from virtually nothing by Sir George’s Italian cook, supplemented by tins of bully beef. There was dancing, lively conversation and laughter among the guests, who were determined to enjoy themselves, but the constant atmosphere of tension pervaded everything; all the attachés had loaded pistols in their pockets, and there were rifles and boxes of cartridges hidden in the chancery offices. Mobs had looted the Winter Palace again earlier that month, and there were fears that any social gathering could turn into a bloody siege in an instant. Meriel would recall later that ‘for the moment we tried to forget the ever-present lurking danger, the sadness of approaching good-byes, the desolation and want hidden behind the heavy red brocade curtains’.
¹⁰

When the evening drew towards its close, the British officers sang ‘God Save the King’. The Russians were deeply moved; one man turned to Meriel with tears in his eyes. ‘You don’t know what it means to hear your men sing that,’ he said, ‘while we Russians have no emperor and no country left.’
¹¹
When the song was over, Bobby Yonin sat at the piano, and the room filled with the slow, insistent opening chords of ‘
Bozhe, Tsarya khrani
’,
^‡
the Russian national anthem. A hush fell. Meriel glanced across at Moura and her husband. Djon’s face was drawn with such anguish, Meriel’s self-control gave way at last, and she cried.
¹²

Christmas Day

In England it was January now, but in Russia it was the 25th of December, the day appointed for the British departure from Petrograd.

There had been a fresh fall of snow in the night, and the embassy motor cars made heavy going of the short drive to the Finland station in the pre-dawn light. To Meriel’s eyes, depressed and grief-stricken, the station looked grubby and bleak. This was the place where Lenin had famously arrived when he returned from his exile in Switzerland to begin fomenting the great revolution. From here the trains ran to the north, into Finland. The British were going home by the overland route which avoided the dangerous German-infested waters of the Baltic.

Just a handful were leaving today – the Buchanans, the heads of the military and naval missions, General Knox and Admiral Stanley, and a few of their attachés – and the Embassy would continue to exist, after a fashion, but without an ambassador. There was an atmosphere of defeat, a hauling-down of the flag.

A group of the Buchanans’ friends came to see them off, including Denis Garstin, Francis Cromie and other members of the British missions who were staying behind. William the chasseur, who had driven the motor, was also remaining at the Embassy to manage its domestic staff. When Miss Buchanan gave him her hand, he couldn’t speak for emotion. Only three Russian friends had come – Moura was one, along with Miriam and Bobby. Most Russians were too scared to venture out on the streets or be seen publicly in company with the British Ambassador.
¹³
Passing by the scowling Red Guard sentries at the station entrance, Sir George and Meriel both wondered if they would make it safely to Finland.

Commissar for Foreign Affairs Leon Trotsky, with whom Sir George had suffered an extremely uneasy relationship during the past few months, had refused to reserve accommodation for them on the train. Sir George donated two bottles of his best Napoleon brandy to the station master, and sleeping berths were duly provided. Some things never changed, and the preciousness of brandy to a Russian was one of them.

For Moura, the departure of her friends marked the end of an era. Her upbringing by Micky had given her a powerful affinity with the British; she was at ease with the language and strongly attached to her British friends. When she embraced Meriel, both their faces were wet with tears, and Meriel didn’t trust herself to speak. It was bitterly hard for Moura to see her mother country throwing away its cordial relationship with Britain, entering into a dark period of mistrust and hostility.

There would no longer be an ambassador in Petrograd, but the Embassy would be kept in place, managed by Francis Lindley, counsellor under Sir George since 1915 and now chargé d’affaires. The British government, unable to condone what it saw as the Bolsheviks’ treason, was breaking off its official diplomatic links. However, it was maintaining a semi-official presence. A new man was coming out from London to be Britain’s ‘unofficial agent’ in Russia, whose task it would be to conduct diplomacy with Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. He was a gifted young fellow who had been a consul in Moscow until last summer, when he’d been sent home by Sir George after a scandalous affair with a French Jew, Madame Vermelle.
¹⁴
Now, on the instructions of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, he was being sent back to Petrograd. His name was Lockhart.