A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (11 page)

And now Lockhart was left with the result: a deeply suspicious and hostile Trotsky. In fact, he was less hostile than might have been expected – much of his anti-British talk was for public consumption.
²⁷
Behind closed doors he was willing to put his feelings aside and do what was in Russia’s interests – and for the time being that included talking to the British. But underneath, the anger was real, and would have repercussions as the spring and summer of 1918 unfolded. Clever as Lockhart was, taking on the combined cunning of Trotsky and Lenin might be a challenge too far.

For the time being, the question that blotted out all others was whether Russia would stay in the war – and if not, what sort of peace terms would be agreed. What would the Russian people do? What did they think? Lockhart was eager to hear any and all informed opinions on the subject, and so it dominated the conversation throughout that first dinner party with Hicks and Moura.

In the two days since Lockhart’s meeting with Trotsky, there had been dramatic developments. On Saturday 16 February, the German government telegraphed the Russians that, in the absence of a peace agreement, hostilities would resume at noon on Monday. Lenin and Trotsky were shaken, but made no immediate move. Lenin – who had argued for peace all along – reminded Trotsky of their personal agreement whereby he must now accept Germany’s peace terms. Trotsky brushed off the idea – he was still convinced that the Germans wouldn’t actually attack.
²⁸
Meanwhile, the news was kept absolutely secret from the Russian people; even the military weren’t informed that they might have to start fighting again. On the Sunday evening – while Lockhart, Captain Hicks and Moura were discussing the very same subject – the Bolshevik Central Committee began a secret all-night debate.

By Monday morning there were already reports coming in of German military activity along the front line. Those who were wise enough to know what was going on were worried. Lockhart, who was now having daily meetings with Trotsky, noted in his diary that there was little hope of the Bolsheviks being able to resist the Germans. Russia might well be conquered, which would be a disaster for the Allies: ‘Our number seems up,’ he wrote. ‘Trotsky says that even if Russia cannot resist she will indulge in partisan warfare to the best of her ability.’
²⁹

At noon on Monday, German forces began their attacks. The depleted Russian forces put up little resistance, and by the end of the week the German army had captured more ground than in the whole of the preceding three years.
³⁰
Meanwhile, the terrified, confused Bolsheviks argued furiously among themselves. Lenin, fearing the destruction of Russia, the collapse of the Bolshevik regime, and the end of all hope for the Revolution, pushed for finding out what Germany’s terms were, and accepting them.

By Sunday 23 February the Germans had conquered most of the lands on Russia’s western border, from the Ukraine to the Baltic. On that day they declared their terms: Russia must cede all the territory now in German hands. Moura was personally affected by the German offensive and by the peace terms – Estonia, the land of her husband, and of her beloved Yendel, was among the conquered territories.

That same evening, Moura again came to dinner at 10 Palace Quay, along with a group of friends. Her acquaintance with Mr Lockhart was becoming a constant. The British agent was deeply impressed by the young lady. Lockhart believed that Russian women were more courageous and ‘superior in all respects’ to their men. He admired Moura’s mind and was affected by the magnetic charisma she possessed. She had languages – fluent English, French, Italian and German. ‘She was not merely fascinating,’ he would recall many years later; ‘she was remarkably well read, highly intellectual, and wise beyond her years.’ Lockhart was a man of his era, and couldn’t resist adding that her wisdom was exceptional because ‘unlike many clever women, she knew how to listen to the wisdom of men who had wisdom to dispense’.

But for Lockhart, as for so many others, she was more than all of this; the overriding impression of Moura, which followed her from her earliest youth to her oldest age, was simply expressed: ‘Men adored her.’
³¹

During those weeks of February and March 1918, while the world around them once more began bursting into flames, a bond started to grow between the British agent and the Russian lady. Moura had ‘a lofty disregard for all the pettiness of life and a courage which was proof against all cowardice,’ Lockhart observed. ‘Her vitality . . . was immense and invigorated everyone with whom she came into contact.’ The more he learned about her, the more he admired her. ‘Where she loved, there was her world, and her philosophy of life had made her mistress of all the consequences. She was an aristocrat. She could have been a Communist. She could never have been a bourgeoise.’ Their acquaintanceship began socially, and slowly, insensibly, became more intimate. ‘During those first days,’ he recalled, ‘I was too busy, too preoccupied with my own importance, to give her more than a passing thought. I found her a woman of great attraction, whose conversation brightened my daily life.’
³²

She would become much more than that – infinitely more. For the time being, Lockhart and Moura made a little social heaven for themselves in the midst of the reigniting war and the gloom of the impoverished city.

Notes

*
Now Helsinki.

^†
Gregorian date. Russia had switched calendars on 31 January; the next day was 14 February.

5

‘What Children We Were’

February–March 1918

The snow glowed a faint blue under the light of the waning moon. All was still, not a soul about, just the silent light on the soft snow, the star-dusted vault overhead, and the rare peace of the city at night. Occasional gunshots could be heard in the distance, but otherwise it was quiet.

Standing close, Moura and Lockhart looked back across the frozen Neva at the lights glittering along the Palace Quay. The British Embassy beside the Troitskiy Bridge, further along the Winter Palace. In between stood the mansions where Lockhart had his flat and headquarters. The lights were few, and in every shadow there was danger, but in their memories they would recall moments like this as precious idylls.

It had become their practice, as the first weeks passed and the regular dinner parties no longer provided enough of each other’s company, to take a sleigh and drive along the banks of the Neva.
¹
They would go in the evening, and head out across the bridges to the islands, where the city sprawled out over the river delta – Vasilyevsky Island, where the university and the stock exchange were, Krestovsky Island with its pleasure gardens and yacht club, or the huge Petrogradsky Island, the city’s original heart, under whose shoulder nestled the Petropavlovskaya fortress.

All these places had been the playgrounds, institutions and residences of the ruling classes for the past two hundred years, ever since Peter the Great decided to build his port city here, on land wrested from the Swedes. Hundreds of thousands of serfs had laid the roads, dug the canals, laboured on the bridges and piled up the palaces and mansions, and tens of thousands had died doing it. Now their descendants had claimed it all back.

It could be dangerous to be out after dark. People with sense never went out alone, and they walked in the middle of the street to avoid alleys and doorways. Lockhart always carried a revolver in his pocket, with his hand constantly resting on its grip.
²
But these two young people had little regard for risk, Moura especially. Lockhart’s ardent nature was getting the better of him, and he was capable of careering full-tilt to destruction for the sake of gratifying it. This woman fascinated and transfixed him.

Moura kept her thoughts and feelings to herself in those early weeks. Their sleigh-rides were moments of carelessness snatched from the political tide that was rising around them. But something was changing in her. She had never felt any particular devotion towards any man. Her fling with Engelhardt had meant little to her – the act of a stifled teenager yearning to escape. Kerensky had been a misjudged bid for survival. Djon she had married because he was a portal into the life of excitement and glamour she craved, but there had never been any depth of feeling; now she had reached a point where she felt contaminated by his touch. It was a relief when he fled to Estonia.

All the other handsome, dashing, attractive men who flocked around her had failed to snare her feelings. There were a few – Denis Garstin and Francis Cromie in particular – for whom she felt affection, but none inspired any romantic feeling, let alone love.

But this man, this Lockhart, with his rather prissy mouth and protruding ears, who described himself as ‘broken-nosed, with a squat, stumpy figure and a ridiculous gait’,
³
was different somehow. Certainly, he was a man who made no secret of his desire. On their pleasure drives, with their sleigh speeding along, Lockhart would take advantage of their close confinement to try to kiss her. She didn’t respond; instead she sat, ‘strangely thrilled, bewildered and a little frightened before the strange feeling that subconsciously I felt growing in me’.
⁴

It would be some time before she put a name to that unaccustomed feeling. And if she ever managed to understand
why
she felt it, she never wrote it down or confided it to anyone. It was true that Lockhart had a presence that commanded attention – as she did herself – and a compelling gaze. He was a man one either loved or detested. One jealous rival called him a ‘contemptible little bounder’, while some in the Foreign Office regarded him as little better than a traitor.
⁵
But nobody could doubt his talents. From the very first he valued Moura for her knowledge and her intellect, which were both considerable. A later lover, who was inclined to be disdainful about the loose, ‘Russian’ manner of her thoughts, admitted that her mind was ‘active, full and shrewdly penetrating’ with ‘streaks of extraordinary wisdom’. She could ‘illuminate a question suddenly like a burst of sunshine on a wet February day’.
⁶

For Lockhart, carrying the burden of Great Britain’s relations with the vast power of Russia, illuminating wisdom was a commodity without price. He was a superbly confident young man, and inclined to trust his own wisdom, but he would take all the shrewd penetration he could get – especially when it came from a person with Moura’s other attractions.

Perhaps that was what had woken the strange, dormant feeling that was stirring in her now, as she stood close beside Lockhart, gazing out over the moonlit snow-city. Until this moment Moura – as her friends and relations saw her – had stood for high society, fun, mystique: a hostess with magnetic charm, a singer of haunting gypsy melodies, a taunter of lovestruck men; nobody had taken her for a source of wisdom.

If she wasn’t careful, if this feeling wasn’t kept in check, sooner or later Lockhart would make another of his attempts to kiss her and she wouldn’t resist. And who could tell where that might lead, what unknown feelings that might unlock?

Their conversations already sailed close to the brink of deeper intimacy. They joked about ‘Bolshevik marriage’
⁷
– the dismantling of the institution of matrimony that the revolutionary feminists were calling for. None called more stridently than Alexandra Kollontai, the new People’s Commissar for Social Welfare, who advocated a culture of sexual liberation, where women and men would be free to have lovers and friends as they chose, and thereby break down the bourgeois system which kept married women in servitude. Her ideas ran foul of Lenin – who was in some ways a staunch conservative – and weren’t received well by working-class women.
⁸
But her free-love ideas titillated the liberal elite. To Lockhart and Moura, who were tip-toeing out to the very edge of bourgeois courtship like explorers on an ice floe, it was an exhilarating and amusing subject for conversation. But – at least as far as Moura was concerned – not for action.
⁹
For now there were little parties with their friends and sleigh-drives along the river and out to the islands, and the promise of something more, always a little out of reach.

‘What children we were then,’ Moura would recall, looking back on this magical time, ‘what old, old people we are now.’
¹⁰
Just eight months had gone by when she wrote those words; eight months in which both their lives were transformed. If they hadn’t had each other, they might never have survived; but then, if they hadn’t had each other, they might never have been launched into the terrible, wonderful nightmare at all.