A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (34 page)

After her desperate final letter to Lockhart in May 1919, in the wake of Djon’s murder and on the eve of her mother’s death, with the Estonian nationalist forces pushing the Red Army back to the very outskirts of Petrograd, Moura slipped into obscurity. Not a written word in her own hand survived, and few contemporary accounts. Most of what was handed down to posterity was hearsay, much of it wrong.
³

By the end of that May, Moura was alone in the world. Lockhart was beyond her reach, and her mother dead, either from surgical complications or from the illness which the surgery was intended to treat.
⁴
With her children in Estonia, she had no other family left in Russia.

Moura’s plight grew desperate when she finally lost her struggle to hold on to her mother’s apartment. Now that the elderly lady was dead it would no longer be possible to work on the sympathies of the government officials. Moura found herself on the streets, forced to throw herself on the charity of acquaintances. She said later that she was given accommodation for a time by the elderly General Aleksander Mosolov, who had once been head of the Court Chancellery under Tsar Nicholas II.

When the summer of 1919 drew to an end, a full year had passed since her last period with Lockhart – the nightmare of their imprisonment and the last few blissful days together in the Kremlin. Winter was approaching and she still had no proper home. She had found extra work as assistant to her old friend Korney Chukovsky, who, in addition to his publishing work, ran a studio, library and children’s theatre for the House of Arts.

Then another mystery occurred. In late summer she was arrested and held by the Cheka. The reason is unknown, but people were being arrested constantly for crimes as slight as being out late at night or failing to carry the requisite identification papers. Chukovsky was concerned about her, and when Maxim Gorky came to him one day in an incoherent rage about a friend of his who had also been arrested, Chukovsky asked him to use his influence to help Moura too. Gorky threatened to make a scandal and repudiate the Bolsheviks if the prisoners were not released.
⁵

Once Moura was free, Chukovsky took her, as he had done the previous December, to see Gorky. She already knew the great man quite well through her translation work for his World Literature publishing house.
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This meeting took place at his apartment. It was a peculiar place, on the fourth floor of a block at 23 Kronverksky Prospekt, a vast crescent on Petrogradsky Island (where Moura and Lockhart had liked to come on their sleigh-jaunts). The block itself was a rather ugly alpine-looking conglomeration of rustic stone and stucco, with hefty arches and hexagonal windows, reminiscent of the manor at Yendel. The atmosphere within was a world apart. Gorky had become a saint-like figure. Since the Revolution, he had been one of the mainstays – perhaps the principal saviour – of the arts in Russia. He had used his influence to help found the House of Science and the Houses of Literature and Art – institutions which fostered the intellectual life of the new Russia. And on his own initiative he had begun the World Literature publishing venture, which sought to import the fruits of foreign authors into the Russian language.

Within his domain he was like a baron in his manor, surrounded by companions and supplicants. His appearance had become eccentric. One of Moura’s contemporaries, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich, described him as looking like ‘a learned Chinaman in a red silk robe and motley skullcap’ which set off his sharp cheekbones and Asian eyes. His formerly thick hair had been cropped to the scalp, his face was deeply lined, and he wore spectacles on the tip of his nose. There was always a book in his hands. ‘A crush of people filled the apartment from early morning to late at night,’ Khodasevich recalled. ‘Each of the people who lived there had visitors, and Gorky himself was positively besieged by them.’
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Living in or passing through were writers, scholars, publishers, actors, artists and politicians. People in trouble flocked to the apartment to plead with Gorky to protect them from Grigory Zinoviev, the powerful head of the Petrograd Soviet and Northern Commune, or to help them get food, transport or countless other favours. Gorky listened to every plea, and was tireless in his efforts to help.

In an echo of her first meeting with Gorky at the office of World Literature, Chukovsky brought Moura to see him in the afternoon. Weak tea was served from a samovar in the large, well-furnished dining room. This was the only public room in the apartment – all the rest were bedrooms belonging to the many residents.
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Gorky had been charmed and intrigued by Moura ever since their meeting nine months earlier. ‘He was a brilliant speaker,’ she would write years later, recalling that first meeting, and ‘in the presence of a strange, new young woman, he displayed a special eloquence’; Chukovsky had whispered to her afterwards that Gorky had been ‘like a peacock spreading his beautiful feathers’.
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He gave her a permanent position as his secretary and interpreter, and invited her to move into the apartment.

Moura reverted to her maiden name, and became Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya once more. Perhaps she wanted to erase the memory of Djon; perhaps she hoped that by registering officially under that name she might break the ability of the Cheka or of intelligence agencies abroad to keep track of her. Many people came to believe that she was still in the service of the Cheka, and was briefed by them to spy on Gorky and pass back information about his attitudes and contacts.

His relationship with the government was a rocky one. His politics were leftward and pro-revolutionary, but he was neither a Communist nor a Bolshevik. Having supported the Revolution and helped work towards it for decades, Gorky’s views had altered. He had seen the behaviour of the common people during the battle and did not like it. ‘You are right 666 times over,’ he wrote to a friend who had predicted this; the Revolution was ‘giving birth to real barbarians, just like those that ravaged Rome’.
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The government that had emerged was a government of corrupted rabble and tyrants. He wrote a series of essays in his newspaper,
Novaya Zhizn
,
*
roundly condemning the Bolsheviks as enemies of free speech: ‘Lenin, Trotsky and their companions have already become poisoned with the filthy venom of power,’ he wrote; they were no more friends of democracy than the Romanovs had been. Following a shooting of demonstrators by Red Army soldiers in January 1918, he lamented the blood and sweat that had gone into bringing about the precious idea of revolutionary democracy in Russia, ‘and now the “People’s Commissars” have given orders to shoot the democracy which demonstrated in honour of this idea’.
¹¹
That he could publish such statements with virtual impunity was a measure of his stature in Russia.

Anger, regret and dissatisfaction were mingled in Gorky’s character. His surname had been chosen with feeling – born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, as a young man he had assumed the name
Gorky
(meaning ‘bitter’) – although perhaps
Kisly
(sour, acidic) might have been equally apt.

He dreamed of a republic of the arts and sciences; neither a democracy nor a socialist state (he feared and disliked the peasant class), but a society governed by intellectuals, artists and creative thinkers, with himself at its heart. As Moura had commented dryly to Lockhart some months earlier, ‘He thinks himself a d’Annunzio of Russia.’
¹²
Gorky had been close to Lenin for many years, but had an antagonistic relationship with him, and a hostile one with some powerful figures, including Zinoviev. But such was his stature and popularity, none dared touch him directly. Although
Novaya Zhizn
was closed down on Lenin’s orders in July 1918,
¹³
his person was inviolate, and most commissars – even his enemies – judged it politic to grant any favours he cared to ask.

In this climate, it would not be surprising if the regime chose to spy on him. And Moura might have been their agent. On the other hand, the rumour that she was their eyes and ears in the Gorky household might just have been more of that gossip that clung to her ‘like flies to Tanglefoot paper’, as she put it.
¹⁴
And yet, her occasional complaints about the gossip could equally have been the natural indignation of a guilty conscience.

Although Moura had been given a start as a translator of books into Russian, Gorky used her mainly as a translator-secretary, concerned mostly with business matters.
¹⁵
Thus she began to acquire the all-round knowledge of the publishing and translating businesses that would be her principal means of subsistence throughout her life.

There were twelve rooms in the apartment, of which four small chambers were reserved for Gorky’s private use – bedroom, study, library, and a little museum where he displayed his collection of Oriental artefacts. The rest of the apartment consisted of the communal dining room and bedrooms. Moura shared a room with a young medical student called Maria Geintse (or Geynze), nicknamed ‘The Molecule’ and described as ‘a wonderful girl, the orphaned daughter of some old acquaintances of Gorky’s’.
¹⁶
The population of the commune changed over time, but the main long-term inhabitants included the artists Valentina Khodasevich, her husband Andrei Diderikhs (known as ‘Didi’) and Ivan Rakitsky, and at a later period the poet Vladislav Khodasevich (Valentina’s uncle) and the writer Nina Berberova, who were also a couple. There were many others who came and went.

Moura, whose closest experience of communal living had been in Lockhart’s lavish apartment, shared only with Hicks and the servants, had to adapt to an entirely new mode of living. But she had been doing that for two years now, and sharing a room in a crowded apartment was better than starving on the freezing streets. Most of the other ‘former people’ of the wealthy classes were now crammed into shared rooms in squalid conditions, and living by forced labour. In Gorky’s household there was warmth in the air and food on the table.

At some point – perhaps immediately, more likely over the course of months – Moura became Gorky’s mistress. It would be a troubled affair; she was young enough to be his daughter, and had a flighty, fiery temperament that irked him, but like all Moura’s men, he fell in love with her.

Gorky’s relationships with women were like his relationship with politics – erratic and idiosyncratic. He liked to be in control; he could be madly jealous, and when jealous, violent. There had been many women who had fulfilled the role of
de facto
wife to Maxim Gorky, but only one to whom he had been legally married – Yekaterina Peshkova (née Vozhina), a fellow revolutionary. He met and married her in Samara on the Volga in 1896; he was a young man then, and Yekaterina was eight years his senior. She bore him a son, Maxim, and a daughter, who died in childhood.
¹⁷

By 1902 he was gaining a reputation as a dramatist and worldwide fame as an author to rival Tolstoy (who knew and admired him). His play
The Lower Depths
was staged by the Moscow Art Theatre, the best in the country, and was taken around the world. One of the theatre’s top actresses, Maria Fyodorovna Andreyeva, became his lover.
¹⁸
She was a dark-eyed beauty with reddish-golden hair and an outspoken manner. She was a political radical, and captivated Gorky. She was married to a government official, but Gorky the
littérateur
and revolutionary suited her better. In 1903 Gorky left the distraught Yekaterina and went to live with Andreyeva. They never divorced, and he provided financially for her and their son.

Gorky and Andreyeva joined the revolutionary exiles on the Italian island of Capri after the failed uprising of 1905, and toured the United States. The puritan Americans hounded them and when no hotel would accommodate the unmarried couple they were forced to return to Capri.
¹⁹
Andreyeva called herself ‘Countess’ and was disliked in the exile community, who believed she was only after Gorky’s money and status.

Their relationship was strained. Andreyeva’s obstinacy and domineering nature began to irritate the egotistical Gorky, who wanted to have things his way. He considered returning to his wife but Andreyeva had nowhere to go and Gorky did not have the heart to leave her. He wrote to Yekaterina, ‘I beseech you, do not call, do not rush me . . . At the present time I do not possess the energy to take a decisive step.’ All he wished for was ‘peace in which to work, and for this peace I am prepared to pay any price’.
²⁰
In 1912 Andreyeva made her peace with the government and returned to Russia. Still a political exile, Gorky was unable to go with her.

In 1913 amnesty was granted to the exiles as part of Tsar Nicholas II’s celebration of three hundred years of Romanov rule. While Yekaterina and their son, Max, returned to Moscow, Gorky settled for a while in a small town nearby. He saw Andreyeva regularly although they no longer lived together. Eventually Gorky moved to Petrograd, where he took the flat at 23 Kronverksky Prospekt. From the windows he could see Alexander Park, and beyond it the Petropavlovskaya fortress, where he had once been imprisoned.