A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (37 page)

Moura knew they could have no hard evidence of any of this. But what they told her next shook her profoundly. News of her arrival had preceded her. The brother and sister of her late husband, Djon von Benckendorff, had petitioned the authorities, demanding that Moura be deported back to Russia and that she be barred from visiting her children. They regarded her as a Bolshevik agent, and some even suspected her of complicity in Djon’s murder. Several other Benckendorff and Schilling relatives had lent their voices to the demands.

Immediately she asked for a lawyer. The police provided her with a list of names to choose from. Moura studied it with a sinking feeling; some of the names were Russians – they would probably be old Tsarists who would be prejudiced against anyone with Soviet connections. The other names were all those of the Teutonic families who had ruled the Baltic region since the Middle Ages. They would all be against her; indeed, many of the men on the list were related to the Benckendorffs. She hadn’t a hope.

There were just two other names, both of them Jews. Moura was infected with the casual anti-Semitism that was virtually universal in her world; like most of her class and kind, she viewed Jews with a sort of sardonic tolerance, not unlike her view of peasants,
³
and she picked a name despondently. Her lawyer, as it turned out, was a good one, and a kindly man who sympathised with her plight.

The police released her, apparently for lack of evidence. They were content to let her be passed, according to custom, to a court of Baltic barons – an
Ehrengericht
*
of the so-called
Gemeinnutz Verband
.
^†
Despite the nation’s independence, the upper class of Estonia was still profoundly Germanic, and despite the socialist reforms and the redistribution of land that had occurred since 1918, the nobility still had influence. The court was convened under Count Ignatiev, the elected head of the Baltic nobility.
⁴
Its purpose was to determine her connections, if any, to the Soviet regime. With the help of her lawyer, Moura began to make her case. The proceedings would drag on for months.

Meanwhile, she was more or less free. Time was running out; as a Russian citizen she was only allowed a three-month stay. At first, while the court deliberated, her Benckendorff relatives would not allow her near her children. They had their own suspicions about her story. Why had she not left Russia with the children in 1918? Why had she not taken her mother out via Finland the following year? Why had she visited Estonia and not stayed with her husband and children? And what precisely was the nature of her relationship with the Bolsheviks? The Benckendorffs, like all their Baltic ilk, had been almost religiously devoted to the old imperial order, and ‘regarded the Communist regime which had murdered the Tsar as a criminal conspiracy’.
⁵

With a mixture of truth, omissions and lies, she offered up her story. She had to remain in Russia to care for her mother; truthfully she told them that the Bolsheviks had continually refused her mother a permit, and that there had been a hundred and one difficulties with Swedish and British visas. This was all true. But she flatly denied any relationship with the Soviet state or its spies, and kept resolutely quiet about her relationship with Lockhart. If the Benckendorffs thought it suspicious that Djon had been murdered at a time when Moura was seeking a divorce and had visited Estonia, they didn’t voice it.

Finally, reluctantly, she was allowed back into the Benckendorff fold. She could visit the children. She left Tallinn and made the short journey to Yendel.
⁶
At least one person at Yendel was looking forward to Moura’s return. Micky, who loved her like a daughter, had been growing increasingly excited as the days passed, and her excitement had passed to the children.

Moura arrived at night. On the journey from the station, along the familiar arrow-straight driveway, she passed by the estate farm and the manor house. Neither belonged to the family now. Along with all the other landholdings in Estonia, Yendel had been taken over by the state, and was now an agricultural college. The family had been left with a small farm and the quaint little lakeside lodge of Kallijärv.

After Moura had arrived and been greeted by Micky, she went to bed – her own soft bed in her own room, in a quiet, secluded country retreat. After the life she had led during the past few years, it was the answer to a prayer. She would be reluctant ever to rise from this bed. As she grew older, her bed would always be dear to Moura – the centre of her world.

The morning after, Micky took the children to see their mother. They were full of anticipation, caught up in Micky’s enthusiasm and curious to know what this unfamiliar mother might be like. Only Kira was old enough to have clear memories of her. Of Moura’s own children, Pavel had been four when he last saw her. For Tania, who was now six, it was as if she were meeting her mother for the first time.
⁷

They were taken into Moura’s room, where they found her sitting up in bed. Tania didn’t recognise her at all. She felt nothing for this complete stranger. She would recall that her mother ‘was larger than I had expected’, and she felt a little disappointed that ‘this rather healthy-looking person did not correspond to the stories of hunger and privation we had been told’.
⁸
Micky had told them that Moura had caught burrowing lice during her time in prison in Moscow, but Tania could see no sign of them on her skin. The children weren’t allowed to ask questions about why she had been in prison; it was ‘all finished and done with’.

There was no glad reunion – everyone was awkward and embarrassed. Micky clucked and fussed around Moura, and shooed the children out once they had taken a good look. Their mother had been through an ordeal, they were told, and was exhausted physically and emotionally.

Moura barely rose from her bed during that first week at Kallijärv. Anyone she wanted to see was brought to her. Nobody in the household or the extended family would speak about Moura’s past in front of the children, but Tania heard enough snippets and whispers to make her mother sound mysterious and wicked. The little girl was fascinated and puzzled.

Not long after Moura’s arrival, all the family went together to church – one of the big Russian Orthodox feast days that followed Easter, either Ascension or Pentecost. Moura went with them. When Tania trooped up with the others for communion, she noticed that her mother stayed behind, at the back of the church. To Tania’s mind, only those who had the blackest sins on their conscience – those which one wouldn’t dare admit to in confession – would refuse the sacrament, and she wondered if Moura had committed murder or robbery.

Moura’s conscience might well have been troubling her. She took her religion seriously – at least her personal faith in God had been invoked many times in recent years as she struggled through her ordeals and crises. And yet she sinned with a defiance that bordered on bravado. Maybe her faith had taken a blow; she had prayed hard for everything to come right with Lockhart, and had got nothing but heartache in return. And yet that needn’t stop her making an insincere show of taking communion. That she refused must have been a measure of her state of mind and conscience.

Looking back at her mother, and wondering what crime she might have committed, Tania felt her first pang of affection. ‘I felt that whatever it was I would protect her,’ she recalled. Returning from the altar, she stood beside her and stroked her fur coat, ‘to reassure her that I was on her side’. The little girl was rewarded with a smile.
⁹

After a period of rest at Kallijärv, Moura began spending time in Tallinn. What she was up to, Tania didn’t know, either then or later. All she knew was that her mother was put up in a flat owned by friends of the family, Baron and Baroness Bengt Stackelberg. She spent the middle of every week there, returning to Kallijärv only for weekends. She made contact with the other members of Gorky’s advance party in Berlin, reporting on her arrest by the Estonian authorities. At Gorky’s request, she was wired a sum of money from Berlin.
¹⁰
Presumably it was trade ministry money, and the sender would have been Maria Andreyeva. It never occurred to Tania in later life to wonder why Moura spent the working week in Tallinn and the weekends at Yendel. If her business there was connected with Maria Andreyeva’s in Berlin, she was well placed.

Only once in her life would Moura allude to her work in Tallinn; many years later she admitted that she was employed by a Dutchman selling gold and diamonds.
¹¹

Since the previous summer, Tallinn had been the nexus of a gold-laundering scheme. Russian gold was transported there from Petrograd and shipped to Stockholm, where it was melted down and sold. Swedish, German and British companies were buying into the extremely lucrative scheme, and hard currency and industrial products ranging from locomotives to pharmaceuticals were flowing back to Moscow. As starvation and unrest grew worse in Russia, the trade goods were increasingly military – especially rifles and ammunition. And while British firms were profiting from the gold-laundering, the British and American governments and their intelligence agencies were trying to prevent illegal Russian gold from entering their markets.
¹²

Perhaps it was this that made Moura an asset in Tallinn. She knew many of the foreign diplomats and intelligence agents from the old days in Russia, and she must have had inside knowledge of the bank schemes that were being run in 1918 by her then boss Hugh Leech. There weren’t many in Russia who had Moura’s talents and knowledge, and it must have made her valuable enough for Maria Andreyeva to guarantee her freedom. There was clearly some influence working for Moura now; later that summer she even managed to make a flying visit to Petrograd to meet with Andreyeva.
¹³

It was also around this time that MI5 first decided to open a file on her.
¹⁴

Regardless of her connections, Moura’s time in Estonia would be severely limited. Her visa allowed her three months, and then she would have to go back to Russia.

It wasn’t an attractive prospect. After the comforts of Kallijärv, the thought of going back to Petrograd was appalling, especially now that Gorky had moved on and she would no longer have a secure refuge. Moura’s lawyer suggested that she might try fleeing to some other country, perhaps Switzerland. But that would probably lead to arrest again. He added thoughtfully that maybe the best thing she could do would be to get married.
¹⁵
Marriage to an Estonian citizen would free her from Russia’s clutches for good. The lawyer even had a candidate in mind, and introduced her to him.

Baron Nikolai Budberg was twenty-six years old, a little younger than Moura. He had much in common with Djon. Like the Benckendorffs, the Budbergs were a large and powerful old Baltic-Russian landowning family. And Nikolai – known to his intimates as ‘Lai’ – had, like Djon, attended the military academy in St Petersburg in the days before the war. But in every other way Baron Nikolai Budberg was as unlike Djon von Benckendorff as he could be. Whereas Djon had been staid, responsible and sensible (if dull), Nikolai was the archetypal aristocratic rake. He was a notorious duellist, and had fought four duels, in the last of which he had killed his opponent.
¹⁶
He was also rumoured to have been an agent for the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police.
¹⁷
Having inherited his title and his wealth at a young age, he had squandered it on dissipated living and gambling. He was in a delicate situation; he had debts and wanted to leave the country, but his creditors would not allow him.
¹⁸

An arrangement was negotiated between Moura and Nikolai. They would marry, on condition that she pay his gambling debts. She arranged the money out of funds channelled to her from Russia via Berlin – possibly taken from the proceeds of the
valiuta
scheme. In return, Moura acquired the prestige of the title ‘Baroness’ (which delighted her) and, most importantly, Estonian citizenship and a passport. At last she would have the freedom to go where she wished.

In later life, Moura would bristle indignantly at any suggestion that this was a marriage of convenience. She developed a sympathetic fondness for Nikolai, and believed that he loved her after his fashion. She felt that she had ‘found the only reason that could make me want to go on living – to be of use to someone. It is but a poor reason, I admit, and I think I am too much of an egoist to be satisfied with it’.
¹⁹

Moura didn’t undertake the marriage lightly. In late June, after bottling up her feelings for a month, she had finally written to Lockhart to express her grief and dismay at the news of his baby son.
²⁰
And there were her feelings about Gorky (and his about her) to be considered. On the day she left Petrograd, she had left a letter for him (he was away in Moscow at the time). Smarting and bewildered by the previous day’s news about Lockhart, she tried to kindle a feeling deeper than that between a great man and his mistress.’I want you to feel that intense inner feeling that I think happens only a few times in life,’ she wrote, ‘that the love of this girl from Kobelyak will be with you throughout the difficult, anxious, boring and dark hours of your life . . . You are my joy, my big true Joy, if you only knew how much I need you.’
²¹
Even in this seemingly heartfelt letter, she was sustaining a fiction. Kobelyak, a town in the Poltava region of the Ukraine, was not where Moura came from; she had been born on the Zakrevsky estate at Beriozovaya Rudka, near the town of Pyryatyn, more than a hundred miles from Kobelyak. The purpose of the deception is unknown, but its juxtaposition with her declaration of love seems not to have troubled her. Throughout that summer she wrote to Gorky reminding him of her love for him, expressing her annoyance at his constant silence, and urging him to hurry up and leave Russia to escape the Bolsheviks’ latest campaign of repression.
²²