A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (21 page)

His own situation was growing graver by the day. The British alliance with the Czechoslovak Legion was a given – which put Britain in the position of being indirectly at war with Russia – and the Bolsheviks’ view of Lockhart was now downright suspicious. Only the friendly relationships he had developed with certain middle-ranking members of the government, together with his reputation (no longer accurate) for being pro-Bolshevik, protected him. All British personnel in Moscow and Petrograd had been forbidden to travel, and there was no longer any secure way of communicating directly with the outside world. It seemed an age since he had heard anything from Moura. His concerns about her safety were beginning to turn desperate.

20 July, Yendel

She wouldn’t be able to go through with it. It was worse than she could ever have imagined. The feelings she had had on the approach to the border, when the German soldier tried to flirt with her, were nothing compared with the indignation and disgust she felt now.

Djon, her so-called husband, the former officer and diplomat of the Tsar and loyal son of Russia, had gone over wholeheartedly to the Germans. He had transformed himself, effectively, into a German. As if there weren’t already enough of them in Estonia; their soldiers were everywhere. There was even a German officer staying at Yendel – here in the place that had once been her home, the playground of her British friends! Rather than being shunned as an enemy occupier, he was welcomed by her husband, lunching and dining with the family. Moura was appalled.
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Whether the officer was aware of her disdain or not, Djon certainly noticed it. Soon they were back to their old ways, arguing about politics. Djon accused her of being on the side of the Allies, which was half-true, but also rich; he had been their friend too until it suited him not to be. And what of his loyalty to Estonia? The master of Yendel’s new allegiance would win him few friends among the local people. The German occupiers in Estonia were behaving in much the same way as those in the Ukraine. Baltic Germans were favoured over ethnic Estonians in the government, workers were being laid off and wages reduced, newspapers and Estonian cultural societies were suppressed, and colonists from Germany were being offered farmland by Baltic German landowners, many of whom wanted Estonia to be fully incorporated into Germany.
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This former province of the Russian Empire, which had lacked independence but at least had some cultural identity of its own, was being thoroughly Germanised, and it made Moura sick.

Djon offered her a choice – either him or her convictions.
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Even if she had been capable of subjugating herself to any man, she could not have done so for Djon. Before coming here, she had worried about the morality of using and deceiving him in the way she was planning to. Above all, it would involve deceiving her children too. But now she felt unable to go through with the deception for entirely different reasons. Moura shrank from her husband’s touch. This man, who had been her romance, her life, for whom she had borne two children, repelled her physically and morally.

She wrote to Lockhart: ‘I want to scream and say I am not going to bear it any more. It’s only the thought of him, of our little boy that stops me – but I don’t know, Babykins, if I’ll be able to stick to it after all.’
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All she wanted was to abandon everything and hurry back to Russia, to her one and only love.

The single shred of comfort was that the children were safe so long as Estonia was under military rule. The countryside had been brought to order, and the peasant bandits and saboteurs were gone, for the time being. But she missed her children, missed being able to embrace them, and she worried about their future. But even they weren’t a strong enough tie to hold her at Yendel against the pull of Lockhart, all those hundreds of miles away in Moscow.

Casting her plans aside, throwing Djon’s ultimatum back in his face, and laying down her maternal duty, she departed from Yendel, heading back towards the border. The future could take care of itself; for the present, she wanted freedom. And Lockhart.

The days of the British mission in Moscow were numbered. The future of the Allies in Russia was grim – unless they stiffened their backbones and came marching in as conquerors. The Czechoslovak Legion was dominating central Russia, but the Allies had nothing to match it with. In between, isolated at Yaroslavl, Savinkov’s uprising was withering. It had spread to nearby towns, but failed to build up the support and weaponry needed to hold out against the Red Army. On Sunday 21 July, after two weeks of battle, Savinkov’s few hundred surviving fighters surrendered.
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Once again, Boris Savinkov himself escaped, and would rise again to trouble the Bolsheviks, but the Allies’ plans had taken a debilitating blow. Any force landing at Archangel now would have little chance of getting through to Moscow. Unless it came in sufficient numbers.

On 25 July, in a panic move, the British, French, American and Italian embassies which had been impotently holed up at Vologda since the spring, monitoring the situation but playing little direct part in any actual diplomacy, suddenly struck camp and fled to Archangel, where two ships were waiting to evacuate them. The move was prompted by a message from General Poole indicating that his force would be landing at Archangel imminently. The Ambassadors were keen to avoid becoming hostages of the Russians, and their urgency was so great, some British stragglers arrived late, and had to run down the quay and clamber aboard as the ships were pulling away.
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‘So here ends the Vologda episode,’ Lockhart noted sourly in his diary, ‘a thoroughly stupid one at best.’
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Lockhart and his handful of staff were now isolated in Moscow, while Cromie and his little group were similarly cut off in Petrograd. Neither Lockhart nor Cromie had been given any warning of the Ambassadors’ departure, and the Bolsheviks certainly had not; they guessed correctly that military intervention must be imminent. Despite reassurances from Georgy Chicherin, Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Lockhart knew that he and his people had effectively become potential hostages against Allied action. They could be seized at any moment.
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Following his meeting with Chicherin, Lockhart returned to his rooms at the Elite and began preparing everyone for departure. It was agreed that after he had gone, Captain George Hill and Sidney Reilly would stay on in Russia and continue their counter-revolutionary missions under cover.
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Everyone else must leave.

It was ten days now, Lockhart calculated grimly, since Moura had left Petrograd bound for Estonia, and still he had heard nothing.
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Ten days
. He had one of her last letters with him. ‘If I remain there longer than a week,’ she had written, ‘you
must beleive
that it will only be if there is some difficulty about trains and passes. Please please, Baby, don’t think of anything else.’ She had promised that as soon as she was back in Russia she would come straight to Moscow – ‘if it is possible still’.
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If it is possible
. She knew as well as he did the risk that he might not be here that long. Ten days of silence, of not knowing; three whole weeks since he had last seen her and held her. It was unbearable. Could he depart without seeing her again? How would he ever find out what had happened to her if he left now?

While preparations for departure went on around him, Lockhart sank into a torpor. He delayed setting off. The next day there was still no word from Moura, but still he lingered. A form of madness was taking him over. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t deal with official business, couldn’t concentrate on any thought but her. He sat in his room for hours on end, dealing out hand after mindless hand of patience and ‘badgering Hicks with idiotic questions’.
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The ever-patient, ever-loyal Hicks understood. He was fond of Moura, and had his own romantic interest in staying – in the form of young Liuba Malinina; along with Moura she had become part of the little intimate circle around Lockhart and Hicks.
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But patience and devotion must reach their limit. Another day came, and still there was no news. Departure could not be delayed forever; soon Lockhart would have to make the decision to go.

On Sunday afternoon, three days after the flight of the embassies from Vologda, a week since the collapse of Savinkov’s uprising, the telephone rang in Lockhart’s room. He picked it up, and with a rush of exquisite joy heard a familiar voice crackling down the line. It was Moura, and she was back in Petrograd, safe and sound and breathless with adventure. She was catching the train to Moscow that night. She would be with him tomorrow.

Lockhart’s depressed lassitude fell away from him. ‘The reaction was wonderful,’ he would recall. ‘Nothing now mattered. If only I could see Moura again, I felt that I could face any crisis, any unpleasantness the future might have in store for me.’
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As soon as she was back in Lockhart’s arms, Moura poured out her story. The journey from Estonia had been a dreadful ordeal – a full six days from Yendel to Petrograd, some of it on foot through terrible danger and hardship, sneaking or charming her way past German border guards. (She heard months later that the official who had helped her cross the border had been arrested for abetting an English spy, and was shown a dossier about her.)
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But here she was – safe and as full of love as ever. In celebration, the couple drove out to dine at the Yar, another of the opulent night-restaurants in Petrovsky Park.
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Overjoyed to have her back, Lockhart perhaps didn’t think to query her tale. Six days was a long time to travel two hundred miles, even with the certainty that she must have had to walk the twenty-two versts
*
from Narva to Yamburg, which she had known beforehand she would have to do (‘won’t I be nice and thin,’ she wrote).
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An air of mystery would always surround this journey. In later life she would magnify the account further, claiming that she had walked the entire way from Yendel to Petrograd.
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Any possibility that she might have been anywhere else en route, or spent less time at Yendel than she claimed, was never raised by Lockhart – at least not that he ever wrote down. He was the only source for her having told this story upon her return.
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The final leg of her journey had been as quick as could be. She had boarded the train for Moscow immediately, whereas before she had always had to wait for passes and tickets to be obtained through her diplomatic friends. Now, with the authority of the Cheka behind her, she could travel however she wished within Russia. It was all the more surprising, then, that the journey between Yamburg and Petrograd should have taken so long.

No doubt it was wholly coincidental that the day after Moura’s arrival in Moscow, a stunning and unsettling event took place hundreds of miles away in Kiev. On Tuesday 30 July, Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, the detested commander-in-chief of the German forces in the Ukraine, the man who was in effect Hetman Skoropadskyi’s overlord, was assassinated. A bomb was thrown into his car from a passing taxi, mortally wounding both him and an aide. The aide, a Captain Dressler, bled to death; Field Marshal Eichhorn, with multiple wounds, lingered for a few hours in hospital before dying of a heart attack.
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The reactions to the murder were varied and interesting. The assassin, a twenty-three-year-old student from Moscow named Boris Donskoy, was arrested at the scene. When he was interrogated by the German military authorities, the first question the interrogator asked him was, ‘Do you know Lockhart? Do you know who I mean?’ They relayed a report on the interrogation to Moscow, where Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin gave a précis to a startled Lockhart. Chicherin and his deputy, Lev Karakhan, were gleeful about the whole business – in their personal view it served the imperialists right for acting against the wishes of the proletariat.
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One could almost imagine that there were elements within the Bolshevik government who had wanted the German Field Marshal dead.

At first Donskoy denied any connection to Lockhart or anyone British. He was a member of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, acting in response to the crushing of his comrades in the wake of the Mirbach assassination. But by Saturday 10 August, when he was publicly hanged in Kiev on the orders of a German military court, Donskoy was claiming that his group of Left SRs had been ‘bought’ by representatives of the Allies.
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