A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (49 page)

Later that year, back in London, Moura received a surprising and unsettling visit.

Timosha Peshkova, widow of Gorky’s son, Max, along with her mother-in-law, Yekaterina Peshkova, Gorky’s first and only legal wife, had been allowed out of the USSR to clear up the last remaining items of Gorky’s property at the Sorrento villa. Both women had had long and intimate working relationships with the Cheka and NKVD; Timosha indeed had had an affair with Yagoda. While she was outside the Soviet Union, Timosha travelled to London, where she called on Moura in the hope of persuading her to relinquish Gorky’s archive. She failed, and went back to Moscow empty-handed.
¹⁶

H. G., despite being in his seventieth year, carried on having affairs. He had a fling with Constance Coolidge, a rich American divorcee, and with the journalist Martha Gellhorn. He was lonely, and hated it; he had a child’s fear of loneliness, he told Constance. ‘But I suppose I want my woman at my beck and call. I don’t want to follow her about. I want her to follow me about.’ It maddened him that he couldn’t have that with Moura. ‘She is always flitting off. I scream with rage when I am left alone, like a bad child.’
¹⁷
He was still the ‘greedy little boy’ Enid Bagnold had been smitten by more than twenty years earlier. In H. G.’s eyes (those sparkling sea-blue eyes) it was Moura’s fault that he had to go on having affairs. As for whose fault it had been during the decades of affairs before her, he didn’t comment.

His relationship with Constance became largely one of letters. The one with Martha Gellhorn came to nothing, but Wells continued his search for the elusive ‘shadow lover’, that person who would mirror him both sexually and intellectually and look after him into his old age. She remained unobtainable and he would have to settle for the often-absent Moura to fulfil that role from her flat at 81 Cadogan Square (whither she and Tania had moved after their home in Knightsbridge was pulled down).

While he fumed over Moura’s absences and deceptions, Wells managed to continue his work. Among other things, he co-wrote screenplays based on two of his stories.
The Man Who Could Work Miracles
and
Things to Come
(based on
The Shape of Things to Come
) were both released in 1936, both produced by Alexander Korda, the British-Hungarian movie mogul. Moura knew Korda, possibly through the émigré community in London, or perhaps through the film deals she had negotiated on Gorky’s behalf during the 1920s. Korda had left Hungary in 1919 to escape the counter-revolutionary White Terror. (Michael Curtiz, director of
British Agent
and
Casablanca
, was also a Hungarian émigré who left in 1919.) It was Moura who introduced Korda to H. G. Wells and initiated their collaboration.

Korda was also acquainted with Lockhart, who dined with him at Sibyl Colefax’s house in May 1935, together with the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson. The Prince of Wales showed his political colours at the gathering; according to Lockhart the Prince ‘came out very strong for friendship with Germany: never heard him talk so definitely about any subject before’.
¹⁸

For the time being H. G. and Moura enjoyed being part of the movie crowd, especially if it included royalty. And Wells would not have to wait much longer for Moura’s visits to Russia to end.

At the beginning of 1936, H. G. sailed home from a trip to America. As he walked down the platform at Waterloo station, dodging the inevitable reporters, he saw Moura waiting for him. She jokingly accused him of having another lover while he had been away. Yes, he replied in kind; he had been unfaithful to the very best of his ability. A weight fell away from him. He believed at last that he had lost the obsession with her and that their relationship could now enter a more relaxed phase, free from his obsessive jealousy.
¹⁹

Moura continued to dart in and out as she pleased. They spent weekends away together, had scintillating conversations and made love in a comfortable rather than passionate manner.

At the end of May H. G. noticed that Moura seemed depressed and would begin crying for no reason that he could fathom. She would not tell him the cause of her distress.

In March she had secretly travelled to the Crimea for a short visit to Gorky at Tesseli. In April, back in England, she sent what was to be her last letter to him. ‘My dear friend,’ she wrote, ‘it is now almost a month since I have left you and yet it seems that I will wake up, come to disturb you at your desk, help working in the garden and everything else that makes life pleasant.’ She told him it had struck her ‘how inseparable and valuable my relationship to you is, my dear’.
²⁰

Then, not long after receiving Moura’s letter, Gorky heard news that both of his beloved grandchildren were ill with influenza. Despite his own poor health, on 26 May he left his nurse and companion, Lipa, to go to Moscow to visit them.

Some said that he became ill on the train as a result of a cold draught from the windows; others that he was ill before he left Tesseli. Still others believed that Gorky did not become ill until several days after visiting the children, and that he caught their infection. Influenza in a person with Gorky’s tuberculosis would be very serious. In
Pravda
it was stated that he was stricken with illness on 1 June – after he had returned to his home near Moscow. Seventeen physicians gathered around his bedside.

In Moscow, the first round of Stalin’s infamous show trials, by means of which he would eventually purge all his rivals and their allies and supporters, were about to get under way. Ultimately, most of the prominent Bolsheviks still surviving from the era of the Revolution would be arrested, tried and executed. There would be only two notable exceptions – Stalin himself and Trotsky, who was in exile abroad. Proceedings had begun in secret the previous year, with the arrest and interrogation of Lev Kamenev, the former deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and Grigory Zinoviev, the former head of the Petrograd Soviet and Northern Commune. After Lenin’s death, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev had formed a triumvirate which had ruled the Soviet Union for a while. In the struggle for dominance that followed, Stalin was the victor, and from the mid-1920s he had become effective autocrat of the USSR. But they were still alive, still a threat and needed to be purged. They were arrested and interrogated under the direction of Yagoda (who would himself be purged during the third round of trials in 1938).

Kamenev had been Gorky’s friend. Zinoviev had been his bitter enemy. Now, facing trial and execution, they both appealed to him for support. Gorky was still worshipped by the masses, and had never been able to ignore a plea for help, even from an old enemy. Stalin, who planned many more such trials and executions, realised that Gorky had become more of a liability than an asset. But to dispose of him through trial and execution would be unthinkable. For Stalin, Gorky’s illness, if it should prove fatal, would be a blessed coincidence.

The NKVD had a sophisticated toxicology department in which they developed poisons and biological weapons including pneumococcus bacteria capable of inducing pneumonia. Rather than putting Gorky on trial and upsetting the Russian people, what better than exposing him to a deadly infection?
²¹
For a man known to suffer from lung disease, such a death would be expected anyway and nothing sinister would be suspected. Several other members of Gorky’s household, including the superintendent, his wife and the cook, all became ill with what was diagnosed as angina. They displayed symptoms similar to Gorky’s, although none had had direct contact with him. Yet of all those who sat with him throughout his illness not one fell ill.

Within days, Moura arrived at his bedside. Another extraordinary coincidence. How had she been informed of his illness, obtained a visa and organised the journey so quickly? Possibly it was a pre-planned visit that just happened to coincide with Gorky’s sudden illness. Or possibly not. According to a close friend, she was collected from her home in Knightsbridge by a black limousine which had been sent by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador. She flew to Berlin and then on to Moscow on 5 June; her entry into the USSR was not marked in her passport.
²²

Not for the first or last time, Tania was required to provide a cover for her mother’s absence; she wrote to tell H. G. that Moura had become ill while visiting her sister in Paris and had to recuperate in a nursing home. H. G., either suspicious or worried – possibly both – kept pestering Tania for the name of the home so that he could contact her. Tania hated telling him all these lies. She had begged Moura to let her reveal the truth. At first Moura refused, but after a couple of days she relented. Tania was allowed to tell H. G. that Moura had heard news of Gorky’s illness and had left the nursing home hurriedly to visit him prior to his likely death. ‘Thank goodness no more lies required,’ Tania wrote in her diary. ‘Still have to pretend I knew nothing of all this till today. Fed up being intermediary every time. Makes me look a complete fool.’
²³

Did Gorky really want Moura there at his deathbed? He was being nursed by Lipa, who hated Moura. Given the speed of her passage from Knightsbridge to Moscow, it was quite possibly on Stalin’s direct orders that Moura was invited into Russia so that she could bring with her the remaining archives. But although she brought some papers with her, much still remained unaccounted for.

Gorky’s illness became worse, and by 8 June he was not expected to live. His close friends and relatives began to gather to pay their last respects. Yekaterina, Timosha and Moura were among them.

Gorky opened his eyes and said: ‘I am already far away, it is very hard for me to return . . .’ After a pause, he added: ‘All my life I have thought how I might improve this moment . . .’ Kriuchkov entered the room and announced that Stalin was on his way . . . ‘Let them come, if they can get here in time,’ said Gorky.
²⁴

He was injected with camphor, which rallied him for a while, and by the time Stalin arrived Gorky seemed so much improved that he was surprised at having been brought to see what he had supposed to be a dying man. He demanded that everyone leave; he wanted time alone to speak with Gorky.

Despite rallying for a while once more on 16 June, Gorky suffered a relapse. On the night of 17 June a raging storm began and hailstones pelted the roof. Gorky was kept alive with oxygen but by morning it was clear that nothing further could be done. He died at eleven o’clock. Moura, overcome by grief, lay beside his dead body for some time.

The funeral was a rushed affair, carried out the next day. Gorky had wished to be buried next to his son, but instead a cremation was hastily arranged and the ashes placed in the Kremlin wall. Despite the rush, a massive crowd, estimated at eight hundred thousand, attended the funeral procession in Red Square. Word of his death had travelled fast. People were hurt in the inevitable crush. Moura attended the funeral as part of his family, sitting between Yekaterina and Maria Andreyeva, his other long-term lovers; in front sat Timosha with his granddaughters Darya and Marfa. André Gide made a speech at the funeral. According to Moura, while Gide was in mid-speech, Stalin turned to the writer Aleksei Tolstoy and asked, ‘Who’s that?’ Tolstoy replied, ‘That’s Gide. He’s our great conquest. He’s the leading writer of France and he’s ours!’ Stalin grunted and said, ‘I never trust these French fellows.’
²⁵
Stalin was right; on his return to France, Gide wrote a long anti-Communist work entitled
Retour de l’URSS
.

Moura’s role in the last illness and death of Maxim Gorky was never clear. There was a rumour that she administered a fatal dose of poison during his last days. But even if she could be persuaded to do such a thing (the mortal fear that Stalin inspired might be enough to make her comply) with several NKVD personnel and a nurse at hand it was unlikely that Moura would be chosen for such a task. And her love and admiration for Gorky, while nowhere near as strong as her love for Lockhart, were sincere. But she did not come away from the business with her hands clean. She might well have been brought there on Stalin’s or Yagoda’s instructions. And part of the plan might have been that she bring the Gorky archive that was in her keeping. But she did not bring it all, and if she hoped to get something in return, she did not get all of that either.

During the course of Gorky’s illness, Moura and Pyotr Kriuchkov prepared a will in Gorky’s name, assigning Moura the rights to the archive in her possession and to the foreign royalties on his published works, and everything else to Kriuchkov. He refused to sign it. So Moura did what she is alleged to have done on numerous previous occasions – she forged his signature. Moura gave the document to Yekaterina, with the instruction to hand it on to either Stalin or Vyacheslav Molotov, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. Yekaterina read it, and was appalled that Gorky had left nothing to her. She claimed later that she had given it to Stalin, and that he gave it to ‘someone else’. It disappeared and was never seen again.
²⁶
Nonetheless, Moura, who had been receiving Gorky’s foreign royalties under power of attorney, continued to receive them for a further three years before the right expired under Soviet law.