A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy Read online

  A Oneworld Book

  This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications, 2015

  First published in North America, Great Britain and Australia

  by Oneworld Publications 2015

  Copyright © Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield 2015

  The moral right of Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield

  to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted by them

  in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved

  Copyright under Berne Convention

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

  Excerpt from H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life by Anthony West

  (Random House, New York). Copyright © 1984 by Anthony West.

  Reprinted by permission of the Wallace Literary Agency, Inc.

  Excerpt from Memoirs of a British Agent by R. H. Bruce Lockhart

  reprinted with the permission of Pen and Sword Books.

  Excerpt from Retreat from Glory by R. H. Bruce Lockhart (Putnum, London)

  reprinted by permission of the Marsh Agency.

  Permission to use part of the poem ‘Moura Budberg on her proposed return to England’ from

  Out on a limb by Michael Burn (Chatto & Windus, 1973) granted by Watson, Little Ltd

  Thanks to Simon Calder and his siblings for permission to quote Lord Ritchie Calder.

  Excerpts from Russia in the Shadows, H.G. Wells in Love, a letter from H. G. Wells

  to Elizabeth von Arnim, Correspondence of H. G. Wells v3 p513 and a letter from H. G. Wells

  to Christabel Aberconway, 20 May 1934, quoted in Andrea Lynn, ‘Shadow Lovers’, p. 199-200.

  Reprinted by permission of United Agents LLP.

  ISBN 978-1-78074-7088

  ISBN 978-1-78074-7095 (eBook)

  Text design and typeset by Hewer text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Oneworld Publications

  10 Bloomsbury Street

  London WC1B 3SR

  England

  Visit www.mourabudberg.com for more information about Moura and news about A Very Dangerous Woman.

  Contents

  Map

  Descendants of Ignatiy Zakrevsky

  Illustration Credits

  Preface

  Prologue

  PART 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART 2

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  PART 3

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  PART 4

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  PART 5

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Notes

  continued

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  Descendants of Ignatiy Zakrevsky

  Illustration Credits

  With kind thanks to Georgi Särekanno the keeper of the Jäneda Museum, to David King, to the Hoover Institution Library, to Peter Lofts, to Allan Warren, and also to the Manuscripts and Special Collections section of the University of Nottingham for granting permission to use their illustrations of Meriel in her nursing uniform and Moura in the snow. Thanks also to Dimitri Collingridge for the use of the photograph of Moura, to the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University for allowing us to reproduce the photograph of Yakov Peters and to Getty Images, the National Portrait Gallery, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois and the Library of Congress for all allowing us to reproduce images.

  1 © Deborah McDonald.

  2 Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to U A Lora.

  3 © Tania Alexander.

  4 © Buchanan Collection, Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. BU B 8/1/43/4.

  5 Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to fireramsey.

  6 © Georgi Särekanno, private collection.

  7 RN Museum © Trustees of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum

  8 R N Museum © Trustees of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum

  9 © Buchanan Collection, Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham.BU B 8/1/56/2.

  10 © Georgi Särekanno, curator of the Jäneda Museum, and by kind permission of Enno Must.

  11 Wikimedia Commons. RIA Novosti archive, image 6464/RIA Novosti/CC-BY-SA

  12 Robert H. B. Lockhart Papers, Box 9, Folder 12, Hoover Institution Archives. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.

  13 © David King Collection.

  14 Robert H. B. Lockhart Papers, Box 10, Folder 17, Hoover Institution Archive. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.

  15 © National Portrait Gallery.

  16 By kind permission of Dimitri Collingridge

  17 ©Tania Alexander

  18 © Georgi Särekanno, Jäneda Museum.

  19 Robert H B Lockhart Papers, Box 9, Folder 20, Hoover Institution Archives. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.

  20 Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  21 © Tania Alexander.

  22 © David King Collection.

  23 © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  24 © Getty Images.

  25 © Peter Lofts collection RM004.

  26 © Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  27 Wikimedia Commons. With thanks to Allan Warren.

  Preface

  Moura Budberg was a mystery to everyone who knew her. Even her closest friends and her children never quite figured her out.

  London in the 1950s wasn’t short of remarkable characters, but few men or women had the magnetic charm or the air of danger and mystery that surrounded Baroness Budberg. Conducting her soirées in her dark, slightly shabby flat in Kensington, she managed to attract the exotic blooms of the literary and political crop. Graham Greene, Laurence Olivier, Tom Driberg, Guy Burgess, Bertrand Russell, Hamish Hamilton, David Lean, E. M. Forster, Lady Diana Cooper, Enid Bagnold, Peter Ustinov – all came at various times to Moura’s salon to drink gin and vodka and be enchanted.

  Officially, Moura lived off her earnings as a translator of books and plays, as a script consultant and editor for Alexander Korda, and occasionally from donations charmed out of her rich friends. Moura was renowned for having been the mistress of both Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, who were besotted with her, and the lover of many other men. Physically she wasn’t a prepossessing lady – ageing and overweight, deeply lined, with a large nose badly broken in childhood, wrecked from head to foot by her appetites for food, vodka and cigars. Baroness Budberg was a walking ruin – the harrowed shell of a being who had once possessed beauty, litheness and unsurpassed attraction.

  Her charisma still compelled attention and devotion, even in her ruined state. H. G. Wells, whose offers of marriage she turned down repeatedly, said of her, ‘I have rarely seen her in any room with other women in which she was not plainly – not merely in my eyes but to many others – the most attractive and
interesting presence.’1

  There were always rumours about her. She had been a spy, a betrayer, a double or even triple agent, in the service of MI6, MI5, the KGB . . . nobody could tell for sure, but everybody had his or her own opinion on the matter. She knew simply everybody who was anybody, and liked to convey that she knew everything about them as well. People who entered the sprawling social web the Baroness spun around herself were warned by the older acquaintances to watch their step and their tongues – Moura knew all, saw all, and had powerful, dangerous connections. But hardly anyone, enveloped in one of her bear hugs and subjected to her charm, could resist her.

  Baroness Budberg – or the version she presented to the world – was a figure made partly out of fables and lies. Some of them (and not necessarily the most flattering ones) were her own inventions, concocted or stolen from the lives of others and added to the living mythology of Moura Budberg. She had spied for the Germans in the First World War; had spied for and against the British and the Russians; had worked as an agent for the fearsome Bolshevik secret police during the Red Terror of the Revolution; was the mistress of the British agent who plotted to bring down Lenin; had been the trusted agent of Stalin; and she might even have committed murder.

  If there were any grains or shards of truth scattered in the folds of myth, nobody cared to discern what they might be, or separate them from the lies. Each man and woman who knew the Baroness – family member, friend, acquaintance or enemy – liked to imagine that he or she had put a finger on what made her tick, or knew concealed truths about her. Few of them, in fact, knew more than a fragment about her.

  What they most wanted to know was the truth about her earliest adventures – her love affair with the British diplomat and secret agent Robert Bruce Lockhart in revolutionary Russia, and her involvement in his plot to bring down the Bolshevik government.

  Almost all her friends wished that she would write her memoirs. The writer and peace campaigner Peter Ritchie Calder felt ‘a deep affection for her, and I’ve always thought what a marvellous book could be written about her’.2 He wasn’t the only one. Publishers Alfred A. Knopf and Hamish Hamilton tried to arrange for her to produce an autobiography, and although she took and spent the advance, not a word was written. She had begun a memoir decades earlier, but nobody ever saw it, and it was burned – along with most of her other papers – shortly before she died in 1974.

  After her death, several attempts were made to write a biography, but most came to nothing for lack of source material.

  In 1979, five years after the Baroness had gone to her grave, biographer Andrew Boyle attempted to write her life. His book Climate of Treason – which caused Anthony Blunt to be exposed as a Soviet spy – had topped the bestseller lists, and he turned his attention to the woman who, coincidentally, had tried to tip off MI5 about Blunt decades earlier. He found her a much deeper mystery than any Cambridge spy, and almost as well defended by her circle of close friends. The exchanges of letters between Boyle and the members of Moura’s circle show a curtain quickly being drawn down around her as soon as her family realised what he was up to.

  Boyle got as far as sketching out an outline, in which he noted that ‘a virtue must be made of explaining the tentative nature of the material’3 relating to her early life. But the biography was never written – the writer who had penetrated the mystery of the last Cambridge spy couldn’t catch a sure enough hold on Moura Budberg to bring her to life.

  One biographer succeeded where Andrew Boyle failed. Nina Berberova was a Russian novelist who had the priceless advantage of having known Moura during her early years in exile, from around 1921 to 1933. Other than that, Moura’s life was almost as mysterious to Berberova as it was to any other person. As a highly spirited writer of fiction, she wasn’t deterred, and where her source material failed, she didn’t hesitate to invent – not only decorative details but vital facts.

  Since then, more material has come to light. Aside from the large archives of letters to Gorky, Wells and Lockhart, more recently the file kept on her by MI5 from 1920 to 1951 has been released. Added to facts uncovered by Andrew Boyle and tied to new research into the historical background of the ‘Lockhart Plot’, it has become possible to piece together the whole story of her life, and uncover some surprising and quite startling facts.

  What Moura did in her life, what she was reputed to have done, and what she claimed to have done are difficult to tell apart. Sometimes it’s impossible to tell them apart. It is tempting to take a cynical view of Moura’s untruths – that she aggrandised herself or simply couldn’t distinguish fact from fiction. But what she was really doing was creating an artistic truth for herself. She did it all her life, but it was only in the course of her intimacy with Maxim Gorky, when she delved deeply into the mind of a literary creator, that she herself began to understand what she was doing. Trying to sum up what Gorky did in the process of converting life experience into fiction, she commented that ‘Artistic truth is more convincing than the empiric brand, the truth of a dry fact.’4

  There was her life and motive encapsulated. She wasn’t a magpie – she didn’t steal experiences because of their attractive gleam, or embellish her own in order to seem more interesting. Where Gorky created literary art out of people’s lives, Moura tried to create an artistically ‘true’ life for herself out of them, even as she was living it.

  And her stealing and invention weren’t wholesale – just a little touch here and there. Her life, quite by chance, had a dramatic structure normally found only in novels; she was aware of the fact, and ensured that in her letters and her utterances at the time, and in her recollections afterwards, the right words were said and the right attitudes struck at the dramatically appropriate junctures. Whether it was a courageous farewell in the gloom of a night-time rail station, a vow to love unto death or a noble valediction on a mountain crag, she played her part to the full. That it was embellished and charged deliberately with drama did not make any of it less real, either for her or for the people who acted in the play of her life.

  The contributions that have gone into the making of this life story are too numerous to list in full. If it hadn’t been for the late Andrew Boyle’s work in gathering the tales of her friends while they were still living, this book would not have been possible. Neither could it have been done without the memoir written by Moura’s daughter Tania, An Estonian Childhood.

  Others who have helped this book on its way, and who have earned our thanks, include:

  Archivists who have provided copies of documents and letters relating to Moura Budberg’s life: Arcadia Falcone of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas; David K. Frasier of the Lilly Library, University of Indiana; Carol Leadenham, Sean McIntyre and Nicholas Siekierski of the Hoover Institution archives, University of Stanford; Dennis J. Sears, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, University of Illinois; and the staff of the House of Lords archives, Westminster.

  Enno Must, Director of Jäneda Mõis, and Georgi Särekanno, Head of Jäneda Museum, kindly gave Deborah an hour of their time to show her round the manor in which Moura lived in Estonia and which now contains a museum devoted to her and the Benckendorff family.

  Biographers and historians who have shared their expertise and information: Andrea Lynn, for her help and for sharing information about Moura’s life and her relationship with H. G. Wells; John Puckett for creating an invaluable translation of the report by Yakov Peters on the Lockhart Case; Professor Barry P. Scherr of Dartmouth College, University of Chicago, for providing notes on the Gorky/Budberg correspondence held in Russian archives and for information on their relationship; Caroline Schmitz for translating the German correspondence between Paul Scheffer and Moura; Miranda Carter and Nigel West for information and advice.

  Heartfelt thanks to those friends and acquaintances of Moura Budberg who shared their memories and thoughts about her in conversation with Deborah: Lord Weidenfeld; Michael Korda; Nathalie Brooke (née Benckendorff); and Jamie Bruce L
ockhart, who also gave permission to use letters from Robert Bruce Lockhart’s archived documents. Thanks also to Simon Calder and family for allowing us to use the epigraph written by his late grandfather, Peter Ritchie Calder.

  Finally, profoundest thanks to our agent, Andrew Lownie, for first seeing the potential of this story and for bringing us together to write it; and to Fiona Slater, Rosalind Porter and everyone at Oneworld for believing in the book and letting it see the light.

  Deborah McDonald

  Jeremy Dronfield

  January 2015

  Note on dates and place names

  The Julian (‘Old Style’ or OS) calendar was used in imperial Russia until it was replaced by the Gregorian (‘New Style’ or NS) calendar after the Revolution. As a Catholic invention, the Gregorian calendar was resisted by Orthodox countries until very late. Eastern Orthodox Churches still use the Julian system for their ecclesiastical calendars.

  The Julian calendar was thirteen days behind the Gregorian. Thus, the ‘October Revolution’ actually took place in NS November, and in pre-revolutionary Russia Christmas took place when it was January in the rest of Europe. In the narrative that follows, to avoid such anomalies, OS Julian dates will be given when dealing with Russian events prior to the official change (which occurred on 31 January 1918), and NS Gregorian after.

  Shifting national borders and changes in rulership have caused several of the places featured in this story to change their names. Because of its Germanic tone, the name of St Petersburg was changed to Petrograd on the outbreak of war in 1914; following the Revolution, in 1924 it became Leningrad, before finally reverting to St Petersburg in 1991. The port city of Reval in Estonia became Tallinn in 1920. The Estonian village now called Jäneda, where Moura spent summers and Christmases at her husband’s country seat, was then known (at least to anglophone writers) as Yendel.