A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy by Deborah McDonald & Jeremy Dronfield

Author:Deborah McDonald & Jeremy Dronfield [McDonald, Deborah & Dronfield, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Espionage, Soviet Union
ISBN: 9781780747088
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2015-06-08T23:00:00+00:00

Wherever we went we encountered busts, portraits, and statues of Marx. About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful beard . . . It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapital in its inane abundance, and the human part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind.41

In Marxist Russia everyone starved and froze and dreaded falling sick. Medicines were unobtainable. ‘Small ailments develop very easily therefore into serious trouble . . . If any one falls into a real illness the outlook is grim.’42

The commune at Kronverksky Prospekt was spared the worst of these privations. In the evenings the inhabitants and their guests would gather in the dining room, where in the middle of the table stood a large kerosene lamp; in its glow, people would sit and talk art and politics, or listen to Gorky’s tales of his life, which he turned into the bravura performance of a gifted storyteller and dramatist.43

Gorky accompanied Wells and Moura on one of their outings. It was a doubly meaningful one for Moura – a visit to the Petrograd storehouse of the art and antiques commission. This was the state organ which seized and evaluated works of art, whose secret purpose was as a resource for the valiuta programme. Gorky was probably ignorant of the programme; neither would he have known that Moura was now involved in it. But the visit had an extra meaning for her. The building that had been taken as the commission’s storehouse was the old British Embassy on Palace Quay.

Two years had passed since Cromie’s death, and almost as long since Moura’s last visit, when the place was a clutter of broken furniture. Now, to Wells’ eyes, it was ‘like some congested second-hand art shop’:

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