All the while, lightly roosted in what he called his ‘theatrical safe house’ just a street away from the gates of the Kremlin, Sidney Reilly mapped out a counter-revolutionary conspiracy so intricate that, as Izvestiya later remarked, it ‘transports us back to the atmosphere of the Venetian republic, the medieval Italian states, or the barbarous lands of the East’. Reilly’s plan was to overthrow the Bolshevik government and draw Russia back into the First World War. He planned to place the entire revolutionary government under arrest at a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars in the Bolshoi Theatre at the beginning of September. Reporting on the plot later, the Soviet press claimed that Reilly’s intention was to kill them, but his solution to the problem of their power was more theatrical. He planned to parade Lenin and Trotsky trouserless through the streets of Moscow with their coat-tails flapping so that ‘everybody should be aware that the tyrants of Russia were prisoners’. He assured his superiors in London that ‘beneath their national apathy the great mass of the Russian people longed to be delivered from their oppressors’. For the denouement, Reilly cast himself as ‘master of Moscow’.
I have read numerous accounts of the Reilly affair, in Russian and English sources, and (as is usually the case with spy stories) the facts seem impossible to establish. Reilly’s true role in the conspiracy has never been fully understood. One book suggests that he may have been a double agent, the ‘First Man’, working for the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police. It is hard to find any continuity of conviction or allegiance in his strange life, except to his desire for adventure and the logic of his own audacity and cunning. He remains half out of sight, keeping secrets to the end. He collected and discarded identities, wives, mistresses, homes, passports, false beards, tall tales, putative origins, cash fortunes and fine possessions. In reality ‘Sidney Reilly’ was an illegitimate Odessa-born Jew named Sigmund Rosenblum, sharing social origins with many of the Old Bolsheviks. Another of the anti-Bolshevik conspirators, the head of the British diplomatic mission in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, described him as ‘cast in the Napoleonic mould’.
What intrigues me about this resonant tale of espionage and high political intrigue, known in the Soviet press as the ‘Lockhart plot’, is the role played in it by No. 3 and Elizaveta Otten, one of the pretty occupants of apartment 85. Otten must have valued her good name and her place in the order of the city. She is the only one of the young artistes who shared the apartment to have her name and address listed in the Moscow directory of 1917: ‘Otten, Eliz. Emil., Sheremetevsky 3’. She was twenty. A photograph in her personal archive, which is kept in Moscow’s main puppet theatre, shows her in stage paint, with a cupid’s bow pencilled beyond the edges of her lips, lowered false eyelashes, a gentle gaze and a scarf tied around her fair hair. Her father, the manager of a tea company, had disapproved of her dreams of the stage. Yet Otten had recently made her debut at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio in a play called The Green Ring by the Symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius.
Sharing the apartment with Otten was a dancer from the Art Theatre, known as Dagmara K., who also took an active part in the anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. She was the mistress of Count Alexander Sheremetev, composer, conductor of the Imperial Court Choir until 1917, and half-brother of Count Sergei. Perhaps it was through Count Alexander that Reilly, who had connections in elite Moscow society as well as in its lower depths, first made the acquaintance of the actresses in No. 3.
Known to the actresses as Sidney Georgievich, the practised seducer Reilly had been a ‘frequent visitor’ in the apartment before Elizaveta Otten became his ‘chief girl’ in Moscow and he moved in to stay. Throughout the summer, Otten and her friends served as resourceful go-betweens as he spun his plot. Every morning another young dancer, the charming Maria Fride, would come up the staircase to deliver written intelligence from inside the Kremlin, copies she had made overnight of all the documents that had passed through the hands of her brother, Colonel Alexander Fride, on the previous day. The colonel, a Latvian Rifles officer, worked for the Bolsheviks as chief of military communications. Otten couriered secret letters between Reilly and the acting British consul, and received deliveries of documents from the Kremlin mole. Reilly meanwhile accumulated hundreds of thousands of roubles, mainly from the personal donations of Muscovites, which he secreted in a bureau drawer in the apartment: cash to bribe the Latvian mercenaries who guarded the Kremlin. In a city which had sunk, as he writes in his self-heroising memoir Britain’s Master Spy, ‘into a state of putrescence and stagnation beyond recall’, the young performers were no doubt grateful for his material largesse. Whatever their motives or real convictions, Reilly considered them to be ‘entirely’ on his side, and among his ‘most loyal and devoted collaborators’.
Perhaps it was not just the charms of the obligingly conspiratorial young women from the Art Theatre but also the perfect aptness for his counter-revolutionary phantasmagoria of the despoiled building in which they lived that drew Reilly to make this his principal ‘safe house’ in Red Moscow. The home of ‘Mlle S.’, as he calls Elizaveta Otten, was a most fitting address at which to conspire to save the bourgeoisie as a class. ‘The house in Cheremeteff was a large place containing no fewer than two hundred flats, and some of these were of the largest size’, Reilly says, adding that the apartment of the ‘interesting young ladies’ was so spacious that they had spare rooms to let to an ex-government official and a professor of music. Many of the other apartments, he notes, already accommodated several families. It was as though his mission could be distilled into the importance of saving this particular house and its inhabitants from the ravening Bolsheviks who were poised to claim it as their own.
Even the name of the street seems to have possessed evocative power for Reilly, who calls it ‘Cheremeteff’ again and again. The lineaments of his proclaimed cause and of the emblematic importance to him of No. 3 emerge in his apocalyptic portrait of the city under Red Terror. The city is ‘paved with desolation, filth, squalor, fiendish cruelty, abject terror, lust, starvation’; Moscow has become a vision of hell, ‘baptised in the blood of the bourgeoisie’. In this ‘city of the damned’, ‘Cheremeteff’ represents a tableau of almost allegorical pathos. Reilly describes a gang of men and women under guard, weakly attempting to clear refuse from the streets which reek of the carcasses of abandoned horses. The forced labourers have ‘well-bred scholarly faces’, the women are dignified and refined: ‘they were members of the bourgeoisie; they had been stockbrokers, lawyers, schoolmistresses, when there had been stocks, laws, and schools in Russia’. Meanwhile, Reilly adds, former servants refuse to work, and spend their days carrying off ‘from the flats of their erstwhile masters and mistresses such furniture as they coveted for the better decoration of their own apartments’. In his fantasies Reilly becomes the agent of conservation, as the city is ripped violently by the proletariat from the gentle bourgeoisie. The house in ‘Cheremeteff’ is a last citadel. The mission of Moscow’s new Napoleon is to deliver the fallen class from its dispossession, to restore the plunder.