My Secret Agent Auntie
A film by Dimitri Collingridge
Short synopsis:
Legend has it that my Aunt Moura was a double agent, who spied for the Soviets
and for the West from 1917 to the late 1960s. She was a femme fatale who was
the mistress of a famous Russian writer, Maxim Gorky, and a famous British one,
H.G. Wells. She also had an affair with the British spy Bruce Lockhart. Both the
KGB and MI5 held large files on her. These were the stories I grew up with and
what Russian and Western historians have alleged in several weighty volumes.
Such was the story told in the American film British Agent directed by Michael
Curtiz who also made Casablanca.
I would have enjoyed these glamorous
tales of intrigue and adventure that
starred my aunt, if there wasn’t one
which cast a dark shadow over her
and my family: because Aunt Moura
was said to have betrayed hundreds of
people to Stalin in order to ensure her
own survival.
I can no longer live with this dark stain
on the reputation of my family. In this
film, I am going set out on a mission
to clear her name. I will be following
in her footsteps to Moscow, Estonia,
Ukraine and Britain. I will be
declassifying documents from the
archives of the British and Russian
secret police. There will be many
obstacles to overcome, not least the
suspicion of some of my relatives, who
are scared of what I might find out.
I want to prove the innocence of my aunt, but I may not succeed. No-one knows
for sure what Aunt Moura really did, and I may instead discover a terrible truth.
Short treatment:
When I was growing up, I had one great hero. She was a formidable woman,
whose life story was more exciting than all the adventure films I used to watch,
more intriguing than any spy novel, more fascinating than history itself. What’s
more, she was my great aunt and when I told people about her, I found that no
one had a relative like my Aunt Moura.
My life has been filled with stories
about Aunt Moura: about how she had
been involved in a plot to overthrow
the Bolshevik government; how she
had smuggled the family out of Russia
in the midst of the revolution; how she
had dined with Tsars, Princes and
Politicians; how she’d been the lover
of great thinkers and writers – men
like Maxim Gorky, H.G. Wells and spies
like Robert Bruce Lockhart.
People talked fondly about her
outrageous behaviour: how her life
story had as many versions as it did
listeners, how her charm and huge
personality meant she always got
away with her little white lies and
manipulations.
But probably the most exciting thing
about her was that almost everyone
who met her fervently believed that
she was a spy.
What surprised me when I was younger was how my family did their utmost to
cover up this rumour: surely it was really cool to have a spy in the family? But
as I grew older, I gradually learnt what being a spy meant. With the glamour
came dark, sinister secrets which made my family’s secrecy quite natural.
Coming from a White Russian family, I naturally assumed that Moura had hated
Communism, the Soviets and that if she spied for anyone it was for the West.
So you can imagine how shocked I was when I first found out that she was
actually thought to be spying for the USSR!
Disturbing allegations about Moura have blighted our family’s history and
reputation: Moura was said to have spied on her famous lovers H.G. Wells and
Maxim Gorky for the Soviet Union, while also passing information about the
Eastern Block to the British through Bruce Lockhart and others. Worse still, she
has been accused of giving Gorky’s sensitive archive of correspondence to Stalin.
The archive contained compromising information on many Russian dissidents,
and is said to have been used during the infamous Moscow show trials of the
1930s to help send many to their deaths.
In recent years, the accusations have got even worse. There are Russian
journalists and writers who claim to have found evidence that Moura poisoned
Maxim Gorky on Stalin’s orders.
All family secrets damage and divide the people in that family, and like all
families, ours has avoided talking about the things that we don’t like about our
past. Talk of Moura in the family always focused on the things that made her a
hero – such as bringing us to the UK – but the things that made her the black
sheep were ignored as we all tried to forget. But forgetting always proved
impossible, and our family’s silence on the damaging allegations over the years
has simply allowed the myths to carry on unchallenged.
In this film I want to challenge the stories which many accept as being truth
about Aunt Moura. It pains me to hear people refer to Moura as a double agent
and a traitor. Although there is no smoke without fire, she cannot be guilty of
the terrible things of which she has been accused.
I want to know who she really was. I want to clear her name. Above all, I want
to find out the truth. In making this film, that is what I am going to do.
Programme Style:
Agent Moura will be presented by myself. It will be a historical road trip blending
observational DV shot sequences with Super 8 reconstructions and archive
footage from newsreels and feature films.
My journey will piece together the mysteries of Moura Budberg’s life: a life of
lies, deceit and legend, the nature of which will be reflected in the visual style,
which will give the film the feel of a murder mystery or spy film. The narrative
will be structured as a travelogue, and the film will have the feel of an
investigation rather than a classic historical documentary.
The film will driven by actuality sequences where each character I meet takes
me into their world and tells me what they know about Moura. I will take some
of my interviewees to the places where Moura lived, worked and grew up. The
interviews will be shot in a casual, hand-held style to give an informal feel. I will
track down Moura’s relatives and acquaintances in the UK, Europe, the United
States and Russia. I will also film interviews with historians and intelligence
specialists.
The interviews will be inter-cut with abstract reconstructions of the events
described. These will be shot on Super 8, to give a dream-like, fairytale feel.
I will make extensive use of former classified documents and personal letters
that I find in the course of making the film. I will attempt to declassify new
documents from MI5 and the KGB. I will use a mixture of Rostrum camera and
over the shoulder shots to record the files and letters I discover, and the letters
will also be read in voice-over.
The film will be full of intimate and surprising images of my aunt. My family has
a large collection of photographs of Aunt Moura. In addition there is an archive
interview with her from a BBC documentary and a feature film called British
Agent.
I will be filming in extraordinary locations – from the delapidated ballrooms of
my aunt’s family mansion in the Ukraine, to the home of Maxim Gorky in St
Petersberg, to the corridors of the KGB archive in Moscow and the Hollywood
studios where British Agent was shot.
The result will be a fascinating, exciting and stylish journey through a life in
which ‘the story is greater than the individual’, as Aldous Huxley said of Moura,
yet where both have so far been impossible to pin down.