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Arts club in St Petersburg, which was frequented by Klop and Nadia, but less likely that he was in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In any event, Klop’s mother Magdalena and sister Tabitha were in due course able to escape via the Crimea and Istanbul. They spent some time in Germany but eventually settled back in the Middle East. 43 Klop’s difficulties with the authorities were compounded by his new relationship with the Benois family, some of whom were not entirely above suspicion. They had potentially damning British connections at a time when Britain had been supporting the monarchist side in the civil war with arms, money and men. British secret agents were up to their necks in plots to assassinate Lenin and bring down the Bolshevik regime.
Nadia’s aunt, Camilla Benois, had married her English tutor Matthew Edwardes, whose younger brother George introducedthe glamorous Gaiety Girls chorus line to the London theatre scene. Matthew became a successful business man in Russia but he died in 1917 and Camilla escaped to England. Her son Julius stayed behind and became involved in the notorious British action to seize control of the enormous oilfields around Baku, then part of southern Russia. As a result he spent three years in a Russian jail. The two families remained close and Camilla’s grandson, Julius Caesar Edwardes, became Peter Ustinov’s business partner.
Nadia’s cousin, also Camilla, had married General Dmitri Horvath, general manager of the Chinese Eastern Railway. After the Bolshevik revolution, he led White Russian resistance in the East, declaring himself provisional ruler of all Russia from his power base in Vladivostok. He could never muster sufficient support and eventually threw in his lot with the ill-fated rebellion led by Admiral Alexander Kolchak, with British backing. Kolchak was executed by the Bolsheviks; General Horvath survived in exile with Camilla in Peking. Their daughter Doushka married the British First World War flying ace Cecil Lewis, who in 1922 was one of the founders of the BBC, and in later life lived for a while with Nadia and Klop at their home in Gloucestershire.
In St Petersburg, too, there were dangerous associations about which the Benois family needed to be wary. The Mariinsky Opera had a British conductor, Albert Coates, and in the years prior to the Revolution one of his protégés was a young Paul Dukes who had run away from home to join the orchestra. By 1918 he was an MI6 officer, using his old contacts for information and safe houses to hide from the authorities.
In August 1918 an attempt to assassinate Lenin unleashed the Cheka’s Red Terror in which thousands of suspects were rounded up and hundreds executed. The British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart, who was implicated in the plot, was arrested, only to be freed through the intervention of the lover he shared with Maxim Gorky, Moura Benckendorff. Whether Moura knew Klop or Nadia at this stage is not clear but she would feature prominentlyin their later lives in her adopted guise as the London society hostess Moura Budberg.
In such turbulent times Klop was running huge risks with his frequent visits to the department of Foreign Affairs and he compounded those risks with an ill-judged attempt to bribe an official to let Nadia leave the country. Klop told more than one version of this event. According to Nadia he had offered Comrade Rougaev a wad of foreign currency he had smuggled into the country and was immediately rebuffed. According to his son Peter the bribe was chocolate and bacon and the recipient was Ivan Maisky, who rejected it. 44
Once more fortune smiled upon Klop. Gustav Hilger, in his role of representative of the German Red Cross and the Nansen Relief Agency responsible for the welfare of POWs, could offer Klop an escape route. Klop had good reason to be grateful and he did not forget. Twenty-five years later he returned the compliment.
Hilger took the only photo Klop had of himself and Nadia – from