If you’ve been following my blogs you’ll know that I have an interest in both the role of the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, in penetrating groups of anti tsarist dissident living in London, and also the attempts by the British to destabilise the post revolution Bolshevik government in Russia with the hope of installing a government more likely to continue the war with Germany.

One of these attempts was what is now known as the Lockhart plot.

Bruce Lockhart, along with Sidney Reilly attempted to engineer a coup against the Bolshevik government in the summer of 1918, but the plot failed following Fanya Kaplan’s unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Lenin in 1918.

Lockhart and Reilly’s plot was supposed to swing into action a few days later, and it remains one of the unknowns of history whether Kaplan’s assassination attempt was  a misguided attempt by the Left SR faction to move things along or as was said a spontaneous attempt by Kaplan, who saw Lenin’s increasingly authoritarian rule and the banning of the Left SR, as a betrayal of the ideals of the revolution.

As it was Kaplan’s assassination attempt precipitated the Red Terror when people known to oppose the Bolsheviks were rounded up and shot, often with little or no legal process.

Bruce Lockhart had diplomatic immunity and after being held for a few days was released and expelled from Russia.

Reilly had no such immunity but succeeded in escaping and was sentenced to death by the Cheka in absentia. He was later lured back to Russia and executed by the Cheka.

Reilly is an interesting character.

Clearly a sociopath, he had several wives, including some at the same time, as well as a gaggle of mistresses.

While he was probably only ever out for himself, he worked at various times for the Okhrana, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, and British intelligence.

He told so many lies about himself that no one, not even the OGPU, was totally sure as to his origins, but most stories agree that he was born with the surname Rosenblum, somewhere in what is now Ukraine.

He seems to have started out as a courier for a Russian dissident group, smuggling documents in and out of Russia, and was arrested by the Okhrana, after which point he started working for the Okhrana trying to penetrate Russian dissident groups in Berlin and London.

Sometime in the summer of 1895 he met a young Irishwoman who called herself Ethel Voynich, and had an affair with her.

Ethel wasn’t officially Ethel Voynich, or not yet anyway.

She had been born Ethel Lilian Boole, and was one of the daughters of the noted Irish mathematician George Boole, the inventor of Boolean Logic, to the eternal annoyance of computer science undergraduates everywhere.

However, George Boole died when Ethel was quite young, leaving the family in straitened circumstances.

Her mother took Ethel to live in London, where she had a very unhappy time and seems to have turned into some sort of proto-goth or emo, always dressing in black, and being surly with it.

As soon as she was eighteen, when a small legacy became due to her, she took herself off to Berlin to study music, and became involved in the Russian dissident community, learning Russian, working for a time as a governess in St Petersburg, and acting as a courier smuggling forbidden books into Russia.

Ethel also had an ongoing relationship with a Polish Lithuanian dissident, who had escaped to Berlin from a labour camp near Irktusk in Siberia.

Perhaps after her brief affair with Reilly, Ethel started living full time with Wilfrid Voynich and calling herself Mrs Voynich even though they were not legally married.

In 1897 Ethel published a novel, the Gadfly, set in the period when Italy was being unified, describes the life and loves of a revolutionary, and was highly popular at the time.

It was also very popular in the Soviet Union where it was turned into both a film and an opera under its Russian title Овод, and you can still pick up Russian language paperbacks from second hand shops specialising in Russian language publications for a few dollars.

But that name Voynich.

Wilfrid, once he settled down and no longer participated in revolutionary activity, became a respected antiquarian bookseller, and after the first world war, moved his business from London to New York, and yes he is the same Voynich as brought the Voynich manuscript to the world’s attention.

After Wilfrid’s death in 1930, Ethel lived on until 1960 continuing to run the antiquarian book business with the help of Anne Nill, who had worked as a cataloguer for Wilfred.

In Russia she was commonly assumed to have died in the 1930’s, but such was her popularity, when some visiting Bolshoi ballet stars discovered in 1958 that she was still alive, they made a special point of visiting her and bringing her flowers.

Touchingly, the event was captured on film.