Even among the supreme leaders of Soviet Russia in the 1920s there was fear. When Clare Sheridan, the sculptor who spent her latter years in Galway, was leaving the Moscow War Ministry late one night accompanied by the powerful head of the Red Army and Commissar for Military Affairs, Leon Trotsky, armed soldiers on the bridge at the Neva, stood out on the road, and stopped their car.
They were asked for their personal papers. The guards looked at them carefully, turned them over and back again, and passed them to each other. Trotsky realised the guards could not read, and would have no idea who he was. He sensed immediate danger. Clare urged him to tell them who he was. But Trotsky froze. He was afraid. After a while they were waved on. *
In the autumn 1920 Clare Sheridan was lured to Moscow by the Russian Trade Delegation in London anxious for a good publicity coup. It had heard that Clare, a first cousin of Winston Churchill, was interested in the transformation of the old Romanov empire into a socialist state. A state where, Clare understood, artists were respected and cared for. She was invited to sculpt the heads of the Bolshevik party now caught in a bitter struggle to control all Russia. Clare who had lost her husband in World War I, and the mother of three small children, leapt at the chance.
Knowing that her family would be horrified that she could fraternise with the leaders of a bloody revolution, and fearing that the British government would totally refuse to allow such a well connected artist to become a pawn in the propaganda war, Clare slipped away and travelled incognito guided by her new ‘friends’.
Dangerous men
Once in Moscow she was accommodated in a vast requisitioned mansion on the Sofiskaya Embankment, where there was hot water once a week, chicory coffee and black bread for breakfast, cabbage soup and boiled rice for dinner (sometimes meat in the soup ) at 9pm, but tea from a samovar was available at all hours.
For weeks nothing happened, and as it got colder she realised that her wardrobe, quickly gathered together in England, was totally inadequate. Cold and alone she waited before she was informed her work would start, and continue every night in the Kremlin, the fortified home of the Tzars for many centuries. Clare had to adjust her working schedule to deal with dangerous men who worked through the night, and slept by day.
However, she slowly worked through several leaders including the feared Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as Iron Felix, who was in charge of state security, and the architect of the Red Terror. Clare was totally innocent of his notoriety for summary executions on a massive scale.
‘Which war?’
Lenin, however, was easy as a lamb. The founding head of government, Lenin rose to his feet when Clare entered his office and shook her hand. Each evening he would acknowledge her presence, and then return to the work on his desk. When the portrait was finished he looked at her curiously. He asked his secretary what she thought of the work, she replied that it was ‘good’. He questioned Clare about what her husband thought of her coming to Russia. When she told him he was killed in the war, he asked ‘Which war?’
“I was forgetting that you English had only one war. We have had the Imperialist War, the Capitalist War, the Civil War, and now our wars of self-defence. How futile was England in 1914 - why did she enter?”
Clare replied she did not know why.
He was curious to know what her cousin Churchill thought of her coming to Russia; and he remarked on King George V’s hatred of the Bolsheviks (well, they had shot his cousin Tsar Nicholas and his family at Ekaterinburg ); ‘but Churchill’, he said, ‘and his deadly alliance with the king, were his greatest enemy.’
‘Bourgeois property’
Trotsky took her breath away. A car, with open sides, brought her to the War Ministry, where he agreed she could sculpt while he worked. The car broke down in a snowstorm, and as the driver struggled to restart the car, she almost froze to death. Trotsky met her in his office, previously a ballroom, with his desk on the stage, and a fire at his back. He immediately took her hands, and kissed her fingers.
The next morning she was taken to a requisitioned fur store and invited to help herself. Clare had a slight qualm of conscience ‘sharing government distribution of bourgeois property’, but only briefly hesitated. She felt this was an artist’s reward for service to the community. She selected a Siberian pony-skin for everyday wear, a mink coat, a black sable cloak, and a wide ermine stole. She already possessed a sheep-skin hat.
Trotsky was fully engaged in her work, and would continuously come over and see how the bust was progressing. This un-nerved Clare who asked him what he thought, ‘he stood in silence with a suppressed smile: It looks like a French bourgeois who admires the woman who is doing him, it has no connection with Communism.’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘I like you……’
Churchill’s fury
Their affair continued until the bust was finished. He was a difficult subject as he was highly strung, restless and always on edge. She told her biographer Anita Leslie, he resembled no other man she knew. He looked like a caricature of himself.
On the final night when the sculpture was finished there was a blackout and Trotsky studied the sculpture by candlelight.
It is finished, he said, but are we?
Clare felt she was getting into dangerous waters. She was afraid of his changing moods, and powerful position. He asked her to accompany him on a tour of the Crimea, where she would see the real Russia. Instead she asked to return to England.
To her surprise, on the morning of her departure, despite her insisting that artists should not be bothered with finance: they only needed to be housed, honoured and fed (but not entirely on cabbage soup ), she was handed a cheque for £1,000. She did not quibble.
She left Moscow on a ‘special train’ and had a luxurious sleeper, surrounded by two suitcases packed with her magnificent furs.
Back in London she faced Churchill’s fury at the Bolsheviks’ crowing over how well they treated his cousin. He raved at the propaganda victory scored by these ‘fiendish criminals’. He was highly embarrassed.**
Clare’s mother, Clara Moreton Frewen, advised Clare to go to America until all this furore died over. And to keep out of trouble.
Next week: seduced by the magic of Hollywood.
NOTES: * Trotsky had every reason to be afraid. Expelled from Russia he sought refuge in Mexico, where, after several attempts, Stalin had him brutally murdered August 21 1940.
**Churchill, who was fond of his cousin Clare, calmed down and wrote before she departed that he hoped her work in America would be successful, ‘and that you will come back in a few months with a healthy gap between you and an episode which may then have faded, and to which we need neither of us ever refer.’
Sources include: Cousin Clare - The Tempestuous Career of Clare Sheridan, By Anita Leslie, published by Hutchinson, 1976.
