How a Russian Fashionista Spied for Nazi Germany
In 1940, Anna Volkova-Muromtseva, a White émigré and the daughter of the last naval attaché of the Russian Empire in England, was arrested in London. Anna Nikolayevna was charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.
Volkova was an active member of the Right Club, an opponent of Britain's entry into the Second World War, an antisemite and a supporter of fascism. In short, she spied for Germany out of sheer conviction. Among other things, she recruited a cipher clerk at the American embassy, likewise an ultra-rightist and antisemite.
It must be said that Volkova's biography is a most curious one. Soon after the Revolution the family of the Russian general took British citizenship and opened a Russian tea room in South Kensington, where that very Right Club met for many years. Volkova herself began travelling to Germany actively as early as the 1930s and even befriended some fairly high-ranking Nazis. It was then, in fact, that she came under the watch of MI5; the counter-intelligence service was particularly struck by the Russian émigrée's friendship with Wallis Simpson, the morganatic wife of the former King of Great Britain, Edward VIII.
What bound Simpson to Volkova-Muromtseva? Anna Volkova kept a popular fashion house and was on friendly terms with a good half of London's fashionable women, and she dressed, among others, the Duchess of Windsor. The scale of her career in fashion may be judged by the fact that in April 1937 Vogue carried a photograph of one of Anna Volkova's dresses, and the photographer was none other than Cecil Beaton.
