Maria Ignatievna Budberg Игнатьевна Закревская-Бенкендорф-Будберг, ''Maria — also known as Countess Benckendorff and Baroness Budberg — was a Russian adventuress and suspected double agent of OGPU and British Intelligence Service. According to British journalistRobin Bruce Lockhart, who knew her personally, "she was, perhaps, the Soviet Union's most effective agent-of-influence ever to appear on London's political and intellectual stage".
Early life
Born in Poltava, in central Ukraine, Moura was the daughter of Ignaty Platonovitch Zakrevsky, a Russian nobleman and diplomat. She first married in 1911, Johann Alexandrovitch Benckendorff, Second Secretary at the Russian Embassy in Berlin and Gentleman of the Court, born in 1882. They had two children: Paul born in 1913, and Tatiana, born in 1915 and married Bernard Alexander and was the mother of the businesswoman Helen Alexander. They owned the mansion Jendel Jäneda, in Estonia, where he was shot dead on 19 April 1919 by a local peasant.
Arrest
Before the October Revolution, Moura worked in the Russian embassy in Berlin, where she became acquainted with British diplomat R. H. Bruce Lockhart. Upon the assassination of her husband in 1919, she was arrested on suspicion of spying for the United Kingdom and was transferred to the Lubyanka prison. Lockhart, who mentioned her under her given name in his 1932 book Memoirs of a British Agent, tried to vouch for her but was detained as well for a couple of weeks. They had been lovers and she became pregnant by him, but the pregnancy miscarried. and she by Kay Francis After Lockhart was released and expelled from Russia soon afterward in connection with the "Ambassadorial Conspiracy" affair, Budberg was released as well under the condition that she would co-operate with the intelligence service if the need ever arose. Budberg began to publish "World Lierature", where she met the writer Maxim Gorky with the help of Korney Chukovsky. She became a secretary and common-law wife of Gorky, living in his house with a few interruptions from 1920 to 1933 when the writer lived in Italy before returning to the Soviet Union. He dedicated his last major work, the novelThe Life of Klim Samgin, to her.
H. G. Wells
In 1920, Budberg met British author H. G. Wells when he made a celebrated visit to Moscow and they became lovers. She was briefly married, on 13 November 1921, to Baron Nikolai von Budberg-Bönningshausen. The union was in the nature of a marriage of convenience, and they soon divorced. Moura's relationship with Wells was renewed in 1933 in London, where she had emigrated after parting with Gorky. The close relationship continued until Wells's death in 1946. He had asked her to marry him, but Budberg strongly rejected the proposal.
Double agent?
Budberg was widely suspected of being a double agent for both the Soviet Union and British intelligence and has been called the "Mata Hari of Russia", after the famous Dutch exotic dancer and accused spy. She is known to have visited the Soviet Union at least twice after the 1920s: first in 1936 for the funeral of Gorky and again at the end of 1950, with a daughter of Alexander Guchkov. An MI5 informant said of her, "she can drink an amazing quantity, mostly gin". Moura Budberg maintained residences in London at Ennismore Gardens and in Cromwell Road. She had made her permanent home in England from the time she emigrated there in 1929 until shortly before her death, when she returned to Italy.
Writing
Among many other activities, Budberg wrote books and was the script writer for at least two films: Three Sisters, directed by Laurence Olivier and John Sichel, and The Sea Gull, directed by Sidney Lumet. She translated Gorky's novel The Life of a Useless Man into English in 1971.
In May 2008 a television film, My Secret Agent Auntie, directed by Dimitri Collingridge, was released in England. Her biography was written by Nina Berberova, who chronicled the émigrés.
