The impossibly glamorous life of this Russian baroness spy needs to be a movie
Moura Budberg counted H.G. Wells and Maxim Gorky as lovers
Baroness Maria Budberg was a glamorous globetrotter, a vibrant “it” girl, and a magnificent liar.
Known as Moura, the apple-cheeked femme fatale and probable double agent was sometimes called the “Russian Mata Hari,” after the legendary Dutch dancer and spy. A lover of H.G. Wells, Maxim Gorky, and British spy Robert Bruce Lockhart — who very nearly toppled the nascent Bolshevik regime by plotting to kill Lenin — Budberg was, according to one biographer, a “notorious adventuress.”
Moura was born to an aristocratic Ukrainian family in 1891. She was the youngest of four children, and possessed of an obvious toughness. Though she was educated at boarding school, her biographer, the Russian writer Nina Berberova, claims she was not “the embroidering and curtseying sort,” not given to “fainting spells and emotional hysterics.” Rather, Moura was energetic, smart, and cunning. “She knew how to be among people,” Berberova writes, “how to live with them, how to choose them, and how to get along with them.” (These were things Berberova knew firsthand; she lived with Moura in Maxim Gorky’s household in the 1920s.)
Before embarking on the affairs that would largely define her life, Moura married Ivan Benckendorff, a Balkan diplomat. The two lived in an Estonian mansion. (Moura is thought to have been involved later in a gold-laundering scheme out of Tallinn.) Following the murder of her first husband by a peasant, Moura moved to Berlin, where she worked at the Russian Embassy. There, in 1915, she met Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat. Moura was 26 years old, and became a regular at the apartment Lockhart shared with other young, male attchés. She talked to the men about politics, and dazzled them with Russian hospitality, making them blini with caviar, and teaching them how to wash down the salty bites with chilled vodka.
Lockhart was immediately drawn to her. In his 1932 Memoirs of a British Agent, Lockhart later wrote that Moura “invigorated everyone with whom she came in contact.” She was a “Russian of the Russians,” courageous and vital. “Where she loved, there was her world,” he wrote, “and her philosophy of life had made her mistress of all the consequences.” The two fell passionately in love, and were lovers throughout the period that Lockhart was plotting to assassinate Vladimir Lenin — though, as Ian Thompson writes in The Guardian, it now seems certain Moura was “spying on her beloved ‘Locky’ for the Cheka.”
Of course, Moura’s involvement with Lockhart made her very suspicious to Soviet authorities, who thought she was likely spying for the U.K. They promptly arrested her and threw her in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison. Moura eventually negotiated with Soviet police, agreeing to cooperate with them. Lockhart, too, was imprisoned in Moscow, and once free Moura visited him daily, bringing him rare wartime delicacies like “sardines, wine, butter, and biscuits” procured from the American Red Cross. For his role in the counterrevolutionary plot, Lockhart could have been put to death. He escaped that fate when the Russians later exchanged him for one of their own diplomats.
Moura stayed on in the budding Soviet Union, becoming Gorky’s secretary, lover, and eventually common-law wife. The two lived together in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) almost without interruption between 1920 and 1933. When English historian and science fiction writer H.G. Wells, a longtime admirer and correspondent of Gorky’s, wrote, saying he was “coming to have a look at Russia” in 1920, Gorky invited him to stay. It wasn’t long before Moura and Wells ended up in bed together.
During his visit, Moura also interpreted for Wells day in and day out, even (at the Kremlin’s behest) at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet to which he was invited. “Wells sat with Gorky in his office during the day,” Berberova writes, “Moura perched between them, and their conversations — about the future education of the uneducated, the brotherhood of nations, the uses of technology to conquer nature, and world peace — went on for hours.”
When her relationship with Gorky dissolved in 1933, Moura emigrated to London, where she took up anew with Wells. According to most accounts, the besotted Wells proposed numerous times. Moura declined sternly.
Moura’s status as a muse and woman of intrigue was heightened by the fact that she wove apocryphal details into her own biography. She claimed, among other things, that she was the great-granddaughter of a woman to whom Pushkin had written love poems. (There is no greater claim to fame for a Russian.) She was constantly spinning mystery around herself by artfully embellishing stories, and leaving details out where necessary. As Berberova put it, “Moura had the ability, when she wanted to, of dodging direct questions.” She was matter-of-fact, except when she “played the ‘kitten,’ preparing her interlocutor for an answer, which always turned out to be a non-answer, because it wasn’t yes and it wasn’t no.”
Though Moura’s dynamic and complicated life seems like one of high glamour, it was by her incredible wits and not a little luck that she managed to survive some of the century’s most violent and dramatic upheavals. As Berberova points out, Moura lived during “a time that showed no mercy or pity toward her or her generation. That generation, born between 1890 and 1900, was almost completely destroyed by war, revolution, emigration, the camps, and the terror of the 1930s.”
Moura lived into her eighties. Her final years were spent in her Cromwell Road flat in Kensington, where she entertained the likes of Laurence Olivier, Graham Greene, Martha Gellhorn, E.M. Forster, Hamish Hamilton, Bertrand Russell, and many others. Her biographers, Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield write, rather ungenerously, that by the 1950s, she was a “walking ruin,” “aging and overweight, deeply lined, with a large nose badly broken in childhood, wrecked from head to food by her appetites for food, vodka, and cigars.” Still, she possessed until the end the irrepressible charisma that had bewitched so many powerful men. Though her charm and duplicity made her a divisive figure, Berberova writes that these qualities may not have been borne of any malevolence. Moura “had an innate ability to make everything hard easier and everything terrible not as bad as it seemed,” she writes, “not so much for herself or other women but for men, who, she knew, liked her.” That’s usually enough.
