A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy
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Authors: Deborah McDonald,Jeremy Dronfield
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical
A Oneworld Book
This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications, 2015
First published in North America, Great Britain and Australia
by Oneworld Publications 2015
Copyright © Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield 2015
The moral right of Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield
to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted by them
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
Excerpt from
H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life
by Anthony West
(Random House, New York). Copyright © 1984 by Anthony West.
Reprinted by permission of the Wallace Literary Agency, Inc.
Excerpt from
Memoirs of a British Agent
by R. H. Bruce Lockhart
reprinted with the permission of Pen and Sword Books.
Excerpt from
Retreat from Glory
by R. H. Bruce Lockhart (Putnum, London)
reprinted by permission of the Marsh Agency.
Permission to use part of the poem ‘Moura Budberg on her proposed return to England’ from
Out on a limb
by Michael Burn (Chatto & Windus, 1973) granted by Watson, Little Ltd
Thanks to Simon Calder and his siblings for permission to quote Lord Ritchie Calder.
Excerpts from
Russia in the Shadows
,
H.G. Wells in Love
, a letter from H. G. Wells
to Elizabeth von Arnim, Correspondence of H. G. Wells v3 p513 and a letter from H. G. Wells
to Christabel Aberconway, 20 May 1934, quoted in Andrea Lynn, ‘Shadow Lovers’, p. 199-200.
Reprinted by permission of United Agents LLP.
ISBN 978-1-78074-7088
ISBN 978-1-78074-7095 (eBook)
Text design and typeset by Hewer text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Oneworld Publications
10 Bloomsbury Street
London WC1B 3SR
England
Visit
www.mourabudberg.com
for more information about Moura and news about
A Very Dangerous Woman
.
Contents
Descendants of Ignatiy Zakrevsky
Descendants of Ignatiy Zakrevsky
Illustration Credits
With kind thanks to Georgi Särekanno the keeper of the Jäneda Museum, to David King, to the Hoover Institution Library, to Peter Lofts, to Allan Warren, and also to the Manuscripts and Special Collections section of the University of Nottingham for granting permission to use their illustrations of Meriel in her nursing uniform and Moura in the snow. Thanks also to Dimitri Collingridge for the use of the photograph of Moura, to the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University for allowing us to reproduce the photograph of Yakov Peters and to Getty Images, the National Portrait Gallery, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois and the Library of Congress for all allowing us to reproduce images.
1 © Deborah McDonald.
2 Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to U A Lora.
3 © Tania Alexander.
4 © Buchanan Collection, Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. BU B 8/1/43/4.
5 Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to fireramsey.
6 © Georgi Särekanno, private collection.
7 RN Museum © Trustees of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum
8 R N Museum © Trustees of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum
9 © Buchanan Collection, Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham.BU B 8/1/56/2.
10 © Georgi Särekanno, curator of the Jäneda Museum, and by kind permission of Enno Must.
11 Wikimedia Commons. RIA Novosti archive, image 6464/RIA Novosti/CC-BY-SA
12 Robert H. B. Lockhart Papers, Box 9, Folder 12, Hoover Institution Archives. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.
13 © David King Collection.
14 Robert H. B. Lockhart Papers, Box 10, Folder 17, Hoover Institution Archive. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.
15 © National Portrait Gallery.
16 By kind permission of Dimitri Collingridge
17 ©Tania Alexander
18 © Georgi Särekanno, Jäneda Museum.
19 Robert H B Lockhart Papers, Box 9, Folder 20, Hoover Institution Archives. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.
20 Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
21 © Tania Alexander.
22 © David King Collection.
23 © National Portrait Gallery, London.
24 © Getty Images.
25 © Peter Lofts collection RM004.
26 © Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
27 Wikimedia Commons. With thanks to Allan Warren.
Preface
Moura Budberg was a mystery to everyone who knew her. Even her closest friends and her children never quite figured her out.
London in the 1950s wasn’t short of remarkable characters, but few men or women had the magnetic charm or the air of danger and mystery that surrounded Baroness Budberg. Conducting her soirées in her dark, slightly shabby flat in Kensington, she managed to attract the exotic blooms of the literary and political crop. Graham Greene, Laurence Olivier, Tom Driberg, Guy Burgess, Bertrand Russell, Hamish Hamilton, David Lean, E. M. Forster, Lady Diana Cooper, Enid Bagnold, Peter Ustinov – all came at various times to Moura’s salon to drink gin and vodka and be enchanted.
Officially, Moura lived off her earnings as a translator of books and plays, as a script consultant and editor for Alexander Korda, and occasionally from donations charmed out of her rich friends. Moura was renowned for having been the mistress of both Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, who were besotted with her, and the lover of many other men. Physically she wasn’t a prepossessing lady – ageing and overweight, deeply lined, with a large nose badly broken in childhood, wrecked from head to foot by her appetites for food, vodka and cigars. Baroness Budberg was a walking ruin – the harrowed shell of a being who had once possessed beauty, litheness and unsurpassed attraction.
Her charisma still compelled attention and devotion, even in her ruined state. H. G. Wells, whose offers of marriage she turned down repeatedly, said of her, ‘I have rarely seen her in any room with other women in which she was not plainly – not merely in my eyes but to many others – the most attractive and interesting presence.’
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