A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (72 page)
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Authors: Deborah McDonald,Jeremy Dronfield
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical
BOOK: A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy
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| 29 | Berberova, Moura , p. 115. The ‘Bronze Venus’ was Alexander Pushkin’s nickname for a woman with whom he had an affair in 1828 and on whom he based two of his fictional characters; she is believed to have been Countess Agrafena Zakrevsky. According to Berberova, Gorky believed mistakenly that Countess Zakrevsky was Moura’s ancestor. |
| 30 | Vaksberg, The Murder of Maxim Gorky , p. 99. |
| 31 | Russell, The ractice and Theory of Bolshevism , p. 22. |
| 32 | Russell, The ractice and Theory of Bolshevism , pp. 43–4. |
| 33 | Wells, Russia in the Shadows , p. 31. |
| 34 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , p. 33. |
| 35 | Wells, H. G. Wells in Love , p. 163. The hat was made for Moura from beaver felt, a common hat-making fabric at the time, by Valentina Khodasevich (Berberova, Moura , p. 127; Berberova’s translator has rendered the term incorrectly as beaver fur ). |
| 36 | Wells, H. G. Wells in Love , p. 164. |
| 37 | Wells, Russia in the Shadows , pp. 9–10. In fairness to Moura, some of the untruths she appears to have told Wells could be his misunderstandings or mistaken memories; for instance, a distant cousin of her late husband had been Russian Ambassador in London, and she had been in a Bolshevik prison three times. But knowing her proven tendency to fabricate and embellish, it is quite probable that she told exactly the lies that Wells naively quoted. |
| 38 | Wells, Russia in the Shadows , pp. 16, 26. |
| 39 | Wells, Russia in the Shadows , pp. 15–16. |
| 40 | Wells, Russia in the Shadows , pp. 19–20. |
| 41 | Wells, Russia in the Shadows , pp. 69–70. |
| 42 | Wells, Russia in the Shadows , p. 22. |
| 43 | Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, pp. 226–8. |
| 44 | Wells, Russia in the Shadows , pp. 51–2. |
| 45 | Wells, H. G. Wells in Love , p. 164. According to Berberova ( Moura , p. 123), the gossip in the commune was that Wells went to Moura’s room uninvited, and there were several versions of what happened, ranging from her giving him a ‘swift kick’ to him spending the night chatting to her. Berberova did not believe Moura had slept with him. |
| 46 | Wells, Russia in the Shadows , p. 96. |
| 47 | Khodasevich, ‘Gorky’, p. 229. |
| 48 | Wells told this to sculptor Clare Sheridan, who was in Moscow awaiting a chance to make a bust of Lenin (Sheridan, Mayfair to Moscow , pp. 109 –110). |
| 49 | Vaksberg ( The Murder of Maxim Gorky , pp. 105–6) is completely perplexed by this, and suggests a complicated conspiracy of Gorky’s other women (including Maria Andreyeva and Yekaterina) using their influence to separate her from Gorky. It’s possible, but if they’d wanted that, they could simply have left her to rot in the Cheka jail. |
| 50 | McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist , pp. 61, 143–6; Owen, ‘Budberg, the Soviets, and Reilly’, p. 3. |
| 51 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, 24 Jun. 1921, HIA. Lockhart’s son Robin was born in 1920; he grew up to become an author, and wrote a book about Sidney Reilly. The letter gives no indication of how the news reached Moura, but her wording suggests that it was not from Lockhart himself. It could have been a communication from H. G. Wells, or from Liuba and Will Hicks. |
Chapter 16: Baroness Budberg
| 1 | Berberova, Moura , pp. 127–8. Berberova’s account is based on the story told to her by Moura. However, she wrongly places it in January; in fact it was May. According to a letter left for Gorky, she departed Petrograd on 18 May (Moura, letter to Gorky, 18 May 1921, via Scherr). In this letter, she told him that she loved him, observed that she believed in God while he didn’t, and informed him that she was going to Estonia to see her children. |
| 2 | Moura Budberg MI5 file, report on Moura by Ernest Boyce, 11 Jul. 1940. |
| 3 | There are occasional references to Jews in her letters, and while there is no hostility, there is a degree of casual contempt. The same is true of the writings of Lockhart, Meriel Buchanan, Denis Garstin and nearly all non-Jews during this period. Unlike some of their contemporaries, none of Moura’s circle regarded Jews as a threat or set much store by the fact that so many Bolsheviks were Jews. |
| 4 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , p. 69; Moura Budberg MI5 file, report on Moura by Ernest Boyce, 11 Jul. 1940. |
| 5 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , p. 68. |
| 6 | Berberova ( Moura , p. 130) describes the reunion happening in Tallinn, but Alexander (who of course was there) says it occurred at Kallijärv on the Yendel estate. |
| 7 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , pp. 67–70. |
| 8 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , p. 67. |
| 9 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , p. 70. |
| 10 | Alexander, Estonian Childhood , pp. 70–71. |
| 11 | Moura Budberg MI5 file, Metropolitan Police Special Branch note, 31 Mar. 1947. This note was a record of an interview with Moura in connection with her application for British naturalisation. |
| 12 | McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist , pp. 143–6, 158–61. |
| 13 | Moura, letters to Gorky, 18 Aug.–1 Oct. 1921, GA. Some have suspected that Moura managed to make a covert, illegal visit to England at this time, but she almost certainly didn’t; in October 1921 H. G. Wells suggested to his friend Maurice Baring (who was an old Russia hand) that they visit ‘Countess Benckendorff’ in Cromer, Norfolk (Wells, letter 1335 to Baring in Correspondence of H. G. Wells vol. 3 ). Most likely this would be Countess Sophie Benckendorff, widow of the late Ambassador to the UK, who was then living in Suffolk. |
| 14 | The first entry in the first section (KV2 1971) is dated 9 Dec. 1921, and is an extract from an intercepted letter to Prince Pierre Volkonsky mentioning Moura’s recent marriage to Budberg. |
| 15 | Berberova, Moura , p. 130. |
| 16 | Moura, letter to Gorky, 16 Dec. 1921, GA. There is a note in Moura’s MI5 file indicating that a Russian source identified Budberg as having worked for the secret police in St Petersburg, but doesn’t specify whether this was the imperial Okhrana or the Bolshevik Cheka. |
| 17 | There is a note to this effect in Moura’s MI5 file, and the French Deuxième Bureau also noted it (Deuxième Bureau Documents Rapatriés, dossier on ‘Russian Personalities of Emigration Suspected of Informing the Soviets: Countess Benckendorff, Baron Budberg, Trilby Espenberg, 1921–1936’, Carton 608, Dossier 3529. Quoted in Lynn, Shadow Lovers , pp. 195–6). |
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