Moura (Maria Ignatievna) Zakrevskaya, variously Countess Benckendorff and Baroness Budberg (ca. 1891 - Nov. 1974) was the daughter of Ignaty Platonovitch Zakrevsky (1841-1905), a Russian nobleman. She first married Count Johann von Benckendorff, a high-ranking Czarist diplomat, in 1911. They owned the mansion called Jendel in Jäneda, in Estonia where he was shot dead in 1919 (by a peasant).
After his assassination in 1919, she moved back to Petrograd, she was familiar with the British diplomat R. H. Bruce Lockhart.[1] She was the mistress of Sir R. H. Bruce Lockhart, who mentions her, under her given name, in his book Memoirs of a Secret Agent.
She also had relationships with Russian writer Maxim Gorky and historian and science fiction writer H. G. Wells.[2]
After the expulsion of Lockhart's got a job in publishing "World Literature", she acquainted with Maxim Gorky. She became at first Gorky's secretary, and common law wife. Lived in Gorky's house with a few interruptions from 1920 to 1933 (when the writer lived in Italy before returning to the USSR). He bitterly dedicated to her his last major work, the novel "The Life of Klim Samgin".
In 1920 she met with Wells and became his mistress. Relationship was renewed in 1933 in London, where she emigrated after parting with Gorky. A close relationship with Wells continued until his death; Wells asked her to marry him, but Zakrevskaya strongly rejected this proposal.
She visited the Soviet Union twice, in 1936 at the funeral of Gorky (which made people call her an agent of the NKVD) and at the end of 1950, with her daughter Guchkov.
Later, she was briefly married to Baron Nikolai von Budberg-Bönningshausen.
Widely suspected of being a double agent for both the Soviet Union and British intelligence and has been called the "Mata Hari of Russia".
Among her many activities, she wrote books and was the script writer for at least two films: Three Sisters directed by Laurence Olivier and John Sichel (1970), and The Sea Gull directed by Sidney Lumet (1968).[3][4]
An MI5 informant said of her, "she can drink an amazing quantity, mostly gin".[5]
Moura Budberg's older half-sister, Alexandra 'Alla' Ignatievna Zakrevskaya (1884-1960), who married Baron Arthur von Engelhardt before 1909, was the great-grandmother of Nick Clegg, leader of the British Liberal Democratic Party since December 2007, and Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 2010.