The youngest daughter of the Chernihiv landowner, and then a member of the Senate I.P. Zakrevsky. She was called in the West "Russian milady", "red Mata Hari". She lived with M. Gorky for twelve years, was the mistress of R.B. Lockhart and G. Wells. Her life, full of adventures, could serve as the plot of more than one novel.
Maria-Mura was born in 1892. When the girl was nineteen years old, her parents sent her to England to improve her language, under the supervision of her half-brother Plato, who served in the Russian embassy in London. This year determined the further fate of Mura, because here she met a huge number of people from the highest London society and in the same year she married the Baltic nobleman I.A. Benckendorff from a side line of princely Benckendorffs, but not a prince. Then she met the English diplomat Bruce Lockhart and the writer Wells.
Then Moura and her husband moved to the Russian embassy in Germany. Life promised to be cheerful and carefree, Mura was even introduced to Kaiser Wilhelm at a court ball. But the year 1914 came, and all the embassy workers left Berlin. The war changed everything.
During the war years, despite the fact that Mura already had two children, she worked in a military hospital, and her husband served in military censorship. From the February Revolution, they took refuge in the estate of Benckendorff near Revel. But another revolution took place, and Moura got tired of the village, and she went to Petrograd alone to look around. At this time, the peasants killed her husband on the estate, and the governess miraculously saved the children, hiding with their neighbors.
The situation was so difficult that it was impossible to return to Revel to the children, and the revolutionary authorities soon evicted Moura from the Petrograd apartment, and she found herself on the street, alone, in the city engulfed in unrest. During this crazy time, British Consul Bruce Lockhart returned to Moscow, but now not as an official diplomat, but rather as a special agent, as an informer, as the head of a special mission, called upon to establish unofficial relations with the Bolsheviks on behalf of his government.
For the second week now, Moura had been coming to the British Embassy after office hours, where she had friends whom she had high hopes for. She met Lockhart there on the third day after his arrival ... He was in his thirty-second year, she was twenty-six.
Very soon, the relationship between Moura and Lockhart took on a very special character: both fell passionately in love with each other. She saw in him everything that she had lost, for him, Mura was the personification of the country that he fell in love with, with which he felt a deep connection. Inadmissible happiness suddenly fell upon them in the terrible, cruel, hungry and cold reality of the Russian revolution. Both became for each other the center of all life. Love and happiness and a threat to both were now with them day and night. They lived in an apartment in Khlebny Lane, near the Arbat. Lockhart had a large study, books, a desk, armchairs and a fireplace. And the cook was excellent: from the reserves of the American Red Cross, she prepared delicious meals for them. Moura was calm and cheerful in those days.
But after the execution of the king, rumors spread about the imminent expulsion of foreign observers and informers. The denouement was approaching, but Lockhart and Moura, not allowing themselves unnecessary words that only made their hearts blacker, courageously looked into the future, which must inevitably separate them.
Peters, chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal, was thirty-two years old that year. He was a slender, thin, dapper brown-haired man with high cheekbones, with a strong chin and lively, intelligent and cruel eyes. On the night of August 31 to September 1, he ordered the arrest of the British living in Khlebny Lane. A detachment of Chekists entered the apartment, a thorough search was carried out, and then Lockhart and Moura were arrested and taken to Lubyanka. After some time, Lockhart was transferred to an apartment in the Kremlin, where he was under arrest, of course. But he did not know anything about Zakrevskaya and wrote a request for her release. Then Peters informed the British diplomat that he would be handed over to the Revolutionary Tribunal, but that he, Peters, had decided to release Mura. And on September 22, the Chekist, smiling, entered Lockhart, leading by the hand his beloved Countess Zakrevskaya, the widow of Count Benckendorff. The fact that with such a pedigree Moura not only came out alive and unharmed, but also saved Lockhart, speaks of her extraordinary talent to be a seductive woman ... And, probably, very smart and also, perhaps, very prudent. The next time Peters came with Mura to announce to Lockhart that he would soon be released, the Chekist looked very happy.
Moura saw Lockhart off at the station. He left this country and this woman forever.
She left for Petrograd. 1919 is an ominous year for Petrograd and Russia, a year of starvation, typhus, severe cold in destroyed houses and the undivided reign of the Cheka. Here she found her friend from work in the hospital, former Lieutenant General A. Mosolov, who sheltered her. She did not have a residence permit or ration cards. She decided to work. Once Moura went to the "World Literature" to K.I. Chukovsky, because she was told that he was looking for translators from English into Russian. He treated her kindly, gave her some work, got a ration card, and in the summer he took her to Gorky.
IN different time various women in Gorky's house took the place of hostess at the dinner table. With his first wife E.K. Peshkova, he broke up a long time ago, with M.F. Andreeva - even before the revolution, but she still lived in the writer's large apartment, although she often left, and at that time V.V. Tikhonov, whose youngest daughter, Nina, struck by the resemblance to Gorky. His children, and the children of his wives, and friends lived in his house. Guests often stayed overnight. Everyone liked Mura, and when the cold started a month later, she was invited to live in the writer's apartment. Gorky's and Moura's rooms were nearby.
A week after the move, she became absolutely necessary in the house. She read the letters Gorky received in the morning, sorted out his manuscripts into folders, selected those that were sent to him for reading, prepared everything for his daily work, picked up the pages abandoned since yesterday, typed on a typewriter, translated the foreign texts he needed, knew how to listen attentively, sitting on the couch in his office. She listened in silence, looked at him with her intelligent, thoughtful eyes, answered when he asked what she thought about this and that, about Dobrovijn's music, about Gumilyov's translations, about Blok's poetry, about the insults inflicted on him by Zinoviev ...
He knew little about Moore, something about Lockhart, something about Peters. She told Gorky far from everything, of course. What he perceived as the main thing was the murder of Benckendorff and the separation from the children. She had not seen them for three years, and she wanted and hoped to return to them.
Gorky loved to listen to her stories. She had a short, idle and smart youth, which collapsed from the first blow of the ax punishing this life. But she was not afraid of anything, she went her own way, and neither the Cheka, nor the fact that her husband was torn to pieces, nor the fact that God knows where her children did not break her. She is an iron woman. And he is fifty-two years old, and he is a man of the last century, behind him are arrests, deportations, worldwide fame, and now - chronic tuberculosis, cough and hemoptysis. No, it's not iron.
When Herbert Wells and his son arrived in Russia, Gorky invited them to live with him, in the same large and densely populated apartment, because at that time there were no decent hotels to be found. And Mura was the official translator all the days by order of the Kremlin. By the end of the second week of his stay in Petrograd, Wells suddenly felt overwhelmed, not so much from conversations and meetings, but from the city itself. He began to talk about this to Moura, whom he had met before the war, in London. And she was endowed with an innate ability to make everything difficult easy and everything terrible - not quite as terrible as it seems, not so much for herself and not so much for other people, but for the men who liked her. And so, smiling with her meek smile, she took Wells away to the embankment, then to St. Isaac's Cathedral, then to the Summer Garden.
When Mura tried to sneak into Estonia illegally to find out about the children, she was detained, and Gorky immediately went to the Petrograd Cheka. Thanks to his efforts, Moura was released. But when the railway connection with Estonia was restored, she again went there. Then it was already clear that Gorky would soon go abroad. She hoped that he would go through Estonia and wanted to wait for him there. But in Tallinn, she was immediately arrested, accusing her of being a Soviet spy. She hired a lawyer, and she was released on bail. Three months later she would have been sent back to Russia, where she did not want to go at all. But she could not leave Estonia for any other country, however, as well as from Russia. “Now, if you married an Estonian and received Estonian citizenship,” the lawyer hinted to her, “you would be released.”
She lived with the children for three months, and because of this, her husband's relatives deprived the children of any financial support. Now she had to support them herself and a governess. And it was at this moment that the lawyer introduced her to Baron Nikolai Budberg. The baron also wanted to go to Europe, but he had no money. Mure Gorky, who was in Berlin, transferred a thousand dollars. Now her marriage to the baron decided everything: he received money to travel, she - a visa. Gorky in Berlin energetically lobbied for Mura, whom he proposed to the authorities to appoint him abroad as his agent to collect aid for the famine-stricken Russia.
The years 1921-1927 were happy for Gorky. His best works were written precisely at this time, and, despite illnesses and financial worries, there was Italy, which he loved so much. And there was Moura.
Mura's face shining with calm and peace and large, deep and life-playing eyes - maybe all this was not entirely true, or, probably, not even the whole truth, but this bright and quick mind, and understanding of the interlocutor from a half-word, and the answer flickering in the face before the voice sounds, and the sudden thoughtfulness, and the strange accent, and the way each person, talking to her or just sitting next to her, was for some reason deeply convinced in his mind that he, and only he, at that moment means more to her than all the other people in the world, gave her that warm and at the same time precious aura that was felt near her. She did not cut her hair, as was then fashionable, but wore a low knot at the back of her head, pinned up as if hastily, with one or two strands falling out of the wave on her forehead and cheek. Her body was straight and strong, her figure was elegant even in simple dresses. She brought well-cut, well-tailored suits from England, learned to walk without a hat, bought expensive and comfortable shoes. She didn't wear jewelry. Men's Watch on a wide leather strap tightly tied her wrist. In her face, with high cheekbones and wide-set eyes, there was something hard, despite the cat smile of unimaginable sweetness.
Gorky, along with a large family, moved from one sanatorium to another. We have always lived comfortably and comfortably. When the writer got better, he and Moura went for a walk to the sea. In Heringsdorf, as in Saarov, Marienbad and Sorrento, he walked slowly. He wore a black wide-brimmed hat, sliding it to the back of his head, his yellow mustache curled down. In the morning I read newspapers and wrote letters. Moura continued to keep order in the house. But now, regularly, three times a year, she went to Tallinn to visit her children - in the summer, at Christmas and at Easter - and spent about a month with them each time. Sometimes she stayed in Berlin on Gorky's publishing business. But Nikolai Budberg, her official husband, also lived in Berlin, and he behaved in such a way that he could be put in jail at any time - for card debts, for non-payment of alimony, for unpaid checks ... She had to settle the affairs of the baron - to pay ... Mura decided send her husband to Argentina, and she succeeded. She never heard from him again.
When Lenin died, Gorky wrote memoirs about him, which were severely censored in his homeland. And it was then that Moura began to persuade Gorky to return to the USSR! She reasoned sensibly: the circulation of his books in foreign languages fell catastrophically. And in Russia they began to forget him, and if he does not return in the near future, they will stop reading and publishing him in his homeland. But Moura was not going to return to Russia with him. What did she hope for by refusing Gorky's help?
It turns out that all these years, when she was the secretary and girlfriend of a proletarian writer, during her trips to Tallinn she stopped not only in Berlin, but also in London, and in Prague, and somewhere else. She tried to renew her old connections, and saw Wells several times. But most importantly, she was looking for Lockhart, and finally she succeeded. She met him in Vienna. He immediately realized that he did not have the same feelings for her, and she understood this. But they began to see each other quite regularly. Lockhart later wrote that Moura had given him "tremendous information" in the 1920s that was important for his work in Eastern Europe and among Russian emigrants. Very soon they began to count him again - perhaps due to the resumption of cooperation with Mura? - one of the experts on Russian affairs, and then he became a prominent journalist in the Evening Standard newspaper. He wrote the book “Memoirs of a British Agent” about the days of the Russian Revolution, based on which the film “The British Agent” was made about the adventures of an English diplomat in dramatic days in Moscow, about his love for a Russian woman, about prison, salvation and separation. For the first screening of the film, Lockhart invited Moura.
In the late twenties, Gorky was already constantly traveling to the USSR and promised to return there permanently, so the State Publishing House began to publish collections of his works, and the writer received royalties, despite the difficulties of transferring money from Russia abroad. Moura had a small but constant income from Lockhart, but thanks to Gorky she did not live in poverty and even moved the children with a governess to permanent residence in London, where she herself decided to gain a foothold after the proletarian writer returned to her homeland. She was well prepared for his departure: from 1931, Moura began to appear here and there as Wells' "companion and friend". He was then sixty-five.
Gorky left and left Moura part of his Italian archive. It could not be taken to the USSR, because it was correspondence with writers who came from the Union to Europe and complained to Gorky about the Soviet order. But in 1936 Moura was put under pressure by someone who came from Soviet Union to London with an instruction and a letter from Gorky to her: before his death, he wanted to say goodbye to her, Stalin gave her a wagon at the border, they promised to deliver her to Moscow, and then back. She was supposed to bring his archives to Moscow. If she had not given them up, they would have been taken by force. And if would destroyed, hid? But Mura brought the archives to Moscow, she was taken to Gorky, and immediately after her departure, his death was announced. By that time, Stalin had received from Europe all the archives he needed - Trotsky, Kerensky and Gorky - and began to prepare the Rykov-Bukharin trial.
... Moura stood at the top of the wide staircase of the Savoy Hotel next to Wells and received the incoming guests. She said something kind to everyone and smiled for herself and for him, because his mood Lately it was rather angry and gloomy. The reception was solemn, hosted by the PEN Club in honor of Wells' seventieth birthday. Wells is said to have persuaded her to marry him. She didn't agree.
Throughout the war, she worked for Lockhart at the Free French magazine. Wells perceived her activities with the French as a necessary killing of time. He now lived in his own mansion and began to prophesy about the end of the world, because all his best books left in the past. He was ill, and in 1945 there was no longer any hope of improving his health, and from that time on, Moura was inseparable from him. The war had aged her. She began to get fat, ate and drank a lot and was careless about her appearance. She was fifty-four years old when Wells died.
After the war, Moura lived in London completely freely, without financial difficulties. The son lived on the farm, the daughter got married. Moura traveled to the USSR several times as a British subject. At the end of her life, she got very fat, talked more on the phone and always had half a bottle of vodka on hand. Two months before her death, her son, who was already retired, took her to Italy with him.
In an obituary, The Times called her the "intellectual leader" of modern England, a woman who for forty years was at the center of London's intellectual and aristocratic life.
She loved men, not only her three lovers, but men in general, and made no secret of it. She enjoyed sex, she looked for novelty and knew where to find it, and men knew it, felt it in her, and used it, falling in love with her passionately and devotedly. Her hobbies were not mutilated either by moral considerations, or feigned chastity, or household taboos.
If she needed anything in life, it was only the legend she had created herself, her own myth, which she had grown, blossomed, strengthened throughout her life. The men around her were talented, intelligent and independent, and gradually she became bright, lively, giving them life, conscious in her actions and responsible for her every effort.
Favorite woman of Russian espionage
An ode to the most mysterious Russian beauty of the 20th century - Maria Budberg - is best written using quotes from ... intelligence reports. This woman of mystery has always been under her close supervision. The German police believed that the baroness was collaborating with Soviet and British intelligence, the British were looking for her connections with the German and the Cheka, and the security officers were sure that she was, respectively, a German and English spy.
But intelligence was interested not only and not so much in Maria herself, but in those men who were next to her. Lockhart, Gorky, Freud, Rilke, Wells, Chukovsky, Nietzsche, Peters, Yagoda are the environment of our heroine. Very close environment. All these great people were fascinated by Mary, trusted her completely and were ready to risk everything for her, including their careers and heads. The MK special correspondent got into the hands of unique documents that have not yet been published anywhere. Papers that are almost a century old! They confirm a lot and at the same time refute no less of what the authors of the novels about Maria Budberg fantasized about.
Maria Budberg shortly before her death at her home in Italy.
Biscuit cake and beautiful woman
Yellow sheets with meager typewritten reports. How have they survived to this day? However, there is nothing strange, all those rare documentary evidence that Budberg herself had not destroyed (shortly before her death, she burned a huge archive, for which much intelligence of the whole world would have given!) was kept more than any treasure. And now here they are, here it is, the truth! After so many years, after so many novels written about Mary and so many stories invented about her!
I am translating one of the papers that I have in my hands.
Berlin. 1922 To the Political Presidium, Department 1-A, counterintelligence.
About the Russian citizen Baroness Budberg and Baron Budberg, suspected of espionage. Request to arrange for the identification of the mentioned persons in Berlin and the clarification of their occupation.
So, the Germans really suspected Budberg of espionage. But in whose favor? And does this mean that Maria was definitely not a German spy?
At this time, Moura (as she was called at home) was 30 years old and she was already closely acquainted with at least four outstanding men. She looked 18 - without a single wrinkle, with slim waist and mischievous chuckles in the eyes. Let's fast forward to when she really was 18 years old to see how far she had gone to the moment when the document that I have in my hand appeared.
Many saw the secret of Moura's attractiveness in her ability to love every man as the only one.
Man first. Benkendorf.
In 1910, the clever and beautiful Maria Zakrevskaya, who had just graduated from the boarding house for noble maidens, charmed the diplomat and courtier of Nicholas II, the owner of the estate in Estonia, Mr. Benckendorff.
From the dossier "MK"
The so-called Lockhart conspiracy, or conspiracy of ambassadors, was organized in 1918. According to the official version, set out by the deputy. Chairman of the Cheka Peters, the head of the special British mission Lockhart, with the participation of ambassadors Nulans and Francis, tried to overthrow the Bolshevik government (by bribing the Latvian riflemen who were in Moscow guarding the Kremlin). It was the Lockhart conspiracy that became one of the reasons for the deployment of the massive Red Terror.
The wedding was not postponed. Ivot Maria Benckendorff often accompanies her husband on trips abroad, for some time she even works at the Russian embassy in Berlin. And then the revolution began. I had to return home.
Maria became a frequent visitor to the English embassy in Petrograd. Perhaps thanks to a long friendship with the daughter of the British ambassador. Be that as it may, it seems that it was there that she met the famous English intelligence officer Robert Bruce Lockhart.
The second man. Lockhart.
Moura soon becomes his mistress. Not very, it would seem, sentimental, like all spies, Lockhart later described his feelings in the Memoirs of a British Agent as follows: “Something entered my life that was stronger than life itself. For a hundred minutes she did not leave me until she separated us. military force Bolsheviks." The words of a man who loved.
“But what about the husband?” - you ask. By that time, the sad news came about his death near Reval, either at the hands of the Reds, or the Whites, or simple bandits. When the British embassy moved from St. Petersburg to, its head, Lockhart, called Moura. She came and began to live with him in house number 19 in Khlebny Lane. At this time, Lockhart becomes the culprit of a grandiose political scandal: he is accused of attempting a military coup and capturing Lenin himself.
It follows from the documents that on the night of September 1, 1918, a detachment of Chekists led by the commandant of the Kremlin Malkov conducts a search in Lockhart's apartment. Here is what they saw there: “Vases of fruits and flowers, wine and biscuit cake in the living room. A beautiful woman, Lockhart's cohabitant, a certain Mura in the diplomat's bedroom."
Moura was arrested, and she ended up in the cellars of the Lubyanka. However, Lockhart, not afraid that he too will be arrested, goes to rescue his beloved. First, he turns to the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs with a request for her release, then directly to the formidable deputy. Chairman of the Cheka Yakov Peters.
The third man. Peters.
Lockhart assures Peters that Moura is innocent. I think the experienced Chekist was, to put it mildly, surprised at how the head of the British mission risks for the sake of "some Russian lady." Nevertheless, Peters promises to sort it out and... presents a warrant for the arrest of Lockhart himself. The interrogation of both arrested persons - Lockhart and his mistress Mura - was conducted by Peters himself at the Lubyanka. And something fantastic happens: Peters releases Moura. And soon they come together to the cell to Lockhart (more precisely, the place of his imprisonment was a cozy apartment of the former maid of honor of the Empress in the Kremlin). Maria throws herself on the sweetheart's neck and hands over a gift - "The History of the French Revolution". Between the pages of the book was a note: “Don't say anything. Everything will be fine". At the same time, Peters was very friendly and showed with every appearance that he had agreed on something with Mura. It turns out she charmed him too! The literary critic Roman Yakobson, who knew Maria well, said that he once asked Moura: “Did you sleep with Peters?” - and she replied: "Of course."
Be that as it may, Lockhart is indeed soon released after Moura's troubles, and he leaves Russia.
The fourth man. Maksim Gorky.
What about Moore? She remains in Russia, but leaves Moscow for Petrograd, where she meets Korney Chukovsky. And he brings her to Maxim Gorky, who headed the publishing house "World Literature". Gorky takes Moura as secretary of the publishing house and soon falls in love, so much and so passionately that he cannot live without her. Explaining this phenomenon - why influential men were so drawn to Mary - is both difficult and simple at the same time. It is difficult, because all these men were completely different from each other, neither in appearance nor in character. Simply because Moura did not adapt to them, did not survive - she loved. With each of them, she was like with the only one: she did not spare tenderness and affection, was not afraid to expose herself and experiment. About the experiments it would be necessary to say separately - the testimonies of Maria's friends were preserved, who assured that she loved sex and was looking for novelties in it.
Thanks to Maxim Gorky (center), Maria Budberg was released from arrest in 1919.
In 1919 Moura was arrested again. There were no reasons for this.
I think the Chekists were interested in her new work with Gorky and were looking for opportunities to attract her to cooperation, says veteran intelligence officer Leonid Kolosov (who died not so long ago). - Who knows? Perhaps they would have dealt with her, as they did with others. But the intervention of Gorky helped, who even wrote to Grigory Zinoviev, a candidate member of the Politburo of the RCP, with whom he was on bad terms: “Let me remind you once again about Maria Benckendorff - can I release her on bail? For Easter?
Zinoviev granted the request, and Mura and Maxim Gorky met Easter together. The main proletarian writer devoted one of his main works - “The Life of Klim Samgin” to this woman. Gorky invites her to marry, but for some reason Maria refuses (although she lives with him, manages the housework, runs all the affairs). By the way, she also at one time refused Lockhart's marriage proposal. Strange woman, isn't she? Scouts say that she dreamed of leaving Russia. And indeed, as soon as she received permission to leave, she went to Estonia, where she immediately married the unremarkable Baron Nikolai Budberg.
Fifth man. Budberg.
Maria herself admitted: she really liked the title and surname. That's the whole story of this marriage. Although, how do you know - which intelligence agent could the baron be?
Spy of an unknown country
I'm studying a new document. This is a report from the Estonian special services.
“During the German occupation, a certain woman drew attention to herself with her suspicious behavior. She turned out to be the wife of the subsequently murdered Benckendorff, the owner of an estate in Estonia. She had a reputation for being very smart, but not versed in the means of a person. The one mentioned lived in Russia for a long time and claims that she suffered from the Bolsheviks. Right-wing Russian circles unanimously declare that she worked in the Cheka and is now still in the service of the Soviet government. They even warned the Estonian noble club that she was a Bolshevik agent. They are well aware of her activities during the German occupation in Reval. She is now married to Baron Budberg. She agreed to this marriage only because she intends to continue her spy work under a different name. It can also be assumed that she has connections with the British. She has a passion for everything English, she lived with some Englishman (we are talking about Lockhart. - E.M.).
It turns out that Mura definitely did not work for either the Germans or the Estonians, but she could have been an English and Russian (Bolshevik) agent. Interesting fact: when Maria arrived in, the Germans staged a search in her home. They turned everything over and found no evidence of her espionage activities.
In fact, there was not a single piece of paper confirming that Moura was an agent. But all the same, the cautious Germans wrote in a report: “It is possible that he is helping the Russian envoy in Berlin. Although the threads of their connection are not disclosed. There were more interrogations. Mura told German counterintelligence one thing: she suffered from the Bolsheviks, she hates them, and she has known the British since her school years (she studied in London). She was separated from her for some time. Although they did not stop looking after the "suspicious Russian".
And here I am reading another report from 1924.
State Commissioner for the Protection of Public Order in Department A. Berlin.
“As I learned, until recently, Baroness Budberg maintained the closest contact with the Soviet ambassador. She is allegedly the ambassador's right hand and provides services to Russian diplomatic circles as an agent and spy. I cannot execute the order to expel Nikolai Budberg from Berlin, since he himself left for no one knows where.
Mura's husband, Baron Budberg, really disappeared somewhere in Latin America, and she began to live exclusively at the expense of Maxim Gorky. On all his trips abroad, Moura was by his side, managed the affairs of the writer, edited and translated the articles of the magazine that he published, on English language.
The most banal version would be to assume that the baroness was spying on the proletarian writer while he was abroad, the late intelligence officer Leonid Kolosov told me. - But Maxim Gorky was not at all simple, so the spy next to him would not last long. It is possible that Mura sometimes shared with the Cheka some information about the mood of the writer, his plans. But maybe then Gorky himself edited these reports for her. She could send reports on the international situation. But I don't think she had any serious information.
The Chekists probably turned to Mura for help in order to return Gorky to the USSR. Stalin was very afraid that the writer would criticize him from behind a hillock. In general, Gorky agreed to return on Moura's advice. It is a fact. And he left his entire archive to her (already after her death, she handed over part of the documents to Stalin).
Maria visited Gorky in Moscow several times. The last time - literally on the eve of death.
It was she who remained in the writer's room in the last forty minutes of his life, continue the intelligence historians. - Remained alone. She did not let the dying even arrived Stalin into the room. As soon as she left, Gorky died. And Mura left somewhere with the leaders of the Cheka ...
Alas, this gave rise to a version of Moura's involvement in the murder of the writer. They talked about a certain glass that stood on the bedside table and mysteriously disappeared. Gorky was then seriously and painfully ill, and perhaps this glass saved him from suffering ...
But if the version that Budberg was a Bolshevik agent still finds confirmation, then what about the English trail?
I didn't find anything about it in the docs. Although ... here it is, the original protocol of one of the searches, in my hands:
“Checking personal belongings was carried out in the presence of Mrs. Budberg and with the help of a criminal assistant Bug. In addition to a few private letters of no interest, translations from Russian into English were found, which should be published in the form of a book. During the search, Maria said that she had known the Englishman Hicks since the age of 15. We met in St. Petersburg, where he was seconded to the British military mission as a colonel. She also reported that in 1917-1918 she worked in an English commercial society.
Does this prove Mary's connections with British intelligence? I don't think so. Maybe her relationship with the writer HG Wells proves this? The romance with the famous science fiction writer was fantastic (sorry for the tautology).
So. The sixth man Herbert Wells.
The famous writer was visiting Maxim Gorky in Petrograd and once "wrong door" - he got into the bedroom of his secretary and mistress Maria Budberg. And he could not forget this “mistake” of his on his return to London. He invited her to his place. She came, then visited him several more times in the late 20s. And then (when Gorky returned to the USSR from his vacation abroad) she began to live with him in London almost officially.
"I love her voice, I love her presence, her strength and her weakness" - these are lines from the autobiography of HG Wells, and they are about Moore. He, just like Lockhart and Gorky at one time, persuaded her to marry him, but she refused him too! There was even a case when Maria threatened Wells that she would jump out of the taxi in which they were traveling if he did not stop insisting. At the same time, she invariably repeated that she loved him, and he felt this love of hers with all his heart. Already living with him, she went to visit Gorky in Moscow. Of course, she hid it (she said that she was going to visit the children in Estonia). But in 1934, the truth was revealed: Wells came to Moscow, talked with Stalin and Gorky, and found out that Mura had just been here. Gorky told him so: "She came to see me three times last year." "I was wounded in a way that no other Living being' wrote H. G. Wells. But soon Moore forgave. And he did not regret it: when he became seriously ill, only Maria looked after him and remained by his side until his death.
And where in all this love story to see espionage activities? Then one would have to assume that Wells himself is a British intelligence agent. But the science fiction writer has always stayed away from the authorities and even more so from the secret police.
Scout? Whore?
All these men were by no means the only ones in Moura's life. Over the years, she met (and only met?!) With the great Sigmund Freud, the philosopher Nietzsche, the poet Rilke ... They all saw something special in this woman. But was she a spy? And if so, how many countries?
I don't think that she was just an informer, continues intelligence agent Kolosov. - She corresponded with the enemy of the people Yagoda, constantly informed him of something, and in return received through him visas to enter the USSR and travel abroad. And I am still sure that it was she who poisoned Maxim Gorky, whom Stalin was very afraid of. Yagoda once admitted that Gorky was killed by one of his most secret agents, who was a former mistress ... Once I was on a business trip in Italy. I visited the villa where Gorky lived and worked. So one of the local old women with traces of her former beauty told me: “I served Massimo when he came here to be treated for consumption. Oh it was a real man! Unlike our seniors, who can only work with their chatty tongues. And Massimo was taciturn, but indefatigable... By the way, I heard from various guests who came here that some harlot with a strange name ruined your great writer. So I also think that Maria was a brilliant confused, super-professional.
I beg to differ. Moura was a shrewd and wise woman. All her great men ended their lives in tears, but she lived and lived. I think she was playing some kind of game with many intelligence agencies of the world. She shared what little she knew. And thanks to this, she herself survived and, most likely, saved her men. And who they served, which of them attributed her to their agents - she was hardly even interested in this. Most importantly, she loved. She loved it the best she could.
1974 Italy. Maria Budberg barely moved around the house. The mysterious beauty turned into an old sick woman who carried a bottle of tincture with her. But how many secrets she kept in her heart! Anticipating death, Maria Ignatyevna burned the manuscripts and personal archive, which for some reason she kept in a car trailer that was parked near the house. All mysteries went with her...
Booker Igor 04/20/2013 at 16:00
Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya-Benckendorff-Budberg, called by Nina Berberova an "iron woman", is an incredibly interesting person in two respects: as a double agent of British and Soviet intelligence and the mistress of the prominent writers Gorky and Wells. Almost all of our information about her comes from Berberova's book, which warned her not to believe everything Mura told her.
“In order to survive, she had to be sharp-sighted, dexterous, courageous and from the very beginning surround herself with a legend,” Nina Berberova wrote in the book “Iron Woman”. - Who is she? - my friends asked me when they learned about the book about Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya-Benkendorf-Budberg. - Mata Hari? Lou Salome?"
Mura, as her relatives called her, was born in 1892 in the family of a Chernigov official Ignaty Platonovich Zakrevsky, although she lied all her life that she was the great-granddaughter of Agrafena Fedorovna Zakrevskaya, the wife of the Moscow Governor-General - a famous beauty, sung by Pushkin "copper Venus". Vyacheslav Khodasevich, who believed Murina Mura, often told her: "You don't need to look for examples of how to live when there was such a grandmother."
Half-brother Platon served in the Russian embassy in London and in 1911 Moura came to him and studied at the Newham School for Girls in Cambridge. Then she claimed that behind her shoulders was the University of Cambridge. She knew foreign languages, but a long stay in a foreign-speaking environment left an imprint on her Russian language. In the same year, Mura Zakrevskaya married Ivan Alexandrovich Benkendorf, an employee of the Russian embassy, and began to call herself a countess, although her husband was not a count. He belonged to a side branch of a famous family and had no rights to the title. In 1913 she gave birth to a son, two years later - a daughter.
In the summer of 1917, the Benkendorfs were at their Estonian estate; in October, Mura went to Petrograd and did not return. Local peasants brutally murdered her husband. The children stayed with the governess and Mura long time did not know about their fate. Soon she was evicted from the capital's apartment and she found shelter in the British Embassy. Here she met the vice-consul and part-time British intelligence officer Bruce Lockhart. His wife, having lost her first child during childbirth, went to England to give birth to her second child. Lockhart became so savage that in the early autumn of 1917 he was urged to return home and visit his family.
Moura and Bruce's romance flared up almost immediately after Lockhart's arrival in Moscow. “Something came into my life that turned out to be stronger and stronger than all other ties than life itself,” Lockhart admitted in his Memoirs of a British Agent. Lockhart settled the Russian mistress in his apartment in Khlebny Lane. Lovestory ordered to live long on the night of August 31 to September 1, 1918, when the Chekists knocked on the door. The "case of ambassadors" was hung on the Englishman, in which he was involved to the very top, and at the same time they took Mura.
Three weeks later, Dzerzhinsky's deputy Yakov Peters came to Lockhart's cell with Mura under his arm to free the spy. "Hello, my Murka and goodbye!" - the burnt agent could sing, thanks to his intercessor. How Moura thanked Peters - we do not know. The question of whether Mura was a double or triple agent, whether she worked for Soviet, German, British intelligence remains open. The archives are still closed, and even her biographer did not advise taking Moura's word for it.
Mura asked Chukovsky to work as a translator. Moura knew German, French, English and Italian. Korney Ivanovich arranged for her to be Gorky's secretary. It is believed that Mura became the mistress of the loving Alexei Maksimovich. Gorky dedicated his last novel"Life of Klim Samgin". It seemed that Mura finally found peace and settled down in this life, but then the head of Petrograd, Grigory Zinoviev, planted a pig on her and Gorky. It is only for the sake of rhyme that it is said that "the writer Gorky Alexei was a most witty Jew." The Bolshevik Girsh Aronovich, to put it mildly, did not like the proletarian writer, and openly considered Mura to be an English spy. Moura was arrested, but after Gorky's letter to the right place, she was released.
While Gorky was treating his tuberculosis, traveling abroad, Mura ran the writer's household. On the advice of a lawyer, in order to get a free trip over the hill, it was necessary to have an Estonian passport and Mura entered into a fictitious marriage with Baron Nikolai Budberg. Unlike the previous husband, this one was really a baron. The newly-minted Baroness Budberg handed over to her husband - a reveler and a gambler - a thousand dollars, which Gorky sent her from Berlin, and said goodbye to him forever, leaving herself only a surname and title.
According to contemporaries, Mura was not particularly beautiful, sometimes she behaved cheekily and drank a lot. In a word, a kind of emancipe of the beginning of the last century. “She enjoyed sex, she was looking for novelty and knew where to find her, and men knew this, felt it in her and used it, falling in love with her passionately and faithfully,” Berberova writes. “Her hobbies were not mutilated by either moral considerations or feigned chastity, nor everyday taboos. She was free long before the universal liberation of women."
In Moscow, at one time she was considered a secret agent of England, in Estonia - a Soviet spy, in France, Russian emigrants at one time thought that she was working for Germany, and in England that she was an agent of Moscow. In the West, she was called "Russian milady", "red Mata Hari".
"Iron Woman" - this is how Maxim Gorky called Maria Zakrevskaya-Benckendorff-Budberg back in 1921. There is more to this nickname than it might seem at first glance. Gorky knew strong women all his life, he was drawn to them. Mura (as her friends called her) was both strong and new, and besides, she was considered the great-granddaughter or, perhaps, the great-great-granddaughter of Agrafena Fyodorovna Zakrevskaya, the wife of the Moscow governor, to whom Pushkin and Vyazemsky dedicated poems. Pushkin called Agrafena Fedorovna in his letters the copper Venus. This was the second meaning of Gorky's nickname. And the third one appeared gradually, like a hint of " iron mask', to the mystique surrounding this woman.
In fact, Maria Ignatievna was the daughter of a Senate official, Ignatius Platonovich Zakrevsky, who had nothing to do with Count A.A. Zakrevsky, married to Agrafena. Moura's first husband, I.A. Benckendorff, did not belong to the line of counts of Benckendorff and did not have the title of count. Zakrevskaya did not graduate from the University of Cambridge, as she claimed, and she was not a translator of sixty volumes of Russian literature into English. The only thing that was true was her second marriage, which gave her the title of Baroness Budberg. And although she parted with the baron himself very quickly, almost the next day after the marriage, she did not part with his name until her death.
She was called "Red Mata Hari". According to some versions, Zakrevskaya worked for three secret services at once: the Soviet (VChK), English and German. In addition, she loved men and did not hide it. Her chosen ones answered her with passionate and devoted love. Among her heartfelt affections are the writers Maxim Gorky and Herbert Wells, the English intelligence officer Lockhart, the chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Cheka, Peter.
The first legal husband of Maria Ignatievna, Count I. A. Benkendorf, before he was shot in the summer of 1918, found out that his wife was in love with the English diplomat Lockhart.
Robert Bruce Lockhart first came to Russia in 1912 as Vice Consul. He did not know the country, but quickly made friends, fell in love with night trips in troikas, nightly restaurants with gypsies, and ballet. Art theatre, intimate parties in the quiet lanes of the Arbat. In 1917, he briefly went home to Scotland, but then returned - but to another Moscow, to another Russia. He came as a special agent, as an informer, head of a special mission to establish unofficial relations with the Bolsheviks. Meeting Moura at the embassy, he was fascinated by her vitality and resilience. Both soon fell passionately in love with each other. At the beginning of September 1918, at night, Muru took from Lockhart's bed an outfit of Chekists, led by the devoted assistant of "Iron Felix" Yakov Peters. It is not clear whether he brought Mura immediately to the Cheka or to his apartment, where he tried to recruit. One way or another, but Zakrevskaya ended up in the cellars of the Lubyanka. According to British sources, on September 4, 1918, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, whom the Chekists already considered the main actor"Conspiracy of the Entente", appealed to the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs with a request for the release of Mura. Having received a refusal, he went to the Lubyanka to Peters. As a result, Lockhart was immediately arrested and held in custody for several weeks. Moura was released and even got the opportunity to visit Lockhart in the Kremlin, because the English intelligence officer spent his imprisonment in the comfortable apartment of the former maid of honor of the Empress. In October, Lockhart, along with other representatives of the Entente mission, was allowed to return "home in exchange for the release of Russian officials detained in London..."
After his release, Lockhart left for England, and Zakrevskaya remained in Moscow all alone, suffering from a mild form of Spanish flu. When she ran out of money, she sold her girlish diamond earrings, the last thing she had. There was enough money to get to Petrograd in the corridor of a third-class carriage. She went there in the winter of 1919. But in Petrograd she was arrested and released only after a call to the Lubyanka. Moura understood that she had to work in order to live. But how and where?
At this time, the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky organized the World Literature publishing house, and Zakrevskaya learns that the publishing house needs translators from English into Russian. She met the writer Korney Chukovsky. And although Mura never translated into Russian, since she knew it less well than English and French, Chukovsky treated her kindly and gave her some clerical work. Soon he brings Zakrevskaya to Gorky.
At that time, the writer had many people in his large apartment, and it was not known who lived here permanently and who lived temporarily. Here, in addition to the writer, his son, M.F. Andreeva and her relatives, were V. Khodasevich, F. Chaliapin, B. Pilnyak, L. Reisner. M. Dobuzhinsky and many others, including members of the government - Lunacharsky, Kollontai, Lenin.
Gradually, Mura moved to Gorky's apartment and a week later she found herself indispensable in the house - she became the writer's personal secretary, helped sort out correspondence, selected the most important articles for him from newspapers and magazines, and did typewritten work. And she just knew how to listen and talk about music, poetry, art. The rooms of Mura and Gorky were nearby. Gorky admired not only her talent as an interlocutor. She was 24 years younger than the writer. By the way, he dedicated his novel "The Life of Klim Samgin" to her, Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya. In 1921, the famous English writer Herbert Wells, an old acquaintance of Gorky, appeared in Gorky's house. He wanted to see Russia, to see the results of the revolution he welcomed. Wells immediately captivated everyone with his intelligence, cheerful conversation, and enthusiasm. Mura was with him as an interpreter - she was officially assigned to him by order of the Kremlin. Wells knew Zakrevskaya in London, before her marriage, nine years ago, when she was twenty. Towards the end of the second week of his stay in Petrograd, Wells suddenly felt depressed, and Mura, smiling at him with her sly and meek smile, took him for a walk to the embankment, to the Summer Garden. As a result, Wells found himself at her feet. And, having left, he sent her letters with an opportunity.
In the winter of 1921, Mura left for Estonia, where her children lived with her husband's relatives. In Tallinn, she was arrested as a Soviet spy. She was released. But, since the entry visa expired in three months, at the end of her trip she married Baron Nikolai Budberg, an Estonian subject.
Gorky and Mura were in correspondence, and from time to time she received checks from the Dresden bank, where Gorky's fees were transferred.
In the spring of 1922, she finally came to Gorky in Heringsdorf, and soon they all settled in Saarov.
What attracted Moore and Gorky, and Wells, and many other men? A face shining with peace and tranquility, large, deep eyes, a bright and quick mind, understanding the interlocutor from a half-word ... Slender and strong, elegant even in simple dresses. She didn't wear any jewelry, her wrist was tightly tied by a man's watch on a wide leather belt.
Living with Gorky, from time to time Mura went away "to the children", for a month and a half. Few people knew the details of these trips, where and with whom she had been. Even twenty years later, she was silent about her meetings with Harold Nicholson, breakfasts with Somerset Maugham, friendship with Vita Sackville-West, receptions at the French embassy. Moura also saw Lockhart, who later described the first meeting after separation in his book of memoirs.
Gorky understood that Zakrevskaya would not return home with him. She traveled increasingly to London, where she met Lockhart and rekindled her relationship with Wells. Soon, finally choosing London, she settled a stone's throw from Wells' house. She told him that she would stay with him as long as he wanted, but she would never marry him. This relationship lasted for about thirteen years, until the death of the writer, and Wells suffered greatly from the fact that Zakrevskaya refused to marry him. According to his will, after his death, Wells left Moura one hundred thousand dollars, on which she lived almost to the end.
In the autumn of 1974, she moved to Italy and on November 2 she died in the house of one of the suburbs of Florence, where her son lived. He moved his mother's body to London, where she was buried in Orthodox Church and buried on November 11 of the same year ...
Former Soviet intelligence officer Leonid Kolosov tried to find documents related to Mura's work. However, the personal file of the adventurer was not found in the archives of the foreign intelligence service, although an operational certificate for her and a number of documents from other cases in which Zakrevskaya played an important role were found.
But the intelligence officer did not find anything in the documents available to him that testified to international espionage, and even in the German secret archive there was no evidence. And the Germans eventually came to the conclusion that the most likely of all the implausible assumptions was that she was a Cheka agent. Leonid Kolosov, in principle agreeing with the German documents, believes that the word "agent" is too high to define the secret activities of Zakrevskaya. She, in his opinion, was an informant for the Chekists, simply speaking, a "snitch". Kolosov put forward such an assumption - it was Mura who poisoned M. Gorky on the instructions of her boss Yagoda.
But this is just an unproven assumption, based on omissions, hints of those who were related to intelligence activities. And the life of Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya-Benkendorf-Budberg is still shrouded in secrets and legends.
Alexei Maksimovich Gorky once remarked: "The smartest thing a man has achieved is to love a woman." It would seem a strange saying for a well-known proletarian writer, whose head should have been occupied with completely different things. But the "Petrel of the Revolution" knew what he was talking about: it was women who always fueled his inspiration. And the last of them, according to one version, could cost him his life...
Text by Natalia Turovskaya
In 1974, on a quiet August evening in the backyard of an inconspicuous Florentine house twined with vines, an old stately lady, leaning with difficulty on two sticks, approached a closed trailer van and stopped for a moment, either remembering something or something. thinking frantically. On her large face were obvious signs of love for strong drinks. And only the eyes - huge, brown, with a veil - spoke of the former beauty. She took a flask of some liquid from her bosom, poured it over the wagon, and threw a lit match into it. Everything instantly flared up, and cheerful lights danced, reflected in the dilated pupils of the old lady. She did not think to move to a safe distance and seemed to enjoy the spectacle. And from the garden an agitated middle-aged woman was already running towards her and shouting:
- Mother! Mommy! Well, what have you done? After all, your whole life was there! Letters, diaries, your love...
“No, baby, you are very mistaken here,” the old lady replied calmly, allowing herself to be led into the shade of orange trees. “Everything that is entrusted to paper can sooner or later become dangerous. And love... cannot be destroyed. Unless, of course, it was really about love.
This old lady was a Russian emigrant, Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya. She is also Countess Benckendorff, she is also Baroness Budberg, she is also Mura.
Doesn't it remind you of anything? Yes, in the West this mysterious woman was often called the “Russian Milady”. And, really, it was for what ...
NOT JUST MARIA...
Masha was born in St. Petersburg, in the family of the chief prosecutor of the Senate, Ignatius Platonovich Zakrevsky. It must be admitted that the girl was not particularly beautiful - she was tall, plump in the chest, and a bit heavy in her gait. But among her peers, she immediately caught the eye: no one could laugh at other people's jokes so contagiously as she did; no one had such amazing ability to study foreign languages; and, most importantly, from the age of 15 she was unusually attractive to men. Why? Yes, who knows. Perhaps because she always knew how to listen carefully. young man and from the first minutes of acquaintance to inspire him with the idea that he will never have a more devoted and understanding friend in his life.
After graduating from the Institute for Noble Maidens, her parents sent Maria to London to improve her English.
Here, 19-year-old Miss Zakrevskaya quickly made a perfect match for herself - Ivan Benkendorf, an Estonian nobleman who held a high diplomatic rank in the Russian embassy in England. They quietly got married and began to live an ordinary secular life for the diplomatic environment: receptions, receptions, official visits. The young wife, who was also fluent in German, acquired a host of famous admirers, including the English envoy Bruce Lockhart, the fashionable psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the Russian writer Korney Chukovsky and others. A year later, Benckendorff was transferred to the Russian embassy in Berlin, where they had children of the same age. And two years later, the First World War, and the couple hastily returned to St. Petersburg.
In 1917, Benkendorf, taking his little son Pavel and daughter Tatyana, went to his family estate in Estonia. Maria could not follow him because of her mother's serious illness. Alas, they did not see each other again: Benckendorff was brutally murdered by rebellious peasants near Revel, his estate was looted and burned, and the children miraculously survived thanks to the kindness of their neighbors. Maria Ignatievna could not go to them: the railway connection with Estonia was interrupted, and she had no roof over her head, no money, not even warm clothes. And here, for the first time, the famous quality of Mura (as her relatives called her back in childhood) appeared for the first time - an indestructible will to live, which never ceased to amaze the people around her for many years. Resuming her acquaintance with Bruce Lockhart at the house of her old friend, who at that time was already heading the British diplomatic mission in Russia, she became his mistress (fortunately, the Englishman breathed unevenly towards her from the very first meeting!). In March 1918, the Soviet government moved to Moscow, where the British mission also went, and Moura, as a common-law wife, settled in Lockhart's Moscow apartment.
Moura's vitality is incredible, she energizes everyone she comes into contact with. She is an aristocrat, and I see in her a woman of great charm.
(From the diary of B. Lockhart)
Lockhart was in love in earnest and was already dreaming of marrying Moura and taking her to London, but fate decreed otherwise: one night, right out of bed, the Chekists took them both to the Lubyanka. Lockhart was threatened with execution as a member of the White Guard conspiracy led by the Socialist-Revolutionary Boris Savinkov. Mouret - with her noble past - and even more so. But something incredible happened for those years: a week later, she was released, safe and sound, and even allowed to visit Lockhart daily in the cell. And soon she is also seeking his release on the condition that the former ambassador leave Russia in two days. How did she do it? This is a great secret. Some evil tongues said that in the dungeons she, not without pleasure, answered the love claims of J. Peters, who personally led their arrest. Others say that it was then that she was recruited by the Cheka. And still others even philosophically noticed that one is not a hindrance to the other.
"IRON WOMAN"
Meanwhile, the popular proletarian writer Maxim Gorky was already clearly burdened by the love of his second wife, the hysterical actress Maria Andreeva, looking for a new Muse. And soon he found her in the person of Mura, whom K. Chukovsky, according to old memory, arranged to work as a secretary in the World Literature publishing house, founded by Gorky. Chukovsky himself recalls their first meeting at an editorial meeting: “Oddly enough, although Gorky did not say a word to her, he spoke everything for her, spread the whole peacock's tail. He was very witty, talkative, brilliant, like a schoolboy at a ball. At that time, Alexei Maksimovich was 52 years old, and Maria Ignatievna was exactly 24 years younger. But, according to contemporaries, not only youth captivated the author of the Song of the Falcon. This woman had that amazing delicacy that makes men lose their heads, destroy families, betray children, start wars and so on and so forth and so on. A week later, "Mura's tit", as Gorky called her, who loved to give funny nicknames to the household, becomes his personal secretary and moves to live in his apartment. Of course their rooms are nearby. And he is completely helpless if she is not there: it is she who parses his correspondence, it is she who translates articles from foreign newspapers for him, and finally, it is she who first listens to his new works. It's all over with Andreeva a long time ago, and the ardent Gorky offers Moura a hand and a heart, but ... she values \u200b\u200bher freedom too much. And use it at will. So, when in September 1920, Gorky's longtime friend, the English science fiction writer Herbert Wells, arrived in Soviet Russia, Moura agreed to be with him as an interpreter. Little by little, the author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds falls under the spell of the former countess. And this despite the fact that she never really looked after her appearance: wrinkles appeared early on her high forehead, she preferred simple watches on a wide men's strap to any jewelry, and at dinner she could famously drink a couple of shots of aniseed vodka - nothing spoiled her. And only the eyes - smart, touching like a deer, understanding everything and everything - invariably drove men crazy, fascinated and pushed men to madness.
Photos almost failed to convey its external charms. No woman has ever had such an effect on me. She captivates with her magnetism
(From the memoirs of G. Wells)
One night, Wells went to the bathroom, and when he returned, he messed up the door and ended up in Moura's bedroom, and so he stayed there. In the morning, Gorky, who discovered his lovers, made a huge scandal and almost attempted suicide, to which the wise Mura said: “Aleksey Maksimovich, what are you, right! Indeed, even for the most loving woman, two famous writers at once are too many! And besides, Herbert is older than you..." And Gorky forgave her, and Wells went home with a shattered heart.
But Moura was not up to them: she dreamed of reuniting with her children. And at the end of 1920, she illegally entered Estonia. There she is immediately arrested as a "red spy", but again, by some miracle, she manages not only to get out of prison, but also to obtain an Estonian visa. In a letter to the poet V. Khodasevich, Gorky writes about his beloved as follows: “She has become even nicer and is still interested in everything. Ripper. He wants to marry a certain baron: we all protest - let the baron choose another for himself, and she is ours! Indeed, since the validity of the visa was coming to an end and Moura was again threatened with separation from the children, the local cunning lawyer suggested a curious way out - a fictitious marriage. A certain Baron Nikolai Budberg, who wanted to leave for Latin America, urgently needed to get married. And Mura was vitally needed Estonian citizenship. That's what they decided on. When Mura returned as Baroness Budberg, Gorky exclaimed in astonishment:
- You are not copper, but iron. There is no stronger iron in the world!
- And you wanted me to be lacy at SUCH time? Maria Ignatievna retorted calmly.
THE END OF "RED MATA HARI"
Meanwhile, the clouds over Gorky, who now and then allowed himself to ask Stalin for "old party comrades", were gathering. He was literally forced to leave for Italy "to improve his health" and, of course, the indispensable Mura settled with him in the famous villa in Sorrento. She manages all his affairs, up to the sighting of bank checks. To her, Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya, Gorky dedicates his main novel"The Life of Klim Samgin", begun in Italy in 1925. And she, at one time, persuades him to return to Soviet Russia, while all Gorky's friends unanimously repeat that this is mortally dangerous for the writer. But - he hears only his "dear titty Muru."
Until the end of his days on his bedside table will be her photograph in a frame. On June 18, 1936, in Gorki, where Gorky was being treated for the flu, the People's Commissar of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda, came to “visit” him, accompanied by several people, including a stately woman in black. Do I need to say that it was Moura? She spent more than forty minutes at the writer's bedside, and two hours after her departure, Gorky died "from pneumonia." According to rumors, she either poisoned him with chocolates, or with water, with which he washed down the pill. And although everyone knew that the writer was indifferent to sweets, and therefore would hardly have been tempted by sweets, the glass from which he drank was subsequently not found for some reason.
After Gorky's death, 45-year-old Maria Ignatievna Benkendorf-Budberg left for England forever. She never lived in poverty again: the Soviet government registered her as the heir to Gorky's foreign publications, and she received royalties until the start of World War II.
In London, she settled not just anywhere, but in a neighboring house with HG Wells. Their relationship lasted about thirteen years, until the death of the science fiction writer. With enviable regularity, he offered her to become his legal wife, but Moura was adamant: they say, getting married at her age is only to make people laugh. But the aging Wells, who was in love, had no time for jokes.
Wells is preoccupied and sick - he fell under the spell of Baroness Budberg
(From a letter to B. Shaw)
Rumor has it that once, when they were driving at high speed together in a car, Wells almost tried to wrest the desired “yes” from Mura, but she tore open the door on the go and answered with all her determination:
“I’d rather throw myself on this pavement! ..
When Wells died, according to his will, Moura got one hundred thousand dollars, on which she lived almost until the end of her days. Moreover, she lived stormily, actively participating in the literary life of London (for example, she often had breakfast with S. Maugham, a former resident of British intelligence in Russia), for which she received the nickname “intellectual leader” in the English press. Or maybe not only in the literary one?.. For a long time she was under the close supervision of the British intelligence service MI-5. In the reports of one of the agents it was stated: “This woman is very dangerous. She can drink a huge amount of alcohol, especially gin, and not lose her head. (However, according to the memoirs of her daughter Tatyana, Mura simply loved to always be in the spotlight and spread the most incredible rumors about herself).
One way or another, the curtain on the “red Mata Hari” game fell on November 2, 1974, when Baroness Budberg died at the age of 83 in one of the suburbs of Florence, in the house where her son Pavel lived.
Who knows, perhaps Moura did not accidentally leave to die in Italy? Maybe she wanted to lie in the sun-drenched Italian land, where she spent the happiest years of her life with Gorky? But, alas, the son moved the body of his mother to London, where she was buried in the Orthodox Church and buried on November 11 under the cover of a dank gray fog...
WHO, IF NOT MUR...
Historians are still skeptical about M. Budberg's involvement in Gorky's death. And one of the arguments in favor of her innocence is the fact that after the funeral of the writer she was allowed to leave for England. If she had completed Stalin's task to eliminate Gorky, he would hardly have been interested in the life of such a dangerous witness, and even outside the USSR. But who could be the killer, if not Moura? There are many versions. According to one of them, according to the testimony of G. Yagoda during interrogations, Gorky was personally killed by him on the orders of L. Trotsky. According to another, the writer was killed at the behest of Stalin by his own doctors, L. Levin and D. Pletnev. So, at the “process of doctors”, Professor Pletnev confessed that he “deliberately carried out the wrong treatment, and his accomplices were nurses who gave the patient up to 40 injections of camphor per day.” How things really were, we will probably never know. After all, the price of "confessions" during interrogations at the Lubyanka is known. But there is no doubt that Gorky did not die from banal pneumonia. If only because his body, contrary to the will to be buried next to his son Maxim in the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent, was cremated by order of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and the urn with the ashes was placed in the Kremlin wall. At the request of the official widow of Gorky E.P. Peshkova was refused to give her at least a piece of ashes for burial in her son's grave by a collective decision of the Politburo ...
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