Maria Ignatievna von Budberg-Bönninghausen (, Maria (Moura) Ignatievna Zakrevskaya-Benckendorff-Budberg, née Zakrevskaya; February 1892 – 1 November 1974) — also known as Countess von Benckendorff and Baroness von Budberg — was a Russian adventuress and suspected double agent of the Soviet Union secret police (OGPU) and British Intelligence Service. According to British journalist Robin Bruce Lockhart, who knew her personally, "she was, perhaps, the Soviet Union's most effective agent-of-influence ever to appear on London's political and intellectual stage". Biography Early life Born in Poltava, in central Ukraine, Moura was the daughter of Ignaty Platonovich Zakrevsky (1839–1906), a member of the Russian nobility and diplomat. In 1911, she married Count Johann (Ivan) Alexandrovich von Benckendorff (1882–1919), a member of the Baltic German nobility, Second Secretary at the Russian Embassy in Berlin, and Gentleman of the Court. They had two children: Paul (born in 1913) and Tatiana (born in 1915), who later married Bernard Alexander and became the mother of the businesswoman Helen Alexander. Benckendorff owned a large country house and estate in Estonia, Jendel Jäneda, where he was shot dead on 19 April 1919 by a local peasant. Arrest Before the October Revolution, Moura worked in the Russian embassy in Berlin, where she became acquainted with British diplomat R. H. Bruce Lockhart. Upon the assassination of her husband in 1919, she was arrested on suspicion of spying for the United Kingdom and was transferred to the Lubyanka prison. Lockhart, who mentioned her under her given name in his 1932 book Memoirs of a British Agent, tried to vouch for her but was detained as well for a couple of weeks. They had been lovers and she became pregnant by him, but the pregnancy miscarried. (Lockhart's book was made into an American movie in 1934, British Agent, in which he was played by Leslie Howard ("Stephen Locke") and she by Kay Francis ("Elena Moura"). After Lockhart was released and expelled from Russia soon afterward in connection with the "Ambassadorial Conspiracy" affair (also known as the "Lockhart Plot"), Budberg was released as well under the condition that she would co-operate with the intelligence service if the need ever arose. Budberg began to publish "World Literature", where she met the writer Maxim Gorky with the help of Korney Chukovsky. She became a secretary and common-law wife of Gorky, living in his house with a few interruptions from 1920 to 1933 when the writer lived in