Moura Budberg (1892–1974) had an extraordinary life. She was born in the Poltava region of Ukraine, and as a young woman she danced at the Sanssouci Palace at Potsdam with the Russian Tsar and the German Kaiser. In her twenties by 1917, she had a well-placed aristocratic husband, two children and several fine homes in different countries.
This might have been enough for most of us, but for Moura it was merely a preamble — we are only on page 15. Revolution, espionage, embezzlement, murder, executions, plenty of intimacy and arrests by several different nations take us through a few more chapters. She surges on, driven by her twin passions for men and intrigue and, above all, a determination to survive, fully exploiting her considerable brains, charm and languages, and her useful ability to drink men into oblivion ‘without showing more than a slur in her voice’.
As Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield note with some pleasure, ‘Moura’s life was woven with lovers’, to most of whom she showed no more fidelity than to her spymaster employers.
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