Nick Clegg — politician with roots in the Russian Empire
Nick Clegg was born in Buckinghamshire in January 1967 into a family assembled from four countries. His father, a banker, was the son of Hugh Anthony Clegg, who edited the British Medical Journal for thirty-five years, and of a Russian emigree. His mother, Hermance van den Wall Bake, was Dutch, and had spent part of her childhood interned with her family by the Japanese army at Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. He grew up bilingual and speaks five languages.
The Russian line runs through his paternal grandmother, Kira von Engelhardt (1909-2005), who came from Smolensk and from the Baltic German nobility of the empire - a family of German-Russian and Ukrainian strands, of the kind the multiethnic imperial service class produced in quantity. Her family left after 1917. She married Hugh Clegg in 1932.
Behind her stands one of the more remarkable figures of the emigration. Her great-grandfather - Clegg's great-great-grandfather - was Ignaty Platonovich Zakrevsky, attorney general of the Imperial Russian Senate. One of Zakrevsky's daughters was Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya, better known as Moura Budberg, who became Countess von Benckendorff by her first marriage and Baroness von Budberg by her second. She was a translator and literary figure in London, and for decades was suspected of working for both Soviet and British intelligence; one biographer of the period called her the most effective agent of influence the Soviet Union ever placed in London's political and intellectual life. She was the companion of the British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, then of Maxim Gorky, and finally of H. G. Wells. She died in Italy in 1974. She was Clegg's great-great-aunt.
The same emigre network connects him to Michael Ignatieff, leader of Canada's Liberal Party from 2008 to 2011 and grandson of the Russian Empire's last education minister: Kira von Engelhardt was a first cousin of Alla Ionova, who married a first cousin of Ignatieff's father. Two party leaders in two countries, joined through a family tree that ends at the Russian Revolution.
Clegg read social anthropology at Cambridge and worked at the European Commission and as a member of the European Parliament before entering the House of Commons in 2005. He led the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2015 and was Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015. In 2018 he became head of global affairs at Facebook, later Meta, a post he held until 2025. He was knighted in 2018.
"Grandmother's family left Russia after 1917"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Smolensk
His great-great-aunt Moura Budberg was a central figure of the Russian emigration in London, long suspected of serving both Soviet and British intelligence, and successively the companion of Robert Bruce Lockhart, Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells.
Grandson of Kira von Engelhardt (1909-2005) of Smolensk, from the Baltic German nobility of the Russian Empire, whose family left after 1917. Great-great-grandson of Ignaty Platonovich Zakrevsky, attorney general of the Imperial Russian Senate, and great-great-nephew of Moura Budberg. Sources differ on whether his grandmother was born Zakrevskaya or von Engelhardt; the Zakrevsky descent itself is not in dispute.
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Smolensk. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.