21 Facts About Yevno Azef

Yevno Fishelevich Azef was a Russian socialist revolutionary who operated as a double agent and agent provocateur.

Yevno Azef worked as both an organiser of assassinations for the Socialist Revolutionary Party and a police spy for the Okhrana, the Russian Empire's secret police.

Yevno Azef rose through the ranks to become the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party's terrorist branch, the SR Combat Organization, from 1904 to 1908.

Yevno Fishelevich Azef was born in Lyskava in 1869, the second of seven children of a poor Jewish tailor.

When he graduated, in 1899, the Okhrana ordered him to return to Russia, where he joined the Northern Union of Socialist Revolutionaries, led by Andrei Argunov, and became, in effect, his right-hand man, even though Yevno Azef wanted the revolutionaries to resume the use of terrorist tactics, while Argunov did not believe in violence.

Yevno Azef valued Azef's ability to resolve practical problems, such as setting up an underground printing operation, but was unaware that he was being assisted by the Okhrana.

In Switzerland in 1902, Yevno Azef became a founding member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and served as deputy head of its combat organisation, headed by Grigory Gershuni, which was responsible for acts of terrorism.

Yevno Azef thus became both Russia's leading terrorist and most highly paid police informant.

In 1905 alone, according to researchers who accessed police records after the 1917 revolution, Yevno Azef informed against 17 of his subordinates within the SR Combat Organisation.

Yevno Azef's double dealing was resented by the Okhrana's longer-serving officers, one of whom anonymously tipped off the Socialist Revolutionaries that the Okhrana had recruited two informers in their ranks, Yevno Azef, and a man named Tatarov.

Boris Savinkov ordered for Tatarov to be killed: he was stabbed to death on 4 April 1906, but the Socialist Revolutionaries could not believe that Yevno Azef was a spy.

Nonetheless, fearing more leaks from within the Okhrana, Yevno Azef emigrated to Geneva.

Yevno Azef was in Helsinki in February 1906, when he learnt from a go-between named Pinchas Rutenberg that Father Gapon, the popular hero of the 1905 revolution, was a police informant.

Yevno Azef ordered that Gapon should be killed "like a snake", although he took care to ensure that his own paymaster, Rachkovsky, was not killed, too.

Later, Burtsev spotted Yevno Azef riding through St Petersburg in an open cab when most revolutionaries were in hiding and suspected that he was the unidentified spy.

Unable to prove his suspicions or to persuade any significant figures within the party to share them, Burtsev contrived to meet Alexei Lopukhin in the carriage of a train leaving Cologne and put it to him that Yevno Azef was a spy, which Lopukhin confirmed.

Burtsev then wrote up the case against Yevno Azef and had it printed and dispatched to the Central Committee of the SR Party, who appointed three veteran revolutionaries to a court of inquiry, which held a month-long hearing in Paris and concluded that Burtsev's claims should be taken seriously.

In Germany, Yevno Azef lived with a singer and worked as a corset salesman and stock speculator to invest the money he had amassed during his career as a double agent.

Yevno Azef was constantly in fear of being recognised and killed.

Yevno Azef died of renal failure in Berlin on April 24,1918.

Yevno Azef was buried in an unmarked grave in Friedhof Wilmersdorf.