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Concept
Yevno Azef
Summary
Yevno Fishelevich Azef (Евгений Филиппович (Евно Фишелевич) Азеф, also transliterated as Evno Azef, 1869–1918) was a Russian socialist revolutionary who also operated as a double agent and agent provocateur. He 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. He rose through the ranks to become the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party's terrorist branch, the SR Combat Organization, from 1904 to 1908.
After the revolutionary Vladimir Burtsev unmasked his activity in 1909, Azef fled to Germany, where he died in 1918.
Yevno Fishelevich Azef was born in Lyskava (now Brest Region, Belarus) in 1869, the second of seven children of a poor Jewish tailor. His father moved to Rostov with the family when Yevno was five and opened a drapery but barely made enough money to get his children through school. After leaving school around 1890, Azef worked as a journalist and a traveling salesman. In 1892, the police suspected him of distributing revolutionary literature. To avoid arrest, he embezzled 800 rubles and fled to Germany to first Karlsruhe and then Darmstadt. There, he studied to become an electrical engineer and joined a group of Russian social democrats.
In April 1893, Azef wrote to the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, offering to inform on his fellow students, for money. Later that year, he moved to Berne in Switzerland, and in 1894 joined the Union of Socialist Revolutionaries Abroad, which was organised by the respected narodnik couple Chaim Zhitlovsky and Vera Lokhova.
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 Azef wanted the revolutionaries to resume the use of terrorist tactics, while Argunov did not believe in violence. He 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.
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