Product Code Database
Yevno Fishelevich Azef (born Yevgeny Filippovich Azef; 186924April 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.
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. In November 1901, Argunov sent him to Europe to help unify the Northern, Southern and foreign Socialist Revolutionary unions into a single organisation. Argunov was arrested as soon as Azef had left Russia. In Switzerland in 1902, 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.
Gershuni thought so highly of Azef that he nominated him as his successor, and so when Gershuni was arrested in spring 1903 after being betrayed by another double agent, Azef became head of the combat organisation, with Boris Savinkov as his deputy. Azef thus became both Russia's leading terrorist and most highly paid police informant. In that position he organized the assassination of Vyacheslav Plehve in 1904. Plehve, as minister of the interior, was Azef's nominal employer and the person who had ultimately authorised him to infiltrate the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Plehve had also made Gershuni's arrest the police's main priority, thus facilitating the rise of Azef. In 1905, Azef would organise the assassination of the Tsar's uncle Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, who served as Governor-General of Moscow.
The success of those two assassinations gave Azef immense prestige within the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Because he was so trusted, he was able to deliver a long list of his rivals within the SR Party over to the Okhrana to be arrested. Their names included Anna Yakimova, a veteran of the plot to kill Tsar Alexander II who had served 24 years in prison, and Zinaida Kopolyannikova, who was hanged in August 1906 for assassinating the head of the Tsar's lifeguards. In 1905 alone, according to researchers who accessed police records after the 1917 revolution, Azef informed against 17 of his subordinates within the SR Combat Organisation.
The assassinations of the Interior Minister and the Tsar's uncle also set off a crisis within the Okhrana. The Director of Police, Alexei Lopukhin, resigned, and was replaced by his rival Pyotr Rachkovsky, whom he despised. One of Rachkovsky's first actions was to sack Leonid Ratayev, who had been acting as Azef's handler, and to personally take over supervision of him. Azef's double dealing was also 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, 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 Azef was also a spy. Nonetheless, fearing more leaks from within the Okhrana, Azef emigrated to Geneva.
He was in Helsinki in February 1906, when he learnt from a go-between named Pinchas Rutenberg that Georgy Gapon, the popular hero of the 1905 revolution, was also a police informant. Azef ordered that Gapon should be killed "like a snake", Notes on Georgii Appolonovich Gapon (1870-1906), Northern Virginia Community College although he took care to ensure that his own paymaster, Rachkovsky, was not killed, too.
His wife, Ljuba Mankin, who had been unaware of his double-dealing, divorced him and emigrated to the United States. One of his last acts as a spy was to denounce Lopukhin, who was exiled to Siberia for blowing Azef's cover.
In Germany, 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. He was constantly in fear of being recognised and killed. From 1915 to 1917, during the First World War, he was interned by Germany as an enemy alien. In prison, he suffered from kidney disease.
|
|
