Background
Evno Azef was born in 1869 in the town of Lyskovo in the Jewish Pale of Settlement into a poor Jewish tailor’s family.
Yevno
Evno Azef was born in 1869 in the town of Lyskovo in the Jewish Pale of Settlement into a poor Jewish tailor’s family.
His father moved the family to Rostov, where Azeff attended school and became active in the budding socialist revolutionary movement.
Upon graduation he gave lessons, was a reporter for a local newspaper, and worked as a clerk, but was not particularly successful in earning a living. His continued activities in the revolutionary movement came to the attention of the authorities, and Azeff was forced to flee to Germany.
Azeff settled at Karlsruhe where he studied engineering and continued his revolutionary activities. Although he left Russia with a considerable sum of money, he soon found it depleted. He wrote a letter to the Ochrana, the Russian secret police, offering to sell his services as an informer against his revolutionary comrades. He made contact with the Union of Social Revolutionaries Abroad, a presocialist party that provided him with letters of introduction to leaders of the socialist underground in Russia.
In 1899 Azeff returned to Moscow where he found a position with a general electrical-supply company. At the same time, he became a prominent member of the Union of Social Revolutionaries underground.
As head of the Battle Organization, he controlled the purse strings of that movement, allowing him greater financial independence than the Ochrana offered. He also felt betrayed by the police for their arrest of leading members of the party, an act that cast suspicion upon himself.
To clear himself from suspicion, Azeff took an active role in the planning and execution of the assassination of the Russian interior minister, Vyacheslav Plehve, the man responsible for the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which forty-five Jews were murdered and hundreds more brutally beaten. Although Azeff never identified with the Jewish nationalist movement, the horrors of the pogrom revived memories of his childhood. The successful assassination of Plehve brought Azeffs Battle Organization to the forefront of Russian revolutionary politics. Many leading party activists were arrested as a result of information provided by Azeff to the authorities, but he managed to convince the police that he knew nothing of the details of the plot, and was therefore unable to stop it.
Azeff was also instrumental in the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei, uncle of the tsar and a leader of the reactionary party at court. Once again, he turned in his conspirators while convincing the Ochrana of his inability to prevent the assassination.
After a shake-up in the police, Azeff plotted to blow up the dreaded Ochrana headquarters in Saint Petersburg. Although suspicions were again brewing about him, this daring suggestion strengthened his position as leader of the revolutionary terrorists. It was later suggested that he planned the act to destroy any documents connecting him to the Ochrana rather than in the interest of revolution. Nothing came of this plot, nor did anything come of his later plan to assassinate the tsar himself, although Azeff later confided to friends that he himself would have killed the tsar if possible.
The deteriorating situation in Russia saw the defection of several police officers to the Social Revolutionary Party. One such officer informed the party leadership that an informer had infiltrated the higher ranks of the party, however he only knew of him by the code name Raskin. A party historian determined that this informer was Azeff. Azeff surmised that he was under suspicion and fled to Paris. He was tried in absentia and sentenced to death.
Azeff moved to Germany and settled in Berlin with his mistress, Madame N., a Russian cabaret singer of German origin. The Germans imprisoned him during World War I because of his supposed revolutionary leanings.
He was released from prison following the October revolution in Russia, but died soon after. Only Madame N. attended his funeral.
Religion is a tool used by the ruling classes for the masses to relieve their suffering via the act of experiencing religious emotions.
Azeff was recognized as a leading advocate of terror as a means of liberating Russia. He often declared that “terror is the only way”, but at the same time asked a friend in confidence, “Do you really believe in socialism? It’s necessary for the youth and the workers but for you and me....” Despite his rejection of socialism, he quickly rose in the ranks of the newly-founded Social Revolutionary Party, and was appointed to the party’s first triumvirate. As a party leader, the information he provided the Ochrana was invaluable, and on several occasions his loyalty to he party was questioned by his comrades. He was, nonetheless, appointed leader of the Battle Organization, the militant terrorist arm of the party.
Azeff was ideologically committed to neither police nor party. He was a mercenary, prepared to sell out to the highest bidder. He refused to give information compromising the party’s leadership to the Ochrana when he realized that the 50.000 ruble award offered for that information would go to his superiors rather than to him.