Yevno Azef
Russian revolutionary (1869–1918)
Yevno Fishelevich Azef (born Yevgeny Filippovich Azef; 1869 – 24 April 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.
Early life
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, first to Karlsruhe and then Darmstadt. There, he studied to become an electrical engineer and joined a group of Russian social democrats.
“Yevno Azef” enters the record as russian revolutionary (1869–1918). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Yevno, Azef and Russian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q171930. VIAF identifies the subject as 40180641. The Library of Congress control number is n81017858. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1869, 1918, 1904 and 1908.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yevno Azef” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.