The Trial of Yevno Azef

By early 1906, the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) was one of the best known parties in Russia. Founded at the turn of the 20th century by several hundred young people, SRs were obsessed with “saving” the people and carrying out an immediate revolution. They longed to build socialism and were certain they would be supported by the vast hordes of the peasantry.

To the SRs, the peasants were natural socialists: for centuries villages had been organized around a communal structure that not only decided all questions of importance to the life of the village, but was even considered the legal owner of the land. The obshchinas (village communes) divided their land among their members “as was fair,” i.e. depending on the number of mouths to feed or arms laboring in a family.

But did the peasants want a revolution? This was not a simple question. After all, a previous generation of Russian revolutionaries had tried to incite the peasantry, to little effect: the peasants were outraged at the thought of action against their tsar.

The SRs’ propaganda – especially their promise to take land from the landowners and give it to the obshchinas – made the party extremely popular, but that did not always translate into action. The revolutionaries decided therefore that they had to act on the peasants’ behalf. And, for the SRs, “to act” meant to conduct a policy of terror. An extraordinarily secretive militant organization was created. At its head was the fanatical youth Grigory Gershuni, a former pharmacist. Someone cut from an entirely different cloth – Yevno Azef – soon became his right-hand man.

Dozens of books and articles have been written about Azef that attempt to plumb the terrorist’s enigmatic depths. We know he was Jewish and wound up in Germany early in life. His revolutionary views quickly helped him find comrades; toward the end of the nineteenth century, many revolutionaries had left Russia to avoid the secret police – the okhrana. But Azef was different: in 1893 he offered his services to the okhrana as a double agent. They checked his credentials and were entirely satisfied. Interestingly, the very first police report on Azef describes him as a cunning and unscrupulous intriguer, that his first passion was money. From the start, the police agents were able to see Azef much more clearly than his comrade-revolutionaries.

During the first years of the twentieth century, Azef, who had already received quite a bit of money from the okhrana, joined the SRs. He immediately acquired tremendous authority. His unscrupulousness was seen as decisiveness, his cruelty as fearlessness. If Azef assigned a pregnant woman to put together a bomb, it might evoke surprise, but never protest – if the boss says to do something, that means it needs to be done.

The numerous acts of terrorism carried out by the SRs took place with Azef’s active participation. He climbed higher and higher within the SR hierarchy, at the same time constantly conniving to increase his value to the police – and thus his salary. Ironically, the respect and admiration that SRs felt for the capable Azef grew apace with the volume of important information he was providing to the okhrana.

Whose side was Azef on? Did he betray his comrades to the police in order to ensure his main objectives – first and foremost the ultimate assassination of the tsar? Or did his hefty salary and own well-being come first? Or perhaps he derived most pleasure from the fact that he held the lives of so many people in his hands, from the fact that he was master of both the revolutionaries and the zhandarms (Russia borrowed the French term for police when they established a special Corps of Gendarmes to deal with political dissent)? There is no simple answer. In any event, the years surrounding the first Russian revolution (1905) were the height of this terrorist-agent provocateur’s double career.

In 1903, Gershuni was arrested and Azef took over as head of the SRs militant wing. Among his many “accomplishments” were the murder of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Vyacheslav Plehve, and the tsar’s uncle – Moscow’s Governor General, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. In early 1906, Azef was planning two more assassination attempts: on Moscow’s new Governor General, Admiral Fyodor Dubasov, and on the new Minister of Internal Affairs, Pyotr Durnovo. Both were well-known for their reactionary views and accordingly were seen by the SRs as deserving to die. It was decided that both assassinations should be carried out quickly, before April, when the first State Duma was set to convene.

Azef’s iron will and marvelous organizational abilities were again put to work. Revolutionaries disguised as coachmen, newspaper deliverymen and cigarette sellers conducted a lengthy and exhausting surveillance of their prey, determining their usual routes. The dynamite was transported; the bombs were ready. The young beauty Maria Benevskaya lost a hand while preparing the bomb for the terrorists. But this, of course, did not give anyone pause.

For several days, while they waited for Dubasov to come out onto the street, several young people “took walks” along the slippery Moscow pavement with bombs in their pockets. But, for reasons that are unclear, the attempt on Dubasov’s life was unsuccessful. The bomb was thrown, the Admiral’s adjutant was killed, and several people were wounded, but Dubasov himself received only minor wounds. They also did not manage to get the Minister, despite the fact that he once stopped and bought a newspaper from one of the disguised terrorists.

Was this simple bad luck, or was Azef reluctant to go too far, fearing the dissatisfaction of his benefactors in the police? In any event, numerous subsequent arrests convinced the SRs that they had an agent provocateur in their midst. The revolutionary movement at that time was extensively infiltrated by double agents. But, at the same time, there were many police agents whose behavior was ambiguous. It was from this source that information compromising to Azef began to leak. The revolutionary Vladimir Burtsev, who had spent many years searching for traitors, doggedly compiled evidence against Azef. But the authority of the terrorist leader was too great;  his sway over his comrades in the party was almost hypnotic. Even after Burtsev convinced Lopukhin, the former head of the okhrana, to name Azef, the revolutionaries did not immediately believe the accusation.

A Court of Honor was held in Paris, and Azef, either because he was so sure of himself, or perhaps simply because he reveled in the thrill of it all, did not hesitate to appear. His testimony was confused and contradictory. Nonetheless, the SRs, among whom the penalty for treachery was always death, let Azef go home, since he had promised to provide convincing proof of his innocence the following day.

But by the next day Azef had left Paris, proving something else entirely. He explained to his wife that he had been maligned and had to leave right away to save his good name. She bought his story, escorted him to the train station, and he left for Berlin, where a lover was awaiting him.

Azef never again crossed paths with the SRs. He lived in Berlin until the start of the First World War, when he went bankrupt and was arrested as a citizen of an enemy power. He suffered from kidney disease in prison and died in his own bed in 1918.