Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution [Paperback]

Anna Geifman gives us a riveting portrait of Evno Azef, the most important and elusive police spy in the history of the Russian Revolutionary Movement. Geifman's research is impeccable and her argument convincing. Azef was neither a double agent nor a provocateur. As one of the premier historians of Russian terrorism, Geifman also explores the psychological realm of Azef's treachery, providing important insights into his motivations and career.A revisionist work in the best sense of the word. It strives, on the basis of newly opened archival materials, to reevaluate the personality and career of tsarist Russia's notorious master 'spy.' Azef, who worked for the security police while heading the revolutionary terrorist organization, is here depicted, for the first time, as a complex person, less duplicitous than usually thought of but no less critical in discrediting the wave of terror that swept Russia in the early years of this century.In the winter of 1909, a political bombshell exploded in tsarist Russia. Scandal swept not only the empire but the entire world with the exposure of the secret life of one man. Newspaper headlines introduced him as a twentieth-century Judas, and since his initiation to the most notorious villains' club, his name, Evno Filipovich Azef, has remained in the Russian tradition as a synonym for scandalous duplicity, unscrupulous perfidy, and criminal provocation. His story is inseparable from the history of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary party (PSR) and the terrorism that plagued the tsarist regime in the first decade of the twentieth century. More than 17,000 people were killed or wounded throughout the empire between 1905 and 1910 as a result of political assassination attempts alone. The use of undercover police spies to infiltrate oppositionist groups was a primary means of combatting terrorist activity. Enter Evno Azef, a man who, before being reviled by Socialist-Revolutionary party leaders as a traitorous double agent, would sl£"