Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution - Anna Geifman
Evno Azef was born in a Russian shtetl to poor Jewish parents in 1869. He
was intelligent but anxiety and anger twisted his personality, which made him
unpopular at school and work. In a fix, he impulsively stole 800 rubles and
escaped to Germany where he studied engineering.
In order to keep the wolf from the door – poverty was his great anxiety – he
supplanted his income by turning into a spy for the Tsar’s secret police. He told
the dreaded Okhrana of the plans for terrorist attacks by the Socialist
Revolutionary Combat Organization. Azef was regarded as the mastermind of two
spectacular political assassinations, though in reality he tried in the SR
itself to thwart attacks while telling the Okhrana about the plans. After
a 15-year career as a double-agent, he was unmasked in 1908, causing a huge
scandal that shook up Europe.
Professor of modern Russian and Jewish history at Harvard, Prof. Geifman tells
this interesting story, one right out of Brian Moore or John LeCarre. Also a
psychohistorian, Geifman argues that Azef’s anxiety had its roots in abuse at
his father’s hands, fear of poverty and pogroms, and his physical
ugliness. In order to avoid facing his overwhelming anxiety and feelings of
worthlessness, she argues, he sought the concrete risks of being an informer.
This is a fascinating book for students of secret agents and their handlers,
terrorism and its stupidly dream-struck and mercifully disorganized practitioners,
and Russia’s endless struggle with modern ideas and reform. Geifman’s scholarship seems
impeccable and she makes convincing arguments based on what she has read in
Russian archives. She writes in a style scholarly yet her own, especially when
deploying adjectives professors don't usually use like
"philistine," "shady," and "ill-omened."
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