Yevno Fishelevich Azef was born in Lyskava (now Brest Region, Belarus) in 1869, the second of seven children of a poor Jewish tailor.

Later that year, he moved to Berne in Switzerland, and in 1894 joined the Union of Socialist Revolutionaries Abroad, which was organised by the respected narodnik couple Chaim Zhitlovsky and Vera Lokhova.

He valued Azef's ability to resolve practical problems, such as setting up an underground printing operation, but was unaware that he was being assisted by the Okhrana.

Plehve, as minister of the interior, was Azef's nominal employer and the person who had ultimately authorised him to infiltrate the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

In 1905, Azef would organise the assassination of the Tsar's uncle Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, who served as Governor-General of Moscow.

[3] He was in Helsinki in February 1906, when he learnt from a go-between named Pinchas Rutenberg that Father Gapon, the popular hero of the 1905 revolution, was also a police informant.

Late in 1906, Vladimir Burtsev, a left-wing magazine editor, was approached by an Okhrana officer who had turned against the government who provided him with a wealth of accurate information, including the presence of a spy in the leadership of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, whose identity he did not know.

Later, Burtsev spotted Azef riding through St Petersburg in an open cab when most revolutionaries were in hiding and suspected that he was the unidentified spy.

Instead, Lopukhin approached Azev's former mentor, Andrei Argunov, in Petersburg to verify Burtsev's testimony and travelled to London to give the same information to three of the party's representatives.

In Germany, Azef lived with a singer and worked as a corset salesman and stock speculator to invest the money he had amassed during his career as a double agent.