Editing Yevno Azef (section)

== Exposure ==
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. Unable to prove his suspicions or to persuade any significant figures within the party to share them, Burtsev contrived to meet Alexei Lopukhin in the carriage of a train leaving Cologne and put it to him that Azef was a spy, which Lopukhin confirmed. Burtsev then wrote up the case against Azef and had it printed and dispatched to the Central Committee of the SR Party, who appointed three veteran revolutionaries ([[Vera Figner]], [[German Lopatin]] and [[Prince Kropotkin]]) to a court of inquiry, which held a month-long hearing in Paris and concluded that Burtsev's claims should be taken seriously. Learning where Burtsev had gained his information, Azef secretly visited Petersburg to pressure Lopukhin to repudiate his story. 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 January 1909, the Central Committee ordered Azef's assassination and tried to lure him to an isolated villa in France, but he fled to Germany.

His wife, Ljuba Mankin, who had been unaware of his double-dealing, divorced him and emigrated to the United States. One of his last acts as a spy was to denounce Lopukhin, who was exiled to Siberia for blowing Azef's cover.

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. He was constantly in fear of being recognised and killed. From 1915 to 1917, during the [[First World War]], he was interned by Germany as an enemy alien.<ref>{{Cite journal|title = Yevno Azeff: The Story of a Scoundrel|jstor = 492626|journal = The History Teacher|date = November 1972|pages = 77–82|volume = 6|issue = 1|doi = 10.2307/492626|first = Joseph O.|last = Baylen}}</ref> In prison, he suffered from kidney disease.