An agent provocateur is an agent who infiltrates a group in order to incite it to illegal or compromising acts, so that its members can be arrested, discredited, or controlled. The technique was a hallmark of the Tsarist Okhrana. Its most notorious agent, Yevno Azef, led the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Combat Organization while reporting to the police, until he was exposed in 1908 by the émigré journalist Vladimir Burtsev. Roman Malinovsky, a Bolshevik deputy in the Fourth Duma and a member of the party’s Central Committee, was likewise an Okhrana agent; he was tried and shot in 1918 after returning to Soviet Russia.

The Bolshevik security services inherited and expanded the method. The Cheka and OGPU created fictitious opposition organizations, most famously in Operation Trust (1921-1927), to draw out émigré activists and foreign intelligence officers. Later Soviet and Russian services continued to use provocation against dissidents, émigré groups, and foreign targets. The tactic matters to the study of active measures because it blurs the line between intelligence collection and the deliberate manufacture of events.

Sources

• Andrew, Christopher, and Oleg Gordievsky. KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. HarperCollins, 1990.
• Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Basic Books, 1999.
• Geifman, Anna. Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution. Scholarly Resources, 2000.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.