 There, Lieberman joined a revolutionary student circle and became acquainted with the subversive literature that had arrived in Russia from abroad.Financial woes led him to return to Vilna in 1874, where he worked at the Dvigatel insurance company and in draftsmanship, and soon became a leading figure in an underground circle of Jewish socialists in that city.That same year he published a fictional satire entitled 'The Crux of the Matter' in Peretz Smolenskin's Hebrew journal "Ha-Shaḥar" ('The Dawn').