 She returned home to Irkutsk until early 1902, when she received a passport and left for Paris to study Marxism at the "Vol'naaia Russkaia shkola obshchestvennykh nauk" (Free Russian School of Social Sciences) where the lecturers included Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov.In 1903, she joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (bolsheviks) or RSDLP(b).She was arrested four times between 1902 and 1913, and spent a year in prison.