 From there he was smuggled out of the country in the fall of 1907 by way of Finland (where he briefly met Lenin and other leading Social Democratic émigrés).For the next eight years, he lived mainly in France and Belgium, where he worked variously as a loader for blast furnaces in an arms factory in Nancy, France, as a hauler and coal-hewer in mines in Belgium, as a metal fitter and electrical fitter in French locomotive and car factories (including Renault), as a stoker and coalman on ocean liners, and in a variety of jobs in a number of other factories.In these years in exile and labor, Gerasimov managed to explore much of Western Europe (especially France, Belgium, Italy and the Alps), often working in winter and wandering by foot in summer—for which he was several times arrested for vagrancy.