From my earliest years, life seemed incomprehensible and cruel to me. I think I was barely six when I became aware that there were landowners and peasant serfs in the world; that landowners could sell people, that my father could separate my mother and me by selling her to one neighbouring landowner and me to another.

Another discovery struck me as equally cruel: children were divided into legitimate and illegitimate, and the latter were always treated with contempt and subjected to insults and mockery, regardless of their personal qualities. The children of the house serfs to tease me with the dirty word then used to describe illegitimate children.

She was short and strongly built, with close-cropped hair, and she wore an outfit that seemed almost to have the become the uniform for the advocates of the woman question: a Russian blouse, cinched with a leather belt, and a short, dark skirt. Her hair was pulled back revealling a large, intelligent forehead, and her large grey eyes, in which one sensed exceptional energy, radiated cheerfulness. In general she looked more like a young boy than a girl.

The group began to disperse long after midnight. Alexandra Kornolova, who lived in the apartment, made me stay. When everyone but the girl in grey had gone, she introduced us: the girl was Sophia Perovskaya. Perovskaya suggested that I join a small circle of women who wanted to study political economy, and I agreed.

In the spring of 1879, after Governor Krapotkin was assassinated, there was a wave of searches and arrests in Kharkov. I had to flee and go understanding for good. I spent brief periods of time in various cities, reaching St. Petersburg in the fall of that year. By this time, Land and Liberty had split into the People's Will and Black Repartition. Firmly convinced that only the people themselves could carry out a socialist revolution and that terror directed at the centre of the state (such as the people's Will advocated) would bring - at best - only a wishy-washy constitution which would in turn strengthen the Russian bourgeoisie, I joined Black Repartition, which had retained the old Land and Liberty program.

Joining Black Repartition had involved accepting the basic principles of the Land and Liberty program. Those principles had, in fact, guided my own political work previously; my reservations about joining the organization concerned tactics. The experiences of the revolutionaries who had worked in the countryside had not been very successful. From my various approaches to the masses, I had gradually come to the conclusion that two activities should be paramount. The first was economic terror. Now, the program of Black Repartition included this, but the party's emphasis was on local popular uprisings. In my opinion, economic terror was more readily understood by the masses; it defended their interests directly, involved the fewest sacrifices, and stimulated the development of revolutionary spirit. The other major task was organizing workers' union, the members of which would rapidly spread revolutionary activity from the cities to the native villages; and there, too, economic terror should be the heart of the struggle.

Any revolution that did not involve the participation of the people - even one carried out by a socialist party - would inevitably be merely political; that is, it would bring the country freedom similar to that enjoyed in Western Europe without changing the economic situation of the working people at all. It would simply make it easier for the bourgeoisie to organize itself and thus become a more formidable enemy of the workers.

When we returned to Kiev in April 1880, we found everyone in a militant, revolutionary mood. The governor-general, Chertkov, was quick to sign death sentences. He had executed one man, Rozovskii, merely for refusing to name the person who had left a suitcase of illegal literature with him, and another, Lozovskii, for possession of an illegal proclamation.

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