My father was drowned when I was two, leaving my mother with four small children, the youngest of whom was only a few months old. It was a hard life to be a widow without income or means of support. All the members of the family learnt to do some kind of work from their earliest years so as to be useful and help mother in her struggle to scrape a living.

At the age of eight I entered primary school. I left three years later, having learnt to read and write. School was no mother to me, and it was not the teachers who educated me. The teachers often meted out justice to their young charges with their fists. Even during these years, life taught me there is no justice in this world.

I was very active for my age in the strike, inciting apprentices from all the workshops, shipbuilding as well as joinery, to drive out workers who did not want to join us. We stuffed our pockets with screws and all sorts of scraps of iron, and made for the docks and workshops. Those who went against the general strike decision was pelted with iron fragments, nuts and bolts, and were forced into line. Policemen on foot and horseback threatened us with their whips, but this only strengthened our youthful readiness to fight. For such active participation in the strike, I was dismissed from Semyannikov's and blacklisted.

All my attempts to find work at another factory ended in failure. With the help of some workers, I was given a job at the Obukhov works, but was dismissed as a striker after a couple of weeks. Other attempts had the same result. The impossibility of finding a job in a large factory turned me to work in small workshops. The pay was so paltry that it did not even cover the rent.