[1] As a teenager, he organized a strike by apprentice tailors in Ostrów, disseminated radical propaganda in Kreslavka (Krāslava) and Dvinsk (Daugavpils), and was briefly imprisoned after taking part in the abortive revolution of 1905–1906, having led demonstrators to storm the jail and free political prisoners in Vilkomir.

[2] He and his brother Wolf (Ze'ev), who were at that time affiliated with the labor-Zionist youth movement Tseirei Tsion, broke from their father's religion after their mother's death in 1907.

Migrating to Moscow with other refugees during World War I,[3] he and Wolf (under the collective title of the "Brat'ya Gordinii," the Gordin Brothers) joined the editorial staff of the influential newspaper, Anarkhiia, published from 1917 to 1918.

The remedies for the state and capitalism were, simply enough, statelessness and communism; for the remaining three oppressors, however, the antidotes were rather more novel: "cosmism" (the universal elimination of national persecution), "gyneantropism" (the emancipation and humanization of women), and "pedism" (the liberation of the young from "the vise of slave education").

In Seventy Days In Russia: What I Saw (1924), Angel Pestaña, recounting his visit to Moscow in 1920, notes that Abba Gordin, the "most visible spokesperson" among those anarchists who were "inclined to accept centralism and the dictatorship of the proletariat," had been imprisoned for three months in the notorious Butyrka prison "for the crime of having been elected to the Moscow Soviet by the workers of the factory where he worked":Gordin was a worker in a munitions factory.

[7] Alexander Berkman reports that it was only on May 25, 1920, after some 1,500 Butyrka prisoners refused to eat, that Gordin was released "by order of the Tcheka, in the hope of breaking the hunger strike.