In 1868, she married Nikolay Petrovich Breshko-Breshkovsky, a landowner and country magistrate, but left him after two years and moved to Kiev where she formed a 'commune' with her sister Olga (who died young) and Maria Kolenkina.

[1] In July 1874, she, Kolenkina and Yakov Stefanovich decided to 'go to the people' and set out with false passports, disguised as itinerants labourers, to settle in a village, where they tried to instill revolutionary ideas in the peasants.

Warned of imminent arrest, Kolenkina returned to Kiev, while Breshkovsky and Stefanovich moved to another village, in Kherson province, where they came into contact with evangelical Protestants, known as the Stundists.

After Stefanovich returned to Kiev, Breshkovsky was arrested when a police officer checking her false passport noticed that she did not act as submissively as a peasant normally would.

[5] Breshkovsky was transported to St Petersburg, where, at 31, she was the oldest of 37 women held in the House of Preliminary Detention, all accused of political offences.

[6] Her defiant behaviour in the dock during the Trial of the 193, when she refused to recognise the court's authority and announced that she was proud to belong to 'the Russian socialistic and revolutionary party'[7][3] led to her being convicted and sentenced to five years katorga (penal labour), whereas other female defendants, including the future regicide Sophia Perovskaya, were acquitted.

He wrote: She was a lady perhaps 35 years of age (actually 41) with a strong, intelligent, but not handsome face, a frank unreserved manner and sympathies that seemed to be warm, impulsive, and generous.

Her face bore traces of much suffering, and her thick, dark wavy hair, which had been cut in prison at the mines, was streaked here and there with grey...

[11] Breshkovsky was released in 1896, after 22 years in prison or exile, under an amnesty[4] marking the coronation of the Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia.

"There existed a kind of division of labour between them: Breshkovskaya, like a 'Holy Ghost of the Revolution' flitted about the country, proselytising and inciting everywhere the revolutionary temper of the youth; Gershuni usually followed in her tracks and turned to practical account the enthusiasm she aroused.

"[14] She also visited New York and Chicago, and was befriended by feminists such as Alice Stone Blackwell, Isabel Barrows and Helena Dudley.

Hearing of her arrest, Isabel Barrows sailed to Russia to plead for her release, and succeeded in persuading Nikolay Breshko-Breshkovsky to visit his mother in prison, despite his hostility to her beliefs.

Late in 1918, she travelled via Vladivostok to the U.S., to appeal to the government to send 50,000 troops to support the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War.