Released in February 1913, under an amnesty to mark the tricentenary of the Romanov dynasty,[1] he returned to Moscow, and was one of the founders of the metal workers' union.

After the February Revolution, in 1917, Oppokov returned to Moscow, and under the name 'Lomov' was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks at the Sixth Party Congress in August 1917.

From January 1918, Lomov was a supporter of the Left Communists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, who opposed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, proposing instead to fight a 'revolutionary war' against Germany.

[1] Abandoning his former allegiance to the left, he supported Joseph Stalin against Leon Trotsky in the rift that followed Lenin's death, and having been dropped from the Central Committee, he was returned as a full member in December 1927.

Lomov's wife, Natalya, was arrested on 17 July 1937 and sentenced to eight years in a labour camp for not reporting her husband's 'criminal activities'.

[7][8] Their daughter, Nina, a student at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages was arrested at the age of 20, in June 1939, and sentenced to three years in a labour camp.

[9] Simon Liberman, a Menshevik who worked for the timber trust described Lomov as "an honest, direct man with old-fashioned ideas about the comradeship of the revolutionary circles and about the morals of the revolution itself" adding: He looked every inch a nihilist out of Turgenev's pages.