On his return, in October, he joined a Marxist circle founded by Mikhail Brusnev, which was one of the first social democratic groups to make contact with factory workers.

He moved to Nizhny Novgorod where he started military service, only to be arrested in 1892 because of his link with Brusnev, and taken to Moscow, where he spent ten months in prison.

During a visit to St Petersburg, he delivered a talk to a Marxist circle organised by Stepan Radchenko, and was aggressively challenged by Vladimir Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, who was in the audience.

In these early years he was "the most influential Leninist in the whole of Russia",[8] although, unlike Lenin, Krasin was a 'conciliator' who hoped to re-unite the opposing factions of the RSDLP.

He lived his double life as an apparently law-abiding factory-manager so convincingly that the workers at one point called for his dismissal, unaware that he was secretly helping produce the literature that encouraged them to resist.

[10] In the late 1930s, Soviet history-books were revised to attribute the founding and running of the printing-press to "Koba" Djughashvili (later known as Joseph Stalin), who also lived in Baku at the time.

He obtained a job as the chief engineer for the industrialist, Savva Morozov who owned textile works in Orekhovo-Zuyevo, near Moscow, and to whom he had been introduced by Maxim Gorky.

In April 1905 in London, Krasin chaired the Third Congress of the RSDLP, called to create a Bolshevik organisation that excluded Mensheviks and others, and was re-elected to the Central Committee.

Liadov also said that the bomb used to blow up the home of the Russian Prime Minister, Pyotr Stolypin in 1906 was made under Krasin's direction.

[12][13] Yuri Felshtinsky identified Leonid Krasin as the most likely assassin of Savva Morozov, who died on 26 May 1905 in Cannes, France, by gunshot wound.

Released due to the lack of evidence against him, he emigrated to Berlin, gave up revolutionary activity and focused on his career as an engineer, working for Siemens.

Wise was representing the Entente's Supreme Economic Council; with him[citation needed] Krasin negotiated the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, signed in March 1921.

[a] After Krasin's organized Bolshevik supporters obtained BCEN-Eurobank in Paris as the first overseas Soviet bank,[20] he, as head of the Centrosoyuz mission, which was formed on 24 February 1920 and was an attempt by the Bolshevik's Council of People's Commissars to break through the trade and political blockade of Bolshevist Russia by Western countries, travelled to London, met with British authorities beginning on 31 May 1920, and established "Soviet House" or "Russia House" at 49 Moorgate in London,[24] which was known as the All-Russian Cooperative Limited Liability Company "ARCOS" (Russian: ООО Всероссийское Кооперативное Общество, «АРКОС»).

His necktie matched his suit and shirt in colour, and even his stickpin was stuck with the special jauntinees of a well-dressed man ... Krasin always emphasised his foreign experience and contacts - his cosmopolitanism.

[27]He and his wife were the parents of three daughters, including:[28] While Krasin was negotiating formal recognition of the Bolshevik government by the United Kingdom and France, and despite remedies proposed by his old friend, the physician Alexander Bogdanov, he died from a blood disease.

Krasin's funeral procession three days later included 6,000 mourners, many of them Bolshevik sympathizers; he was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium before being buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow.