An activist during his years as a student, he was expelled and exiled for his revolutionary activities, forcing him to flee the country to Switzerland, where he became a disciple of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

On 17 June 1869, he decided to flee the country, moving through Ukraine and crossing into Austria-Hungary, before heading onto the United States, where he worked in factories and attempted to organise Russian emigrant workers.

[6] Back in Switzerland, he became a key supporter of Bakunin in his factional dispute with Pyotr Lavrov, later joining the Jura Federation of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) and participating in its Congresses as a delegate.

In 1873, Sazhin and other anarchists established a printing press, where they published a number of Bakunin's works including Statism and Anarchy and organised their smuggling into the Russian Empire.

During this time, he made contact with Isaac Pavlovsky's revolutionary circle in Taganrog and participated in Bakunin's failed Bologna insurrection.

[7] Together with Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, German Lopatin and Dmitrii Klements [ru], he began plotting to carry out an insurrection in the Ural region of the Russian Empire, himself returning clandestinely to Russia in March 1876.

Over the subsequent month, he smuggled revolutionary literature into the Russian Empire over the border with Germany, for which he was arrested on 24 April 1876 while carrying a false passport.

In May 1881, he was transferred to a forced settlement in Siberia, first being placed in Kultuk then in Kirensk, in the Irkutsk Governorate, where he married fellow revolutionary Evgenia Figner [ru].