Taratuta joined the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) during its founding in 1898, but within a few years moved towards more radical anarchist positions.
She became a leading figure in the Odesa anarchist communist movement, organising a terrorist campaign against Russian imperial officials.
Taratuta was born Elka Ruvinska,[b] in 1874[1] or 1876,[3] into a Jewish family in the southern Ukrainian village of Novodmytrivka Persha [uk], in the Taurida Governorate of the Russian Empire.
[3] In 1895, she was arrested for socialist political activism,[4] and in 1897, she joined the Yelisavethrad branch of the South Russian Workers' Union [ru], led by Juda Grossman.
After meeting the party's leaders Georgi Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin in early 1903,[1] she quickly became disillusioned with the social democrats and joined the emigrant Ukrainian anarchist movement.
There they joined the anarchist Union of the Irreconcilable (Ukrainian: Союзу непримиренних), which local police believed to have been behind the assassination of Russian Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve.
Olha Taratuta and her sister Rosa were detained on suspicion of being connected to the assassin Stepan Balmashov, but no evidence of such was found and they were released in September 1904.
Before she was even thirty years old, Taratuta had adopted the nom de guerre of Babuskha (English: Granny) and gained a reputation as a leading figure in the Odesa anarchist movement.
[9] By December 1905, rumours of a coming antisemitic pogrom began to spread around Odesa and the city's anarchists responded by carrying out bomb attacks against Tsarist officials.
In late 1907, Taratuta returned once again to Odesa, where she organised an anarchist prison break and carried out an armed robbery of a factory, stealing 3,200 rubles.
[21] Along with fellow Chernoe Znamia member Vladimir Striga [ru],[22] she joined the Intransigents (Ukrainian: Непримиримі), which was made up of anarchists and other followers of Jan Wacław Machajski.
[21] That same month, Taratuta moved on to Kyiv, where she made a botched attempt at breaking out anarchists that were incarcerated in Lukyanivska Prison.
[36] According to Viktor Bilash, Taratuta established contact with Ukrainian anarchist exiles on the other side of the Polish border, maintaining communications with the movement abroad and smuggling literature back into the Soviet Union.
[38] In March of that year, she was arrested for publishing anarchist propaganda,[36] but following the intervention of the anarchist-turned-Bolshevik Georgy Pyatakov, she was swiftly released.
[36] Taratuta also decided to release her own account of her time in the Lukyanivska Prison, which was published in Hard Labour and Exile: History of the Revolutionary Movement in Russia.
[40] In January 1927, she returned to Odesa, taking a job at the House of Revolutionary Veteran, while she clandestinely worked to rebuild the local militant anarchist movement.
At a secret anarchist meeting chaired by Taratuta, the possibility of a war between the Soviet Union and the Entente was discussed, with the majority resolving to defend Ukraine if it was ever invaded.
In February 1927, Taratuta attended the funeral of the anarchist Lev Tarlo, during which she gave a speech that the GPU considered to be anti-Soviet agitation.