In 1874, a few months after qualifying as a surgeon, he again 'went to the people' in the Volga region, and was one of the organisers of Land and Liberty (Земля и Воля - Zemlya i Volya).

When Zemlya i Volya split in August 1879, with one faction - impatient with the failure to politicise the peasantry - breaking off the form the People's Will and plan the assassination of the Tsar, Aptekman joined the future founder of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov and in organising Black Partition (Черный Передел -Cherny Peredel) grouping which insisted that the continued use of propaganda was the best means of achieving social change.

In 1893 and 1894 Aptekman was one of the primary leaders of the People's Rights Party (Partiia Narodnogo Prava), an illegal constitutionalist populist organization.

[4] But later in the same decade, when Marxist ideas began to spread among the young, he broke with the Narodniks and joined what became the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

After the outbreak of war in 1914. he sided with the Menshevik-Internationalists, led by Yuri Martov Having returned to Russia after the February Revolution, in 1919, aged 70, he announced that he accepted the legitimacy of the communist government.