In August 1918 he was living openly at Tashkent under the local Soviet, while aiding both White and British Forces in Central Asia with information and assistance to help forestall the spread of Bolshevik power in the region.
Arrested by the CHEKA in October 1918, he was one of the main organisers of a coup which temporarily overthrew the Tashkent Soviet on 6 January 1919, and incidentally freed him from prison.
This was defeated when the railway workers changed sides when they learned that the new government was royalist and reactionary.
Nazaroff himself managed to evade the pursuing Bolsheviks and escaped through the mountains to Kashgar in China in early 1920, as he tells in his book Hunted Through Central Asia (translated into English in 1932 and reissued in 2002).
He later moved to London in search of work as a geologist, before accepting an assignment in Equatorial Africa, far as he hoped from Soviet agents.