[1] He was forced to work for a living from a young age; though while still in his early teens, he produced his first political essay, on the condition of the Jewish poor in the Mogilev Region, in modern-day Belarus.

[2] Later, he obtained a place at Kiev University, with financial help from wealthy Jews, and organised a political discussion group, based on the ideas of P.L.Lavrov.

[3] The Union disintegrated when Axelrod moved to St Petersburg, at the time when Zemlya i Volya split over the issue of whether to assassinate the Tsar Alexander II.

To provide income for his family while in exile, Axelrod raised milk cows and produced his own kind of buttermilk which he then would sell and deliver himself to his customers.

By the end of the 1890s, Axelrod's company had offices in Zürich, Geneva, and Basel, which provided steady income and allowed him to support revolutionaries.

In Switzerland, in September 1883, Axelrod joined Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich and Leo Deutsch in Emancipation of Labor (Освобождение Труда), the first Russian Marxist group.

When Iskra supporters split at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903, Axelrod sided with the Menshevik faction.

He believed that the revolutionaries would eventually take instructions from organised labour, and during the 1905 revolution, he was the author of a proposal to hold a mass workers' conference.