A member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party since 1898, Zemlyachka worked in Odessa and Yekaterinoslav as an agent for the Iskra newspaper, founded by Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov.

She continued to support Lenin when he appeared to be losing control of the Bolsheviks, who wanted to bring about a reconciliation of the factions of the RSDLP.

Zemlyachka was appointed secretary of the Crimean party committee in November 1920, when the last White Army left in the war, commanded by Baron Wrangel, was evacuating the peninsula.

Leaflets were dropped by aeroplane over Sevastopol, the last city held by the Whites, which offered an amnesty to those who surrendered to the Red Army.

They were signed in the name of the former commander-in-chief of the Imperial Army, General Aleksei Brusilov, who was persuaded to go to Crimea to supervise their surrender by the Deputy People's Commissar for War, Ephraim Sklyansky.

The order to carry out this massacre was signed by the Chairman of the Crimean revolutionary committee, Béla Kun, Zemlyachka, and the head of the Crimean cheka, Semyon Dukelsky[7] According to English writer Donald Rayfield, Kun and Zemlyachka were lovers, and she was "a Cheka sadist who tied the officers in pairs to planks and burned them alive in furnaces or drowned them in barges that she sank offshore.

[9] Social scientist, Nikolay Zayats, from the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus has disputed the large, “fantastic” estimates and attributed this to eyewitness accounts and White army emigre press.

Numerous sources, including the Russian version of Wikipedia[12][circular reference] say that Zemlyachka was born into a Jewish family.

[2] Notably, her major promotion, which made her the most prominent woman in the Soviet government, was announced in the same month - May 1939 - that the Jewish People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov was sacked, because "Stalin was obviously thinking of a Soviet-German Pact.