[1][2] She joined the Bolsheviks in January 1904, aged 18, as a student at a women's college in Moscow, where she was studying mathematics and physics, and was immediately involved in the illegal distribution of party literature.

Arrested again in December 1910, she was sentenced to four years exile in Narym, in Siberia, but escaped, and emigrated to Berlin to get medical treatment.

She returned via Kraków, where she met Vladimir Lenin and made arrangements to smuggle illegal literature and correspondence across the border.

She took notes at the meeting that set the date for the October Revolution of 1917, and took a leading part in organising the takeover of power in Moscow.

In December 1917, she appointed a member of the collegium of the NKVD, but a month later was transferred to economic work as head of Vesenka.

In February 1918, Yakovleva supported the Left Communists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, who opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the war between Russia and Germany at the cost of leaving most of Ukraine and the Baltic states under German occupation.

She returned to work in June, and in September 1918 was appointed deputy head of the Petrograd (St Petersburg) Cheka.

[3] Following the Third Moscow Trial, in March 1938, she appeared as a witness, to testify that in 1918, Bukharin and other Left Communists had plotted to arrest and possibly assassinate Lenin, Stalin and Yakov Sverdlov.

She was held in solitary confinement Oryol Prison, where she was executed, together with all other inmates, three months after the German invasion of the USSR.