June 25] 1852, the oldest of six children of Nikolai Alexandrovich Figner, a retired army staff captain and his wife, the former Ekaterina Khristoforovna Kuprianova, both members of the hereditary Russian nobility.

[2] Her father served in the state forestry service, resigning that post to become a local administrative functionary called a "peace mediator" in the years after emancipation.

During Vera Figner's childhood, the adults in her family thought that she was "a beautiful doll ... good to look at ... but empty"[4] and expected that she would go into society and marry someone older and rich.

[9] This meant leaving Russia to study abroad, and Vera Figner turned her eyes to the University of Zurich, which was accepting Russian women despite their lack of gimnazium diplomas.

In 1873, Figner joined the Fritsche circle, which was composed of thirteen young Russian radical women, some of whom would become important members of the All-Russian Social Revolutionary Organization.

A directive banning all Russian women students from remaining in Zurich was published in the Government Herald, accusing them of using their medical knowledge to perform abortions on themselves, in 1873.

She returned to Russia that year without getting her degree, but found herself unable to help the circle and so got a license as a paramedic and divorced her husband, where she became active with other revolutionary intellectuals in the Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty) organization.

[14] The Narodnovoltsy (Narodnaya Volya members) established study circles of workers in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Kiev, and Kharkov, and coordinated propaganda efforts among students at the country's universities.

The State secret police were relentless in tracking down members of the terrorist organization responsible for the killing of the Tsar and by the spring of 1882 only Vera Figner remained at large in Russia out of Narodnaya Volya's executive committee of 1879–80.

[16] Figner's main activity as the de facto head of the Narodnaya Volya organization in 1882 related to the restoration of the underground apparatus, which was devastated by secret police arrests and seizures of equipment.

[16] Originally based in Odessa, Figner later moved to Kharkov, where she was ultimately betrayed by fellow Executive Committee member Sergey Degayev, who turned police informer in order to lessen his punishment after his December 20, 1882 arrest.