[1] She is widely known for her correspondence with Karl Marx, in which she put into question the necessity of a capitalist industrialisation prior to socialism, in the context of the fact that there already were living farmer communities in Russia that had developed practices and cultures that had a communist component.

[3] After Zasulich was released in 1873, she settled in Kiev, where she joined the Kievan Insurgents, a revolutionary group of Mikhail Bakunin's anarchist supporters, and became a respected leader of the movement.

As her lifelong friend and fellow revolutionary Lev Deich wrote: In July 1877, a political prisoner, Arkhip Bogolyubov, refused to remove his cap in the presence of Colonel Fyodor Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg famous for his suppression of the Polish rebellions in 1830 and 1863.

She and her fellow social revolutionary Maria (Masha) Kolenkina were planning to shoot two government representatives: the prosecutor Vladislav Zhelekhovskii in the Trial of the 193 and another enemy of the populist movement.

[7] At her widely publicized trial, presided over by the prominent liberal judge Anatoly Koni, the sympathetic jury found Zasulich not guilty, an outcome that tested the effectiveness of the judicial reform of Alexander II.

[10] After the trial had been annulled, Zasulich fled to Switzerland, where she became a Marxist and co-founded the Emancipation of Labour group with Georgi Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod in 1883.

In mid-1900, the leaders of the radical wing of the new generation of Russian Marxists, Julius Martov, Vladimir Lenin, and Alexander Potresov, joined Zasulich, Plekhanov, and Axelrod in Switzerland.

She wrote very slowly and suffered actual tortures of creation... "Vera Ivanovna does not write, she puts mosaic together, Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] said to me at that time", and in fact she put down each sentence separately, walked up and down the room slowly, shuffled about in her slippers, smoked constantly hand-made cigarettes and threw the stubs and half-smoked cigarettes in every direction on all the window seats and tables, and scattered ashes over her jacket, hands, manuscripts, tea in the glass, and incidentally her visitor.