[1] Bobrovsky became active in the Russian socialist movement during his student years in Kharkov and, in autumn 1898, established connections with a Moscow Social Democratic group affiliated with future Mensheviks Cherevanin and Avilov through an engineer named Shomet.
[1] In the Caucasus, as elsewhere, the Bolsheviks made use of a system of ciphers to maintain the secrecy of intraparty communications: the 34-letter phrase "Южно-американские штаты" ("South-American states") was Bobrovsky's individual cryptographic algorithm.
[1] Subjected to the additional penalty of five years of exile (he was sent to the northern city of Arkhangelsk rather than Siberia as a result of the exceptional circumstances of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905), Bobrovsky was freed by a group of protesting workers in Rostov during the journey and immediately went to join the Bolsheviks in Moscow.
[1] Like Vladimir Lenin and others in the Bolshevik current, Bobrovsky assumed an internationalist position towards the hostilities between the European imperialist powers during World War I, arguing that no Marxist movement could credibly lend support to a devastating intra-capitalist conflict, but was nonetheless drafted into the Imperial Russian Army as a veterinary doctor on the home front.
[1] As the Russian participation in the First World War lingered following the advancement of Alexander Kerensky to head of the Provisional Government after the overthrow of Czar Nicholas II, Bobrovsky was directed to assume work in Moscow as a military veterinarian.