After finishing Chekhov Gymnasium in 1882, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law of Saint Petersburg University, but was dismissed for revolutionary activity with Narodnaya Volya and exiled to his parents' home in Taganrog.

In 1886, he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he was arrested and later exiled into northeastern Siberia, near Yakutsk (1889–1899), where he studied the Chukchi people, their way of life, traditions, language, and beliefs, giving him valuable material for poems and belletristic essays.

In March 1929, at the Sixth Plenum of the Committee for Assistance to the Peoples of the Northern Regions (the "Committee of the North"), Bogoraz and his fellow "northerners" (ethnographers) were viciously attacked by the "orientalists" (mostly Russian rabfak students, "veterans of many a battle and keen on participating in the nationwide search for class enemies"):At various meetings, the old revolutionary had been accused of turning the institute into a scientific laboratory; of trying to split the institute and gain personal power; of "populist culture-mongering [as opposed to Marxist socio-economic revolutionism] and of a sentimental approach to the peoples of the north"; of denying the existence of classes among the natives and, "as a result .

More ambitiously, the "orientalists" charged the Committee of the North with not exercising proper political control and publishing "anti-Party and anti-Marxist" materials in their official organ Sovetskii Sever.

[5]But Bogoraz and his allies defended themselves stoutly, and by claiming to adhere to the new political line (defining shamans as priests, applying a strict class analysis to the tribes, and laying the groundwork for collectivization) they managed to keep their positions, though they remained under close scrutiny.