She used her new wealth to organise free higher education courses for women, and hired a lecturer named Yakov Kovalsky, whom she married but later divorced, until a police officer came and threatened to arrest them both unless they stopped.

In 1869, she met Sophia Perovskaya and began attending her women's meeting, both joining Zemlya i volya (The Land and Liberty).

[2] Although only involved in propaganda work, she was arrested in 1881, found guilty of being a member of an illegal organization and sentenced to an open-ended katorga in 1881.

According to the American journalist George Kennan, who visited Siberia in the 1880s and interviewed political exiles, a warden named Colonel Soloviev had the two women stripped naked in his presence, then told their male comrades that they were "not much to look at.

As a punishment, she was stripped naked by males soldiers, forced to wear the convict clothes of a common criminal, and taken 70 miles by stream in a small boat from Ust-Kara to a new place of deportation, Stretinsk.

In 1918, Kovalskaya became a research worker at Petrograd Historical Revolutionary Archive and member of the editorial board of the Katorga and Exile magazine.