past record - was a founding member of Chornyi peredel (Black Repartition), rather than the more violent and conspiratorial People's Will, who carried out the assassination of the Tsar. Conversion to Marxism In 1880 Deutsch and other leaders of the Black Repartition group, including George Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich and Pavel Axelrod emigrated to Geneva. Abroad, Plekhanov studied the works of Karl Marx, and persuaded the other three to join him in 1883 in creating the Marxist Emancipation of Labour. All of Russia's Marxist parties, including the Communist Party, traced their lineage from this group. As its most experienced illegal operator, Deutsch was put in charge of smuggling Marxist literature into Russia, but was arrested in Germany in March 1884. Arrest and exile It was extremely rare for Russian revolutionaries to be extradited by any European government, but Deutsch was treated as a common criminal because the attempt to kill Gorinovich, and sent back to St Petersburg in a cattle truck. At this trial, he freely admitted the offence, but was denied the right to explain his reasons for it, and was sentenced to 13 years and four months in prison. In 1890, he was deported to the Kara region of Siberia, where he shared a cell with other political revolutionaries. According to his account, when Deutsch told them that he had become a Marxist — an ideology then little known outside Germany: "Had I announced myself a follower of the prophet Mohammed, they could scarcely have been more surprised." Return to political activity In 1900, Deutsch made a dramatic escape from Siberia, through Japan, the USA, Liverpool, London, and Paris, to rejoin the Emancipation of Labour League in Switzerland in November 1901. His three former comrades there had since joined Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov, and Alexander Potresov on the six-member editorial board of the newspaper Iskra, which was riven by rivalry between the generations. Plekhanov hoped that Deutsch would take over the task of smuggling the paper into Russia from Lenin, putting the older revolutionaries back in control of the project, but his long imprisonment had taken too much of a toll for him to assume the task. Deutsch was present as an observer at the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 when it split into its Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. He sided the Mensheviks - Martov, Axelrod, Zasulich, Leon Trotsky et al. Lenin's widow