Rakovsky subsequently rejoined his wife in Saint Petersburg, where he hoped to settle down and engage in revolutionary activities (he was probably expelled after an initial attempt to enter the country, but was allowed to return). An adversary of Peter Berngardovich Struve after the latter moved towards market liberalism, he became acquainted with, among others, Nikolay Mikhaylovsky and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, while authoring articles for "Nashe Slovo" and helping distribute "Iskra". His close relationship with Plekhanov led Rakovsky to a position between the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, one he kept from 1903 to 1917; the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin was initially hostile to Rakovsky, and at one point wrote to Karl Radek that "we Bolsheviks do not have the same road as his kind of people".