The son of an engineering officer, Mikhail Ashenbrenner studied with the First Moscow Cadet Corps, and was discharged in 1860, with the rank of lieutenant. As an officer, he and a group of comrades studied the natural sciences, and studied Feuerbach, Darwin, and Spencer. In 1864, he was deported to Turkestan for refusing to take part in suppressing the Polish Uprising against Russian rule. He lived in a remote part of Bessarabia until the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877, and then in Kherson province.