Akulov was born in St Petersburg, son a small trader. He joined the revolutionaries as a teenager, during the 1905 revolution and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1907. In 1912, he was one of the organisers of one of the largest demonstrations ever staged in St Petersburg during the reign of the Tsars, in which 60,000 factory workers participated. After the Bolshevik revolution in November 1917, he was posted to Yekaterinburg, as secretary of the Ural provincial party committee of the Russian Communist Party, and from there played a leading role in establishing communist rule in Siberia, and Central Asia. He was a party secretary in Crimea, 1921–22, chairman of the Donets miners' union, 1922–27, and chairman of the Ukraine trade union council, 1927-1931.