Ufa Governorate
Kuskova was born in Ufa, in the Ufa Governorate of the Russian Empire. Her father was a school teacher. As a child, she moved to Samara and then to Saratov. In the 1880s, she became involved in the revolutionary movement. In 1890, she went to study in Moscow and participated in clandestine Narodnik circles. She was affiliated with the party of the 'People's Right' of Mark Natanson and met the future Socialist-Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov. She was arrested in 1893 and exiled to Nizhni Novgorod (Gorki).