The family eventually moved to Paris, where Kuzmenko and Makhno worked odd jobs in order to make enough money to sustain themselves. In 1927, the couple finally divorced, with Kuzmenko leaving Paris to join an organization of pro-Soviet Ukrainian exiles, within which she made repeated unsuccessful attempts to return to Ukraine. By March 1934, Makhno's health had completely deteriorated and Kuzmenko moved him to a hospital, visiting him regularly during his final days and standing by his side when he died. She attended his funeral with their daughter, but she was reportedly too overcome with grief to speak. A few months later, she sent a letter to the anarcho-syndicalist journal Probuzhdenie, in which she defended her late husband from a defamatory article published in the nationalist paper Nova Pora, categorically denying a number of charges against him and writing a brief biography of him and the Makhnovshchina. She also took care of the manuscripts for the second and third volumes of Makho's memoirs, entrusting them to an aid committee which in turn passed them onto Volin for publication.
