Larissa Reissner

Larissa Mikhailovna Reissner (Лариса Михайловна Рейснер; 1 (13) May 1895 – 9 February 1926) was a Russian writer. She is best known for her leadership roles on the side of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War that followed the October Revolution and for being the wife of Fyodor Raskolnikov and the mistress of Karl Radek.

Biography
Larissa Reissner was born in Lublin, Poland, into the family of Michael Andreevich Reisner, a law professor in Lublin, and Ekaterina Alexandrovna Khitrova.

She spent her early childhood in Tomsk, where her father was appointed Professor of Law at the University in 1897. Between 1903 and 1907, she and her family resided in Berlin, Germany, where the family fled because of the father's political activity, with Larisa attending a primary school in the Zehlendorf district. In the aftermath of the 1905-06 Russian Revolution, they moved to Saint Petersburg where she passed her final school exams with a gold medal in 1912 and went on to study at St Petersburg University, including studying courses at the Faculty of Law and Philology as well as psychoneurology at the Bekhterev Research Institute.

During the First World War, she published an anti-war literary journal, Rudin, financially supported by her parents who pawned their possessions to fund it.

Revolution and the Civil War
After the February Revolution, Larisa began to write for Maxim Gorky's paper Novaya Zhizn (New Life). She also took part in the Provisional Government's spelling reform programme, teaching at workers' and sailors' clubs in Petrograd. After the October revolution, Larisa worked at the Smolny Institute with Anatoly Lunacharsky, cataloguing art treasures.

She became a member of the Bolshevik Party in 1918, marrying Fyodor Raskolnikov in the summer of that year. During the Civil War, she was a soldier and a political commissar of the Red Army. She served as chief of an intelligence section of the Volga River flotilla in August 1918 battle for Sviazhsk. During 1919, she served as the Commissar at the Naval Staff Headquarters in Moscow.

International Affairs
In 1921, while married to Raskolnikov, she and her husband traveled to Afghanistan as representatives of the Soviet Republic, carrying out diplomatic negotiations.

In October 1923 she traveled illegally to Germany to witness the revolution there first-hand and write about it, producing collections of articles entitled Berlin, October 1923 and Hamburg at the Barricades.

During her stay in Germany she had become Karl Radek's lover. On her return to Russia she and Raskolnikov divorced in January 1924.

Final Years
During 1924-1925, she worked as a special correspondent for Izvestiya, first in the Northern Urals where she adopted a boy by the name of Alyosha Makarov. Her later writings came from Hamburg, whilst she was visiting a malaria clinic in nearby Wiesbaden. She also wrote articles on a corruption scandal in Byelorussia.

During this time, she also worked on Leon Trotsky's Commission for the Improvement of Industrial Products.

Larissa Reissner died on 9 February 1926, in the Kremlin Hospital, Moscow, from typhoid; she was 30 years old.

Tributes
In his autobiography My Life Bolshevik leader and founder of the Red Army Leon Trotsky paid tribute to her: "Larissa Reisner [...] was herself prominent in the Fifth army, as well as in the revolution as a whole. This fine young woman flashed across the revolutionary sky like a burning meteor, blinding many. With her appearance of an Olympian goddess, she combined a subtle and ironical mind with the courage of a warrior. After the capture of Kazan by the Whites, she went into the enemy camp to reconnoitre, disguised as a peasant woman. But her appearance was too extraordinary, and she was arrested. While she was being cross-examined by a Japanese intelligence officer, she took advantage of an interval to slip through the carelessly guarded door and disappear. After that, she engaged in intelligence work. Later, she sailed on war-boats and took part in battles. Her sketches about the civil war are literature. With equal gusto, she would write about the Ural industries and the rising of the workers in the Ruhr. She was anxious to know and to see all, and to take part in everything. In a few brief years, she became a writer of the first rank. But after coming unscathed through fire and water, this Pallas of the revolution suddenly burned up with typhus in the peaceful surroundings of Moscow."