Larisa Reisner

Larisa Mikhailovna Reisner (Russian: Лариса Михайловна Рейснер) was a Russian writer. She was born on 1 (13) May 1895 in Lublin, Poland, and died on 9 February 1926 in Moscow. She is best known for her participation to the Russian Civil War that followed the October Revolution and for being the wife of Fyodor Raskolnikov and the mistress of Karl Radek.

Biography

Larisa Reisner was born on 1 May 1895 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 an 1907, she and her family resided in Berlin, Germany, where the family fled because of 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 course at the Faculty of Law and Philology as well as psychoneurology at the Bekhterev Research Institute.

During the First World War she published a 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 become 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. During 1919 she served as the Commissar at the Naval Staff Headquarters in Moscow.

International Affairs

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

In October 1923 she travelled illegalley to Germany to witness the revolution there first-hand and write about them, 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 Alyosha Makarov. Her later writings came from Hamburg, whilst she was visiting a malaria clinic in nearby Wiesbadan as well as on a corruption scandal in Byelorussia.

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

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