Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) lived an extraordinary life. She fought for working-class socialism at its high point a century ago, but died just before Stalin snuffed out the workers ’ state she had fought to defend. Cathy Porter’s newly updated Larisa Reisner: A Biography captures Reisner’s passion and sheds new light on her life.
EARLY LIFE
Larisa Reisner was born on 2 May 1895 in Lublin, then in tsarist Poland. (Both her names are often misspelt with two “ss”.) In 1898, her father Mikhail Reisner was exiled to Siberia for his political activities and for the next five years the family lived in the city of Tomsk. Between 1903 and 1907, they lived in exile in Berlin, where Larisa regarded leading German Social Democratic Party (SPD) figures such as Julie Bebel, Sophie Borisovna and Karl Liebknecht as aunts and uncles.
In 1912, Larisa Reisner left school and entered St Petersburg University, wrote poetry and threw herself into the city's bohemian nightlife. Her circle’s motto was: “We are bohemians, restless, rootless, turbulent, forever seeking and not finding, creating new idols, and abandoning them in the name of a new god.”
RUSSIA IN REVOLUTION
In March 1917, Larisa Reisner joined the educational programme of the Petrograd Soviet, teaching literacy and literature in the workers’ clubs. At Red Kronstadt, she met Fyodor Raskolnikov and gave literature classes on ships and in the sailors’ clubs.
There are several accounts of Reisner’s activities on the night the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917. In one account, she sailed to Petrograd with Raskolnikov and the sailors on the battleship Aurora and it was she who gave the orders for the cannon blanks to be fired at the Winter Palace. Another claimed she joined the detachment of Red Guards who stormed the Peter and Paul Fortress. A friend reported that she presented herself for duty to the Bolshevik Central Committee, huddled in a small side room in the Smolny. When asked “What can you do, comrade?” replied, “I can fight, ride, write reports from the front, and if necessary die”.
In October 1917, she worked with the Bolshevik government, first at the Commissariat of Education, then at the Commissariat of Naval Affairs. In spring 1918 she joined the Bolshevik Party and in May, married Raskolnikov in a new state "red wedding" ceremony.
RUSSIA — CIVIL WAR
Reisner made her mark during the Russian Civil War. In late July 1918, she joined a detachment of sailors on the two hundred-mile train journey to form a new naval flotilla on the Volga river. In August-September 1918 Reisner participated in the first, critical military turning point of the civil war. Its fate was decided at Svyazhsk, where a few hundred Bolshevik volunteers defended the bridgehead over the Volga, barring the Czech Legion’s access to the river route from Kazan to Nizhny Novgorod, and the railway line to Moscow. She summed up the spirit of the fighting:
"Svyazhsk was the furnace in which the nucleus of the Red Army was forged, at the height of the retreat and panic, the crossroads from which the tide of the revolutionary offensive began to roll in all directions… this Svyazhsk where not one soldier fought under compulsion, where everything that was alive was fighting to defend the Revolution, bound together by voluntary ties of discipline in a struggle that had seemed too hopeless at the outset… Those who slept on the station floor, in straw littered with broken glass, were afraid of nothing. No one asked when it would end. Tomorrow didn’t exist, there was only a brief hot smoky today, and we lived for it as we live at harvest time… The days seemed so rich, so utterly unlike previous life . As soon as one passed it seemed like a miracle. And it was a miracle…
Reisner wrote of Trotsky’s miracles of leadership and organisation at Svyazhsk, “refusing to yield an inch, inspiring fighters with his ruthless authority and icy calm”. She wrote:
But there is another force in revolutionary war, without which victory is impossible, and that is the romanticism of the Revolution, which inspires people to throw themselves straight from the barricades of 1917 into the harsh discipline of the army, without losing the light step learnt from street battles and political demonstrations, or the quick thinking gained from decades in the underground. It means swimming against the tide, beating back the exhaustion of the four years of war and the stormy waters of the Revolution... Ultimately it’s the revolutionary instinct that is the supreme judge. Trotsky possesses this instinct. The revolutionary in him is never pushed aside by the soldier, the leader, the commander.
The day after the battle for Svyazhsk, Trotsky ordered the soldiers who had deserted to be arrested. 27 were shot, including eight Bolsheviks. Reisner argued that it was necessary, in order to forge the “iron spirit” of the Red Army.
The night after the executions, she joined Trotsky and Raskolnikov on the destroyer Endurance, at the head of a squadron of gunboats sailing with their lights out in battle formation to Kazan. Slipping through the narrow entrance to the harbour, they fired at a caravan of fuel barges, which went up in flames. The Whites fired back, grazing the Endurance’s bows and broke its rudder chain, causing it to ram one of its own gunboats. But engineers managed to repair the damage and the squadron returned without losses.
In December 1918, Reisner was appointed as the Red Navy’s first woman political commissar. She spent two years as cavalry instructor, flag-secretary, war correspondent and reconnaissance officer, fighting in the battles for Kazan and Tsaritsyn, Astrakhan and Azerbaijan, pushing herself to the limit, enduring danger, hunger and exhaustion.
AFGHANISTAN
Reisner’s next assignment was in Afghanistan, the key to Soviet Russia’s complicated relations with British imperial power in Asia. Between 1921 and 1923, she was a member of the first Soviet diplomatic mission in Kabul, with Raskolnikov serving as ambassador.
Resiner’s relationship with Raskolnikov deteriorated during these years. Reisner told her friend Elisabeth Poretsky that while in Afghanistan, Raskolnikov had abused, humiliated and beaten her. She told how he reported her to Moscow for conducting her intelligence work with the British “naked, at their quarters, covered only in a fur coat”, and she had been reprimanded for “behaviour unbecoming to a Party member”. “She said he was insanely jealous and terribly violent”, Poretsky wrote, “and she showed me the vicious scar he had made on her back with his riding crop”.
Reisner suffered two miscarriages in Kabul. She left Afghanistan in May 1923 without Raskolnikov, three and a half months pregnant. In September, she was rushed to hospital in Moscow and had a third miscarriage. She divorced Raskolnikov.
GERMANY
In Autumn 1923, mass strikes seemed to be taking Germany close to revolution. Reisner was sent to live there illegally, with false papers, sharing the underground lives of workers in Berlin and Hamburg. She reported on Hamburg’s crushed communist-led uprising and the fight against Hitler’s fascists. She worked for Comintern secretary Karl Radek and began a romantic relationship with him.
After the uprising was defeated, in the second week of November, Radek sent her to Hamburg. At the end of November, she left Hamburg and returned with Radek to Moscow. She worked on her Hamburg writings, studying trial records, corresponding with those still there, checking her material with them and with the exiled Hans Kippenberger. The first complete edition of Hamburg at the Barricades was published in December 1923 in German and a few weeks later in Russian. She also published a collection of articles titled Berlin, October 1923 . This all took place in the midst of passionate debate about the mistakes made in Germany and who was responsible. This debate formed part of the emerging conflict between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky.
Reisner returned to Germany as a journalist in 1925, travelling across the country reporting on workers’ lives under the new president, Field Marshal von Hindenburg.
RUSSIA
In January 1924, Lenin died. Reisner wrote an obituary ‘Tomorrow We Must Live, Today We Grieve’. Between May and October that year, Reisner spent five months travelling around the industrial heartlands of the Urals and Eastern Ukraine, living with workers’ families, joining them on their shifts in the mines and factories, reporting on their achievements, sacrifices and suffering in building the new Soviet economy. In December 1924, she published her book, Coal Iron and Living People , describing her travels. Reisner also reported for Pravda on the conference of the Communist Women’s International, on its campaigns against fascism and for women’s reproductive rights.
CENSORSHIP & MYTHS
Reisner died on 9 February 1926, three months before her 31st birthday. She received an official funeral, but her association with Trotsky and Radek meant she would soon disappear, as the Stalinists strengthened their grip on power.
In other cases, Reisner was denigrated. In the memoirs of Red Army commander Alexander Boyarchikov, once a Left Oppositionist, broken in the gulag, she was depicted as a scheming sex maniac and demented stalker of Trotsky. All this nonsense is repeated as fact by feted historian Robert Service in his 2009 biography of Trotsky.
ASSESSMENT
Better the verdict of fellow revolutionaries. Radek wrote:
She hated everyday philistinism, she wasn’t interested in accumulating things or settling down, she didn’t want to sink into dull routine. As an artist and fighter for the Revolution, she could always find in life’s prose the lofty, the gripping, the substantive, the great.
Trotsky too was effusive, calling her “this Pallas [titan] of the revolution”. He wrote in My Life :
Larisa 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 and the courage of a warrior… 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.
Porter’s book is the best English language account of Reisner’s life, although it is marred by a bizarre five-page rant (p.296-301) about a US proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. Porter is planning to publish an English translation of Reisner’s books next year, so activists can read her writings first hand. We need more young socialists like Larisa Reisner.