February 2026 marks the centenary of the death of Larisa Reisner. A hundred years on, Reisner remains one of the most extraordinary revolutionaries to emerge from Soviet history. Her life was one of a kind and yet unmistakably of its time. Her politics were shaped by the last feverish years of the Russian Empire, thrown into the fire of 1917, and forged in the brutal improvisation of civil war. She was a poet, a journalist, a political organiser, and, more than anything, someone who consciously and repeatedly refused to accept the limits placed on her by suffocating bourgeois society.
Before 1917, and from her teenage years, she mixed with the strangest, sharpest crowds in Petrograd. Artists, poets, radicals, and bohemians gathered in places like the Stray Dog cabaret, a now-mythic hub of politics, queer life, women’s liberation, and art. The Stray Dog circle included figures such as Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky, alongside actors, Symbolists, Futurists, and sex workers. These were spaces of brilliance but also of rivalry, masculine self-mythologising. Reisner fought for intellectual authority there long before she led a cavalry charge onto the battlefield or commanded a naval fleet. As later recollections show, from an early age, Reisner insisted on argument, on political seriousness, and on her right to interpret the world.
The Stray Dog years were of vital importance for Reisner politically. They taught her that culture and art were not neutral terrain. She saw up close how aesthetic radicalism could mask political timidity. Her early impatience with empty formalism and rhetorical radicalism would later resurface in her advice to theatre practitioners: “They trust the body, which is good, but they distrust the genius of words, which is bad… You can’t act only with your head, but you can’t act without it either… Spirit, spirit, spirit”. The argument was aesthetic, but also had a political meaning. Revolution required deliberate thought as well as mechanical energy.
Bolshevik Organising and Reporting
Reisner joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, in the wake of the February Revolution and amid the radicalisation that culminated in the October Revolution of that year. The collapse of the old order clarified her position. In Reisner’s view, the Bolsheviks represented the most serious attempt to fuse political power with mass social transformation. She came to the party with years of experience organising and thinking. Thanks to centuries of tsarism, by 1917 approximately 70% of the Russian population was illiterate. Reisner, but also leading Bolsheviks such as Nadezhda Krupskaya and Anatoli Lunacharsky, saw education and literacy as key to the political activity of these workers. Reisner’s early political activity had included literacy and educational work among workers’ reading circles (some of which were initiated by her father, Mikhail Andreevich Reisner). In March 1917, she was active in running literature classes for sailors at the naval garrison of “red Kronstadt” and recently literate workers of the Petrograd Soviet.
When the revolutions of 1917 came in February and October, she began to report on the revolution in language that still feels current and alive. Reisner is widely considered the finest journalist of the revolutionary period. She didn’t write as a detached observer, nor did she simplify what she saw for the sake of blunt polemic. Reisner’s reporting on the years of revolution and civil war, captured in the collection of her articles entitled ‘Letters from the Front’, all speak to a writer who was both capturing history as it happened, and setting out a vital political perspective.
She frequently derided what she called “soul-daubers, who dip their brushes in buckets of cheap idealism and seek to sweeten the truth”. The vibrancy of Reisner’s journalism is unrivalled. She captured the fear and exhilaration, the chaos, the sudden tenderness between strangers, and how everything ordinary could be turned inside out. Immediately following the October Revolution, Reisner was made a lead editor with the new state publishing company, which mass produced political works and classic literary texts on the cheapest possible paper to make them accessible to all.
According to legend, on the night of 25 October, as the Bolsheviks moved to seize power, Reisner joined the sailors aboard the battleship Aurora sailing towards the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government was still in session. It was she, the story goes, who gave the order for the blank round to be fired at the Palace. This was the signal that marked the fall of the old regime and the start of the revolution. Whether this actually happened is up for debate, but the endurance of the story speaks to Reisner’s central role in the revolutionary period.
Civil war
Reisner’s commitment to political education endured throughout the darkest years of the civil war, with a substantial part of her time dedicated to travelling across the new Soviet state on agit-trains with posters, printing presses, and reading material. Sailors recalled ships being stormed by workers, soldiers and peasants to hear her speeches at this time. However, Reisner was also right there in the midst of the fighting. She was a “Pallas of the revolution” as Leon Trotsky later remembered.
Reisner was active at the Volga front and on the armoured train at Sviyazhsk in 1918, at one of the most precarious moments in the civil war. After Kazan fell to the Whites and the Czechoslovak Legion, Sviyazhsk became the last-ditch stronghold for the revolution. Reisner conducted agitation among sailors, trained up a cohort of cavalry riders, liaised between the command structures of the Red Army (still being built at that time), and wrote reports and sketches that doubled as morale-building texts. Reisner also frequently led dangerous intelligence-gathering missions during this period, serving as chief of an intelligence section of the Volga River flotilla in August 1918. The following year, in 1919, she served as the Commissar at the Naval Staff Headquarters in Moscow.
Discipline and comradeship
One of the political themes which emerges in Reisner’s reports is that of political discipline. Her writing from Sviyazhsk made clear that she saw discipline, particularly among those fighting against unforgiving odds in the Red Army, not as mechanical coercion or ‘following orders’ but as a voluntary, conscious bond. In essence, she argued that the way to ensure a coherent political line, even in the most difficult of circumstances, was to deliberately convince and win people to it. This was not a condescending, one-way process but one which demanded interest and respect. In one of her most famous passages, she recalled:
“I can see it now, 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… Tomorrow didn’t exist, there was only a brief hot smoky today… The days seemed so rich… As soon as one passed it seemed like a miracle. And it was a miracle…”
Reisner insisted that the Red Army’s strength, at its best, lay in conscious commitment. Crucially, this was inseparable from comradeship. What held Sviyazhsk together was not only orders from above but a web of shared conviction, humour, and care.
The civil war writings epitomise what made Reisner stand out as a writer, one whose words were read by millions thanks to the new mass-circulation Soviet press. She rejected the coldness or expediency that so often is taken as a strength in political writing. She returned again and again to the intimacy of comradeship as the driving force of revolution, foreshadowing what Rosa Luxemburg would later describe as “unrelenting revolutionary activity coupled with boundless humanity”. This included care for the wounded and the makeshift rituals that made life human in catastrophe, such as a game of cards or a shared meal. In her recollections, comradeship is not sentimental but material, built in shared risk. She wrote of fighters “bound together” not only by command but by love for one another and for the revolution. In doing so, she implicitly challenged the liberal separation of the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’.
Larisa Reisner, A ‘Burning Meteor’
Her relationship to leading figures of the revolution was similarly political rather than deferential. She worked in close proximity to Trotsky during the civil war and admired his organisational brilliance and rhetorical force. Trotsky, for his part, praised her courage and luminosity, later describing her as “a fine young woman [who] flashed across the revolutionary sky like a burning meteor”. Her first recorded encounters with Alexandra Kollontai took place in the opening days of the March Revolution at Kronstadt. Kollontai was there addressing mass meetings of sailors aboard the battleships, setting out the Bolsheviks’ message: revolution and women’s liberation, peace, bread and land. From then on, as party comrades, their paths crossed repeatedly.
Larisa was never directly involved in shaping policy within the Zhenotdel, the ‘women’s department’ of the Communist Party, though her party work overlapped with much of the department’s wide-ranging activity under Kollontai’s leadership. This included organising delegates’ assemblies in factories and villages to challenge sexual exploitation, working alongside various commissariats on questions of women’s health and working conditions, overseeing the publication of eighteen women’s newspapers and journals, and helping to develop an ambitious educational programme for women in the newly formed Soviet republics of Central Asia.
These experiences were to shape how Reisner conducted her vital work as a diplomat, or ‘red ambassador’, following the civil war. In the early 1920s, she travelled to Afghanistan and wrote vividly about the country’s struggle for independence. Unlike many European observers, she did not treat ‘the East’ as an exotic spectacle. She was sharply critical of colonial arrogance. Writing of Afghan Independence Day, she described a “foretaste of a completely new kind of social relations, shot through with the hot bright light of equality.” Equality, here, was not a metaphor but a living force, visible in the way different strata of society mingled in the public space. She saw anti-colonial movements as integral to world revolution, not peripheral to it. The revolution could not survive as a purely Russian phenomenon; it had to dismantle imperial hierarchies globally.
In 1920, in Astrakhan, a Muslim city then under Bolshevik leadership, she worked alongside a lively group of Zhenotdel activists from Moscow. Together with local women, they campaigned against polygamy and child marriage, and helped establish a new women’s club, a clinic and a library. The following year, she addressed International Women’s Day rallies in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, events organised by local Zhenotdel activists. By 1922, she was writing to Kollontai from Afghanistan, sending essays on what she saw. They were not, it seems, especially valued by her male comrades in Kabul. “The only person who might be interested in my sketches of Afghan women’s lives is you,” she remarked to Kollontai, indicating the warmth of their friendship.
Her writing of this period also revealed a capacity for wonder and beauty that was never at odds with her determined commitment to world revolution. In Jalalabad, exhausted and ill, she wrote home:
“The air is sweet with roses and cypresses… I’m trying to spend my last days here so I remember the East for the rest of my life… the bright carefree moments when we’re happy because the fountains splash, and there’s youth and beauty and everything that’s sacred, creative and hopeful…”
These words offer a reminder that the Soviet revolutionary period was never just about survival or crude economism. It was about life, about beauty, and about the belief that freedom was something to be felt and enjoyed by all, as much as it was something to be fought for and defended.
Fluent in Russian and German, Reisner also travelled to Germany to report on and to aid what seemed to be the next revolutionary moment in Europe. She worked underground for the Communist International in Berlin, maintaining contacts between activists across the country. Her 1923 journey to Hamburg during the failed German uprising underscored both her internationalism and her realism. She witnessed the fragility of revolutionary moments and the costs of hesitation. These experiences sharpened her sense that revolutionary politics required both discipline and imagination.
Education, revolutionary style
After the civil war, she devoted herself to the work of building the political life of the Soviet state. This included expanding the political education begun prior to the revolution, literacy projects, and cultural programmes, beginning in Petrograd and expanding across the nascent Soviet state. She also taught at the new workers’ colleges, preparing them to enter higher education institutions known as rabfaks. The rabfaks marked a true opening of university education to all, the only requirement for entry being that a student was literate. When she later published her civil war writings as a book, Reisner dedicated it to her students that were setting out in their education at the rabfaks: “our future statesmen, scientists, judges, and professors, hungry for knowledge, working by day, studying at night, selling their last pair of shoes to buy the works of Lenin and Marx, who in a few short years must not only assimilate the old culture but shape its most valuable features into new ideological forms”. This was the slow and unglamorous labour of making the revolution into something that millions of people lived, as well as fought for.
Reisner died in 1926, aged only thirty. She died at the moment when the revolutionary project was beginning to narrow. The late 1920s saw bureaucracy hardening, true internationalism coming under strain, and the culture of the early revolutionary years was being slowly replaced by a Stalinist, nationalist and profit-driven industrial logic. She was working on writing that condemned that direction; the brutal turn towards “socialism in one country”, towards coercion and conformity, towards industrialisation no matter the human cost. This was hinted at in one of her last published works, entitled Coal Iron and Living People. Workers’ struggles and sacrifices give them the right to make the widest criticisms,” she wrote in this book, “and the sharper these criticisms are, the more clearly we will see the face of the new post-revolutionary Russia”. Following her death, Reisner’s writings went out of official circulation, becoming a ‘non-person’ in Stalinist society, likely thanks to her friendship with Trotsky.
‘A Tiger’
In her lifetime, her writings were derided by conservatives in the Bolsheviks as unrepresentative of proletarian ‘purity’. They regarded her style as overly ornate and too “feminine” to convey the supposed realities of working-class life, and argued that her aristocratic background disqualified her from depicting the Revolution from a properly class-conscious standpoint. The most prominent of her critics was the poet and member of Stalin’s inner circle, Demyan Bedny. In an early example of what would now be considered ‘macho bullshit’ at a Moscow writers’ conference in 1925, he dismissed one of Reisner’s short books, The Front, as “tawdry, pretentious, and affected”. Bedny’s view was not popular. In the weeks that followed, the main newspapers of the Soviet state, Pravda and Izvestia, published dozens of letters in support of Reisner. These included a letter written by a miner from the Urals, Vladimir Lavrov, who stated: “‘Pretentious and affected’; that scum Demyan knows nothing. He’s just jealous; Larisa Mikhailovna is a tiger!”
A tiger she was. Larisa Reisner’s writings and activities are a testament to the fact that political activity, much less revolution, is never a mechanical process. Even the October Revolution was born as a living movement, full of contradiction and intensity, and full of people trying to build something better under impossible conditions. A century later, Reisner’s legacy remains a beacon for those hoping to change the world in the truest sense.
She did not care at all for conforming to what women of her day were supposed to be, or how they were supposed to behave. “Larisa had no time for women who sighed into their pillows, complaining of their helplessness”, wrote the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam, a friend of Reisner’s mother. Similarly, she had no patience for politics that demanded the sacrifice of joy, beauty, or tenderness. She never accepted the idea that any part of the world was foreign, or that any person was beneath attention. One hundred years on, Larisa Reisner still stands as proof that revolution is not only strategy and discipline, but also friendship and imagination, and that the fight for a different world has always needed people willing to go against the grain.
Further reading: Larisa Reisner; The Hammer and the Anvil; Dispatches from the the Frontline of the Russian Civil War (trans Jack Robertson) London; Redwords 2021
