[1][2] Frida Abramovna Ichak was born into a working class Jewish family in Marijampolė, a midsized multicultural town halfway between Königsberg and Vilnius, today in Lithuania but at that time in Congress Poland, part of the Russian Empire.
[1] She attended an all-girls' school in nearby Kaunas and embarked on an apprenticeship in garment making, subsequently working in the same trade in order to help support the family.
[6] The title of her doctoral dissertation implies a mathematical-scientific focus: "Über die Ausnahmestellung der Wärme unter den Energieformen" (loosely: "The exceptional properties of heat as a form of energy").
[5] War erupted in July 1914 and by May 1915 they were living together in Zürich: Switzerland was less directly affected by the fighting than the "great powers", Germany, Russia, Britain and France.
[11] The same report described Frida Rubiner as a "rabid Bolshevik [who likes to disguise herself as] a poet's pussycat" ("rabiate Bolschewistin [die sich gern als] Dichtergattin [tarne]").
On the other hand, despite employing detectives, mail intercepts and house searches, the authorities in Zürich failed to find compelling evidence against the Rubiners.
[11] In the Autumn of 1918 Frida Rubiner visited Vienna: her motives, according to her own reports, were more artistic than political, and she probably returned to Zürich before the end of the year.
[1][3] In February 1919 they returned to Berlin, and while Ludwig Rubiner took a job with a publishing house, his wife embarked on a trip to Kaunas and Vilnius to visit relatives in the war torn former western territories of the Russian empire.
[5] She (probably) participated - possibly without any "official mandate"[1] - in the founding congress of the Communist International (Comintern) which took place in Moscow early in March 1919.
[15] In 1924 the party ordered her back to Germany where she took over as political editor of the Berlin based Rote Fahne (Red Flag) newspaper.
[1] She spent some time in Thuringia in order to lead a propaganda offensive against Guido Heym [de] and the "Lenin League" ("Leninbund").
As a backer of the Stalin faction Rubiner was necessarily engaged in what she later described as an active struggle ("einen aktiven Kampf") against the non-Stalinists still exercising influence at the institute.
Between 1941 and 1945 Frida Rubiner worked in the political central administration of the Red Army as head of a re-education programme ("Umschulungsprogramm") for German prisoners of war.
[10] She was also involved in the Soviet sponsored National Committee for a Free Germany ("Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland" / NKVD ), focusing on radio propaganda broadcasting.
[3] After the war ended, formally in May 1945, she remained initially in Moscow, working again with the Publisher for Foreign Language Literature[14] and also, between July 1945 and January 1946, continuing her involvement with the NKVD.
Two months after the contentious creation of a new kind of German Communist Party, the Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), in June 1946 Frida Rubiner was ordered back to Germany,[1] possibly at the request of the German communist leaders working with Walter Ulbricht in the Soviet zone of Germany.
[1] By the middle of February 1949 she was back in Germany[1] where a couple of months later Leipzig University marked her seventieth birthday by awarding her an honorary doctorate.
[16] She returned to Moscow for medical treatment after being badly injured by a fall on the stairs, but by the time she died on 22 January 1952[17] she was back in Kleinmachnow, the prestigious Berlin suburb where the East German party leadership had their homes.