Larissa Reissner was born in Lublin, Congress Poland, to Mikhail Andreevich Reisner, a jurist of Baltic German origin, then on the staff of the nearby Puławy Agricultural Institute, and his wife Ekaterina of the Russian noble Khitrovo family.

[7] 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.

"[10] He wrote passionate letters to her while he was away on war service, and may also have offered to marry her, but during 1916 she learnt that he was simultaneously having an affair with another woman.

[11] After the February Revolution, Larisa began to write for Maxim Gorky's paper Novaya Zhizn (New Life).

[9][12] She also took part in the Provisional Government's spelling reform programme, teaching at workers' and sailors' clubs in Petrograd.

The turnout was so poor that "there was enough room to sit on one sofa" — but it included three major figures in Russian culture, the poets Alexander Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who spent hours discussing how to organise the intelligentsia.

[15][16] In 1917, as part of Maxim Gorky's team, she helped the Jewish plea, presented by Joseph Kruk, whom later testified for this episode, to avoid confiscating weapons that Jews had gathered in the times of the Tsarist regime as part of Jewish organizing for self-defence in response to threats made by The Black Hundreds and also after the revolution.

[19] Reisner was on friendly terms with Osip Mandelstam, who prevailed upon her in 1918 to accompany him in approaching Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the feared Cheka, to plead for the life of an aristocratic art historian — whom neither of them knew — who was under sentence of death.

"[22] While she was in Kabul, Reisner learnt that Blok had died, and wrote a passionate letter to Akhmatova, saying: "Now, when he no longer exists, your equal, your only spiritual brother...

I somehow believe that if she had been in Moscow when Gumilyov was arrested, she would have got him out of jail, and if she had been alive and still in favour with the regime during the time when M. (Osip Mandelstam) was being destroyed, she would have moved heaven and earth to try and save him.

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

A third knock Bela Kun appeared... A furious argument began between him and Ernst Thälmann, each accusing the other...I sat on the sofa with Radek's friend, while the two men remained standing and continued to argue fiercely.

[31] This story appears to have originated from a biography of Liu by a German communist named Hans Heinrich Wetzel, a book scathingly likened by one reviewer to Ian Fleming's novel From Russia with Love.

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.

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.

But after coming unscathed through fire and water, this Pallas of the revolution suddenly burned up with typhus in the peaceful surroundings of Moscow.

"[42] Alexander Voronsky wrote that "her noble face was both strong-willed and feminine, reminding one of the legendary Amazons, and was framed by chestnut... this beautiful and truly rare example of the human species.