[1] Leonid Kannegisser (also spelled Kanngießer or Kannegiesser)[2] was born in March 1896 in Nikolaev, Ukraine, (then part of the Russian Empire), into a wealthy Jewish family.

Kannegisser studied economics from 1915 to 1917 at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute and was a member of Popular Socialists, a moderate left-wing anti-bolshevik political party.

[2] On 17 August 1918 around nine o’clock, Kannegisser, wearing a leather jacket and an officers cap, turned up at the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, left his bicycle by the door and entered the building.

[3] Kannegisser was part of a clandestine anti-Bolshevik group led by his cousin, Maximilian Filonenko, who had close links with Boris Savinkov, who gave the order to assassinate Uritsky.

A major part of Kannegisser's literary heritage is preserved in the closed files of the Central Government Archives of Literature and Art in Moscow.