Heroine of the Revolution, widely considered to be its greatest journalist, read by millions in the new mass circulation Soviet press, role-model for the ‘new woman’ of the Revolution, revered in myths and legends, Larisa Reisner has also had much serious murderous sexist hatred thrown at her by its enemies, the more sensational the better, the more effective at shutting down any proper discussion of her life and work. Because heaven forbid we should be inspired by her short life in the Revolution, blown away by the power and beauty of her writings. She was a talentless hack, churning out Bolshevik propaganda for the illiterate masses, parading around in the furs and jewels of the murdered royal family, living in luxury while Russia starved, a monster of depravity, barely human, a nymphomaniac, who played sex games with her White prisoners before torturing them to death, who slept with all the Party leaders to advance her career as a writer. As Lenin said, ‘The poets of the lie are boundlessly inventive.’
The basic elements of the stories have remained the same in Russia and abroad, in the century since her premature death, aged 31, in 1926. In the big budget eight-part Russian TV series ‘Trotsky,’ released in 2017 to mark the centenary of the Revolution (available on Netflix), she played the leading female role, as chief groupie and accomplice of sadistic leather-clad Trotsky, agent of an international Jewish cabal seeking world domination, writhing and groaning with him on his military train as it speeds towards the battlefield, where in an orgy of bloodshed, they order one in ten sailors from the ranks to be shot.
Three writers in respectable publications in this country and the US did awful things to her after the first edition of my biography was published in 1988, the most venomous and defamatory of them in America’s leading academic Russian studies journal, Russian Review, a long deeply personal fact-free assault on her politics, her writings and her character, with insinuations of her antisemitism thrown in. Last time I googled the new revised HM edition of the biography, published two years ago, the link to this gruesome piece was prominently displayed twice, above and under her picture, with our book buried far below, under a long list of other works. The analytics don’t like her, and I’m told nothing can be done about this. Nice though to know she’s still offending those she set out to offend, and that with all their advantages, they couldn’t produce anything better than this old piece from three decades ago by some dead academic.
Someone new and noisy and important was needed to take the attack forward, and this was to be bestselling multi-award-winning German novelist Steffen Kopetzky, writing in the same genre, fantasy fiction dressed as facts, but much more devious and portentous, whose highly acclaimed bombshell revelations spy thriller doorstopper Damenopfer, with its dead-eyed psycho Larisa on the cover, was published by Rowohlt in Berlin eight months after the biography – ‘bringing to light for the first time for the literary public this once dazzling but now forgotten figure, capturing all the facets of this extraordinary woman’s personality and existence, in politics and literature,’ said Berliner Zeitung.
Set in the high-stakes world of Soviet-German espionage in the 1920s, the novel’s chess-themed title, ‘Queen Sacrifice,’ and Alice Through the Looking-Glass epigraph about life as a game of chess, prepare us for some serious chess business to explain this world and her place in it. But the only chess action, the Queen Sacrifice scene, comes over halfway through, at the end of another chapter, apparently tacked on at the last minute and not mentioned again. Everything is focused on the story driving the narrative – her mission with her soulmate and lover, Nazi mystery man spy General Oskar von Niedermayer (known as the German T.E. Lawrence), to take over the world, their undercover operations in Afghanistan, stirring the anti-British independence movement that will topple the British Empire, and their ‘secret armaments project’ in Moscow and Berlin – ‘which has played a central role in the mayhem and violence of the 20th Century, and has had a direct impact on the murky fate of our planet to this day.’ Wow, serious stuff. Oops, just messing with you, it’s a novel, all made up, no evidence or sources required, a great steaming pile of unsourced tosh from the online Big Lie conspiracy theory school of pseudohistory, leaking into our offline world. Kopetzky’s von Niedermayer is a ‘revolutionary,’ just like her. Fascism and Bolshevism are the same, and fascism comes in many forms, occupying more and more of the political space, increasingly setting the agenda in Germany again. (The specifics of the Afghan operations and the nature of the ‘armaments’ are never revealed.)
The plot is needless to say preposterous, and preposterously executed, and the work seems unedited, dashed off in a rush to a deadline, littered with wrong dates, spelling mistakes, alarming basic factual errors, clichés and anachronisms, lifeless interactions and dialogue. These are surely deliberate, intended to kill any interest we might have in her unrelated to von Niedermayer. Such as her three years on the front line of the Civil War, sailing on the warships of the new Volga Naval Flotilla, from the Urals to the Caspian, fighting with the sailors in the battles to defend the Revolution against the invading armies of the West and their White Guard allies, reporting on the defeats and retreats and final victory in her beautiful ‘Letters from Front’, later her book The Front, full of poetry and drama and imagination and Leninist class analysis. Here’s Kopetzky’s take on her account of the Flotilla’s role in the first major military victory of the Revolution, the battle for Kazan: ‘We were happy in September 1918 after Kazan when we were waiting with the 5th Army to join our Flotilla and the radio announced that the 1st Army had gone on the offensive in Simbirsk …’ Even allowing for the machine translation, the writing is, by any standards, bad throughout, apart from the bits lifted directly from hers, mangled and uncredited.
The action jumps between past, present and future, from country to country, scene to scene, in which she is mostly absent, juggling with its vast cast of secondary characters, real and imagined. For gravitas, there are the minutes of a fictitious top-secret meeting of the British War Office in 1925, to assess Soviet-German relations and the Soviet menace in Asia. For cultural legitimacy, there’s a literary soiree in the salon of the poet Anna Akhmatova, and an excerpt from the recently published memoirs of the avant-garde Marxist Latvian theatre director Asja Lacis, who knew Larisa briefly as a student. There’s a quote from Engels on armed insurrection, and a scene with the gravediggers at her funeral, lamenting the horrors of life in the Soviet Union (a recurring theme in the book). But these are mere sideshows to the heroine’s obsessive pursuit of the elusive Nazi, using the power she has over the men in her life to help her track him down, snaring Radek as her lover, the Comintern’s leading authority on Germany, using him to gain access to the Comintern’s main von Niedermayer contact, future Red Army Chief of Staff General Tukhachevsky. After a sex scene best skipped with the glamorous General, she is whisked to a party of top Soviet and German government and military officials at his villa outside Berlin, where she gets to play the fateful game of chess with Marxist strategist and powerbroker Alexander Parvus/Helphand, voluntarily sacrificing her Queen to checkmate him with a weaker piece, opening the way for her finally to be delivered to von Niedermayer.
Crowbarred into all this are two deeply felt densely written chapters about a completely invented German branch of her mother’s family, the Kaplans, living in Leipzig, with details of their shared ancestry dating back to Catherine the Great, and much elaborate background information about the life and musical career of her invented younger first cousin once-removed, Tanya, full of happy memories of their shared girlhood adventures. Tanya is beautiful, like her (they’re taken for twins), but, in every other way, is her exact opposite, her warm human ‘Doppelganger’, a liberal, not a revolutionary, happily engaged to be married, whose existence and total angelic goodness must be firmly established, as she is to have Larisa’s newborn baby dumped on her. The baby is sprung on us completely unexpectedly. The first we know of the birth is when Tanya is summoned to the clinic in Wiesbaden where Larisa is staying and is informed of the arrangement, expected to drop everything and abandon her beloved musical career so her cousin can chase across Germany after von Niedermayer. All the stops are out for the tell-all turning point scene in which fake Larisa breaks the news to fake Tanya: ‘Tanyushka, you have to know, I gave birth to a child.’ ‘When?’ ‘Two weeks ago.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Here of course, it’s an excellent private clinic. It’s a boy, I named him Arian.’ ‘Arian, a beautiful name, but heavens Larisa, where is he now?’ ‘Sleeping in his cot, do you want to see him?’ (The ‘excellent private clinic’ is one of the author’s digs at the wads of dollars he shows her carrying around, allowing her to live comfortably in inflation-ravaged Germany. The name ‘Arian,’ a variant of ‘Aryan,’ hangs in the air, unexplained.)
Tanya gets to take the baby then and there, without further discussion, and it’s the last he sees of his mother. Tanya is given depth and soul and an inner life, and we can identify with her. Von Niedermayer is given an inner life after Larisa’s death, when he weeps at her grave. Larisa is given not a shred of humanity, and she leaves us cold. The absurd baby story seems particularly sadistic, since she suffered three miscarriages that left her infertile, and her childlessness was known to be a source of great sadness to her. Kopetzky is the most weaselly of writers, claiming in a long interview in the popular daily Frankfurter Rundschau to be a huge fan of his amazing heroine, while using all the writing skills available to him to mock and belittle her, and make her hateful and alien to us.
He said in the same interview he’d known nothing about her before he was commissioned to write about her, and nothing about Russian literature, apart from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and the novels of Nabokov, although, judging from the acknowledgments, he was well supplied with researchers and translators to help him. Surprisingly, our books aren’t on the list. And, given the enormous amount of material about her needed to pad out the novel’s 439 pages and ridiculous premise, the question is where it all came from. Again and again, highly specific facts about her kept coming up from a single source in the biography, events in her life and stories about her, moved to different times and places, twisted in the retelling to lose what made her touching and charming and funny in them. Such as the poetry reading Moscow writers organised for a group of visiting Ukrainian factory worker poets, in the novel as it is in the biography, from the memoirs of its only published source, the poet Alexander Bezymensky, including his account of one the Ukrainians reading his conversation with his machine, which is about to be replaced – ‘she tells me her secret pain, and I understand my iron sister’s sorrow’ – but, with the whole point of the story removed, her role in organising the meeting, and the funny unexpected way she welcomed the Ukrainians.
Countless small intimate details from the biography are used to build the character of the novel’s evil manipulative heroine. Like her Rose France perfume, splashed around at key moments in her pursuit of von Niedermayer, to make men swoon over her and do her bidding. I learnt that the name of her favourite French perfume was Houbigant’s Rose France, and much, much more about her, from her friend and comrade the English communist Andrew Rothstein, whose memories of the Larisa he knew in our conversations in the 1980s inspired me to start researching her life. Repeatedly coming across these borrowings wasn’t a pleasant experience, and the most unsettling of the biography/novel coincidences I found the timing of the fake baby’s birth, in the autumn of 1923, shortly before she left for Germany, the autumn she suffered her third real-life miscarriage – which given the dates, seems more likely to have been a stillbirth, and she knew the baby was a boy. And the only source of all this information was the father, her partner Fyodor Raskolnikov, whose long emotional letters to her in Moscow from Kabul are included in his selected memoirs and letters About Myself and My Times, published in Leningrad shortly after the first edition of the biography, and covered in the new one.
The whole thing comes crashing to an end two decades after her death, with a postcard from ‘Arian,’ now serving with US forces in the American sector of postwar Berlin, written to his ‘dearest mom,’ Tanya Kaplan, telling her ‘Freedom will defeat the Stalinist Terror.’ This is followed by a brief note from the author warning us not to take anything in the book too seriously – ‘a lot in the novel really happened, most of the people described really existed, but it’s a work of fiction.’ By which time most readers managing to get this far will have no idea what’s true about her and what isn’t, which was presumably the intention.
Damenopfer goes straight to the dirty books pile, reeking of ego and deep state and nasty leering sexism, the sort of book you’d rather have nothing to do with. But that would be just giving it a pass to use my work to trash her, blurring her clear revolutionary message into the author’s left equals right twilight zone muddle. Yet, for all the novel’s extraordinary carelessness and vagueness and lack of attention to its subject, how cleverly it rams home on the last page who the winner in this new multipolar world will be – the most aggressive imperialist power on the planet, the USA.
Gratifying as always that she was still annoying the right people, and that they couldn’t come up with anything classier. Then, maddeningly, nine months after the novel, there was a follow-up, claiming to be just that. More horrid things were done to her lovely face on the cover, suggesting otherwise. And the main turnoff was the title, Larissa Reissner. 1924. A Journey Through the German Republic and Other Reports from the Era of the World Revolution. Foreword by Steffen Kopetzky (her name is spelt the German way in both books) – ‘clairvoyant, gripping, troubling, about her journey in 1924 through Germany,’ says the blurb. ‘Present at the Hamburg rising.’ She wasn’t in Germany in 1924: she was travelling around the industrial Urals and Soviet Ukraine, writing the essays and articles about workers’ lives in the mines and factories that became her tour de force of Soviet journalism Coal Iron and Living People. And she wasn’t ‘present at the Hamburg rising’ (although the vividness of the writing led many to assume she was). She was in Hamburg in November 1923, a month after the rising was crushed, reporting in the Soviet press and to the Comintern on events there and in Berlin, turning these reports into the first two books in this collection, Berlin, October 1923 and Hamburg at the Barricades. The sketches and essays of the third work, In Hindenburg’s Country, were from her travels around Germany in 1925 – not 1924, as given here.
In Hindenburg’s Country and Berlin, October 1923 are published in their entirety. Missing from Hamburg is its long brilliant summarising Postscript, ‘German Mensheviks After the Rising’ – her blistering sendup of the fake socialists in the SPD leadership, whose epic betrayal of the workers they claimed to represent she saw as largely responsible for the rising’s defeat. No explanation is given for the censoring of the chapter, and as a prominent longstanding SPD member, active until recently in local Bavarian politics, the author clearly felt under no obligation to provide one. It says she’s not important enough for the omission to matter, or for the wrong dates to be noticed. The dates in her incredibly short life are so easy to access and so hard to get wrong. And there are such a lot of them and so many other errors in his long Foreword, ‘Madonna of the Revolution. The Lonely Dangerous Life of Larissa Reissner,’ which takes up roughly a third of this much shorter work, and appears, like the novel, to be unedited, with often hilarious results – she didn’t ‘publish her anti-war student magazine Rudin at the outbreak of the Second World War, when she was nine years old.’ Her mother’s family weren’t from the Polish aristocracy, they were Russian. She didn’t spend her childhood years travelling freely with her family around Siberia and Germany, as implied, they were moving from place to place as political exiles. Her tributes in The Front to Trotsky’s military genius are from her ‘glorious epic of Svyazhsk’ chapter, not the Kazan one. And so on. Nor, by any stretch of the imagination, can Mayakovsky and Marinetti and the Italian Futurists be said to have been the main influence on her war journalism – one of many such statements clearly intended to make the author seem wise and knowledgeable, which have the opposite effect.
I know how it feels, trying to keep up with this powerhouse of a woman. Translating and studying her over the decades, I often felt hopelessly unqualified to do justice to her gorgeous writing, her courage and resilience and her indomitable spirit, a hundred times braver and cleverer than the rest of us, using her glorious satirical gifts to be rude and funny in all sorts of unexpected ways about the fraudulent and bogus, the smug bourgeoisie, and all forms of male chauvinism and patronising sexist arrogance. No wonder Kopetsky had no idea what he was doing with this terrifying creature he had suddenly to be an expert on at short notice.
But he was good enough this time to credit my ‘detective work’ as his main source for her life. He must have meant the new edition of the biography (clearly studied selectively), not the first referred to, which lacks much of the information used in his books. And, for some reason, I’m credited with showing him the correct way to present the three works of the title – undramatically, following three chapters from The Front and Afghanistan. But it’s a generous acknowledgment and is appreciated. And thanks to him too for choosing as his Epilogue Joseph Roth’s beautiful intense tribute to her memory, ‘Woman of the Barricades.’
It’s as if he did some reflecting, and realised he’d have to do a better job with her, ditch von Niedermayer, make her less of a psychopath, more human, appreciate her writing more, create a new persona for her, separate from her troublesome politics. Her writings from Afghanistan and Germany on the new doctrine of fascism were groundbreaking, and have much to teach us now. Hamburg was said to have been the first Soviet work thrown into the flames in the Nazi book burnings, before the works of Lenin and Gorky, Mayakovsky and Isaac Babel – for ‘pursuing under the guise of historical accuracy an entirely different aim, of providing the German Communist Party with instructions for a civil war.’ There’s nothing of this in the author’s Foreword. He writes of the ‘October coup d’etat,’ and of the Bolsheviks ‘preaching peace, while raising an army and waging civil war’. We’re told her vision of world revolution is ‘a thing of the past, with the world now firmly in the hands of the capitalists’, and he shares with us his own vision of how capitalism’s ills can be fixed without a revolution – with supporting quotes from philosopher of conservatism Panajotis Kondylis, historian Orlando Figes, and Bauhaus artist and early Rowohlt editor Lucia Schultz, writing in 1918: ‘Communists are people who know how great is the lure of money, and want to arm themselves and everyone else against it by preaching the abolition of private property.’
Then having disposed of her politics and put her in her place, he appoints himself her new explainer-in-chief. He writes of his excitement at first discovering her and sharing her with readers, sharing her now again with this new book. Of all his research for the novel, exploring her life, reading up on all the political, military and literary figures trailing after her, Soviet and German. How he’d been planning to research the Foreword in Moscow, working with interpreters in her archives at the Lenin Library, looking for new material. Then, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, his research changed to travelling around Germany interviewing surviving publishers of German editions of her works from the 1970s. Some of these encounters are quite informative. The problem is there’s too much about him, who is not interesting, not enough about her, who is. And, as with the novel, he’s far more involved with his background characters. Walter Benjamin, stumbling around icy Moscow in the winter of 1926, ten months after her death. His lover the Estonian (sic) theatre director Asja Lacis again. Radek’s friendship with Joseph Roth, also working in Moscow as a journalist that winter, connecting nicely with the book’s Epilogue. Radek and Tukhachevsky’s (unspecified) undercover operations with the German High Command, both of them later purged in the Terror, Tukhachevsky charged with conspiring with the Wehrmacht against the Soviet government.
And, at a great distance from all of them, the author’s new reader-friendly depoliticised heroine – his passive remote Madonna, or for those wanting something spicier, his ‘It girl of the St Petersburg literary scene,’ swigging her vodka, smoking her Dunhill cigarettes. Both images are as idiotic and inappropriate as her killer whore in Damenopfer. And, in both books, he shows her main feature to be her loneliness, without friends or comrades, her only ally the unreliable Radek, cut off from her life in the Revolution, from the fight for class justice, against capitalist misery and oppression, because Kopetzky has no time for such foolishness, the world has moved on.
Non Kopetzky fans won’t be rushing to buy Damenopfer, and 1924 is unlikely to interest readers outside Germany. The English translation of Hamburg is from the German, the language in which she originally wrote and published the work, with the English versions of the two other books from the German translations of the original Russian, a clumsy three-way process that has produced inevitably odd results. We don’t need to be told anyway how to read her, we can decide for ourselves. And, for anyone interested in how writers like Kopetzky get published, her sizzling satire on the German publishing scene, ‘Ullstein,’ in In Hindenurg’s Country, makes enlightening reading..
The three books here, with The Front, Afghanistan and Coal Iron and Living People, are all published by HM together for the first time In English as The Writings of Larisa Reisner, translated with Dick Chappell, to accompany the biography, the first and only Reisner biography in the English language, factually accurate, aligned with her politics, based on half a century’s research in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, with seminars on her life and writings delivered at over a dozen academic literary events in Moscow and St Petersburg/Leningrad, Tula and Kazan, and hundreds of published works and archival sources consulted – including many newly released from her now largely digitised archive in the Lenin Library, Cyberleninka.
Thanks to HM, her life and writings are finally being noticed and discussed. Recently published by Helsinki-based Rab-Rab Press is its beautifully designed edition of her final essays on the Decembrist uprising, in my translations, with more of her masterpieces waiting to be translated. Rowohlt’s response to our books shows just how politically dangerous she still is a century after her death, and why there could be no better time than now to be reading her, as the sharpening global crisis brings millions onto the streets, with a new hunger for the history of the first revolution in the world against capitalism, and those who fought for it and wrote about it.
