Fighter, poet, first woman Commissar, Larisa Reisner was considered during her lifetime to be one of the finest writers of the Bolshevik Revolution, and a model for the ‘new Soviet woman’, whose association with Trotsky and other oppositionists made her a ‘non-person’ by proxy after her early death in 1926. The present volume will contain the first English translations of her short books ‘The Front’, ‘Afghanistan’, and ‘Coal Iron and Living People’, along with Dick Chappell’s translations of her writings from Germany. Reisner, who joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 aged 23, is one of the greatest and most many-sided writers of the post-Revolutionary period. Whether in writing about the conditions of the workers in the Urals, the revolutionary battles fought from the Red Volga Flotilla, or the afterlife of British imperialism in Afghanistan, the voice in her texts is always thrillingly hers, bold, instinctive, by turns rigorous and paradoxical, scholarly and colloquial, tender and sardonic, sweeping us along in the narrative of revolutionary transformation. The works collected here are filled with the language of the new Soviet writing, and belong to the earlier heroic period of the Revolution, before hundreds of those she had loved and worked with were killed in Stalin’s purges. New readers of her here, convinced that there is an alternative to capitalism, will be inspired by her depiction of the struggle for a better future and the full development of people’s potential – and her resolutely direct, warm-hearted denunciation of bureaucracy, injustice and inequality.