Landa was born in Kyiv, the daughter of Solomon V. Landa. Her family was Jewish. She graduated from high school in Moscow in 1948. She earned a master's degree in physics from Moscow State University in 1953, and completed her doctoral studies there in 1960; her dissertation research, "On the stability of self-oscillatory systems and automatic control systems in the presence of random influences", was written under advisor Sergei Pavlovich Strelkov. She defended a second dissertation, "Investigation of the dynamic and statistical characteristics of optical quantum generators and amplifiers", in 1972.