Inessa Armand

Inessa Armand
Inessa Armand, 1916
Born	Elisabeth-Inès Stéphane d'Herbenville May 8, 1874 Paris, France
Died	24 September 1920(1920-09-24) (aged 46) Nalchik, Russian SFSR
Other names	Elisabeth-Inès Stéphane d'Herbenville, Inessa Fyodorovna Armand, Elena Blonina
Movement	Bolsheviks

Inessa Fyodorovna Armand (born Elisabeth-Inès Stéphane d'Herbenville; May 8, 1874 – September 24, 1920) was a French-Russian communist politician, member of the Bolsheviks and feminist who spent most of her life in Russia. Armand, being an important figure in pre-Revolution Russian communist movement and early days of the communist era, had been almost forgotten for a long time (due to deliberate Stalinist censorship, partly in consideration of her relationship with Lenin) until the partial opening of Soviet archives during the 1990s (despite this, many valuable sources regarding her life still remain inaccessible in Russian archives). Historian Michael Pearson wrote about her: "She was to help him (Lenin) recover his position and hone his Bolsheviks into a force that would acquire more power than the tsar, and would herself by 1919 become the most powerful woman in Moscow."

Armand was born in Paris. Her mother, Nathalie Wild, was a comedian of half-French and half-English descent, and her father, Théodore Pécheux d'Herbenville, was a French opera-singer. Her father died when she was five and she was brought up by her aunt and grandmother living in Moscow, both teachers.

At the age of nineteen she married Alexander Armand, the son of a wealthy Russian textile manufacturer. The marriage produced four children. Inessa and her husband opened a school for peasant children outside of Moscow. She also joined a charitable group dedicated to helping the city's destitute women.

In 1902, she left her husband, with whom she had an open marriage, to marry his younger brother Vladimir, who shared her radical political views, and bore him her fifth child, Andrei.

In 1903, she joined the illegal Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Armand distributed illegal propaganda; after her arrest in June 1907 she was sentenced to two years' internal exile in Mezen in Northern Russia.

In November 1908 Armand managed to escape from Mezen and eventually left Russia to settle in Paris, where she met Vladimir Lenin and other Bolsheviks living in foreign exile. In 1911 Armand became secretary for the Committee of Foreign Organisations established to coordinate all Bolshevik groups in Western Europe. "