Inessa Armand : Biography

Inessa Armand, the daughter of an actor, was born in Paris on 8th May, 1874. Her father died when she was only five and she was brought up by an aunt living in Moscow.

At the age of nineteen she married Alexander Armand and together they opened a school for peasant children. She also joined a charitable group helping destitute women in Moscow.

When the authorities refused her permission to establish a Sunday School for working women, Armand began to question what social reformers could achieve in Russia. In 1903 she joined the illegal Social Democratic Labour Party. Armand distributed illegal propaganda and after being arrested in June, 1907, she was sentenced to two years internal exile in Siberia.

On her release Armand left Russia and settled in Paris where she met Vladimir Lenin and other Bolsheviks living in exile. In 1911 Armand became secretary for the Committee of Foreign Organizations established to coordinate all Bolshevik groups in Western Europe.

Armand returned to Russia in July, 1912, to help organize the Bolshevik campaign to get its supporters elected to the Duma. Two months later she was arrested and imprisoned for six months. On her release in August, 1913, she went to live with Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya in Galicia. She also began work editing Rabotnitsa (Women Worker).

Armand was upset that many socialists in Europe to support the war effort. She joined Lenin in helping to distribute propaganda that urged Allied troops to turn their rifles against their officers and start a socialist revolution. In March, 1915, Armand went to Switzerland where she organized the anti-war International Conference of Socialist Women.

On the 1st March, 1917, the Nicholas II abdicated leaving the Provisional Government in control of the country. The Bolsheviks in exile were now desperate to return to Russia to help shape the future of the country. The German Foreign Ministry, who hoped that there presence in Russia would help bring the war on the Eastern Front to an end, provided a special train for Armand, Vladimir Lenin and 26 other revolutionaries to travel to Petrograd.

After the October Revolution Armand served as an executive member of the Moscow Soviet. Armand was a staunch critic of the Soviet government's decision to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In February, 1919, Armand was part of the Russian Red Cross Mission to repatriate Russian prisoners of war.

On her return to Petrograd, she became director of Zhenotdel, an organization that fought for female equality in the Communist Party and the trade unions. She also chaired the First International Conference of Communist Women in 1920. Soon afterwards she contracted cholera and died at the age of forty-six.