The woman Bolshevik closest to Lenin: death saved her from the Purge
In 1914 Lenin sent her alone as the Bolshevik representative to the Brussels International Socialist Bureau conference. He wrote: "I am convinced that you are one of those who develops, grows stronger, becomes more energetic and bolder when alone in a responsible post."
A French-born Bolshevik revolutionary and one of Lenin's closest comrades. As the first head of the Zhenotdel (the party's Women's Department) in 1919, she built the framework for Soviet women's emancipation policy and presided over the First International Conference of Communist Women in 1920.
Career Timeline
- 1904Joins RSDLP, becomes Bolshevik
- 1905–08Active in 1905 Revolution; arrested, exiled to Mezen; escapes
- 1909–11Meets Lenin; head of studies, Longjumeau party school
- 1912–13Writes On the Women's Question; returns to Russia illegally, re-arrested
- 1917.04Returns with Lenin in 'sealed train'; elected to Moscow City Duma
- 1919–20First head of Zhenotdel; organizes 1st Intl Communist Women's Conference
Related historical events
1911, Teaching at the Longjumeau Party School
Inessa Armand was born in Paris, raised in Moscow within the wealthy Armand household, married one of its sons and had five children. Having found the limits of charitable work, she joined the Social Democratic party in 1904 and became a professional revolutionary, passing through arrest, exile to Mezen in the far north, and escape.
When the Bolsheviks' first party school opened at Longjumeau outside Paris in the summer of 1911, Armand ran the school's household and was one of its core teachers, lecturing on political economy; worker-students from Russia's factories heard lectures by day and debated by night. Fluent in five languages, she became one of Lenin's most trusted emissaries, representing the Bolsheviks at the Brussels "unity" conference of 1914, and when the war came she led the Bolshevik delegation to the International Socialist Women's Conference in Bern in 1915, helping to gather the antiwar left.
First Head of the Zhenotdel, September 1920
In April 1917 Armand returned to Russia on the same sealed train as Lenin and Krupskaya and lived the revolution in Moscow. In November 1918 she organized the First All-Russian Congress of Women Workers with Kollontai and Sverdlov, and when the Central Committee created its women's department, the Zhenotdel, in September 1919, she became its first director. Drawing ordinary working women and peasants into soviet administration through the delegate-meeting system, and organizing nurseries, communal dining rooms and literacy courses: this was the Zhenotdel's daily work. She edited the journal Kommunistka and presided over the First International Conference of Communist Women in the summer of 1920.
Worn down by overwork, she was urged by Lenin to rest in the Caucasus. Shuttled between resorts in the chaos of the Civil War, she contracted cholera at Nalchik and died on 24 September 1920, aged forty-six. Her body was brought back to Moscow and buried by the Kremlin wall, and witnesses recorded Lenin's open grief at the funeral. The Zhenotdel she built drove Soviet policy on women's emancipation for the next decade.