Inessa Armand

Inessa Fyodorovna Armand (born Elisabeth-Inès Stéphane d'Herbenville; 8 May 1874 – 24 September 1920) was a French-Russian communist politician, member of the Bolsheviks and a feminist who spent most of her life in Russia.

Armand, being an important figure in the pre-Revolution Russian communist movement and the early days of the communist era, had been almost forgotten for some time, 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."

Early life and marriages

Armand was born in Paris. Her mother, Nathalie Wild, was a comedienne 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.

Life

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.

Armand returned to Russia in July 1912. This was a risky mission. Lenin needed her to pass on the resolution of the Prague Conference, to help organise the Bolshevik campaign to get its supporters elected to the Duma, and find out what was going on in Pravda. Helen Rappaport notes that Lenin knew her entry into Russia would invite immediate arrest, yet he made light of it, his concerns for party works overcoming his personal feelings for her. Two months later she was arrested and imprisoned, only to be released against bail in March 1913, thanks to Alexander's generous support. Once again illegally leaving Russia, she went to live with Vladimir Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya in Galicia. She also began work editing Rabotnitsa. Krupskaya, with admiration, noted that exhausted as Armand was, she threw herself immediately into the party works. Lenin wrote to her and trusted her more than anyone else in his circles. The Okhrana considered Armand to be the right hand of Lenin.

According to author Ralph Carter Elwood, "Even more than Trotsky during the Iskra period, she became Lenin’s ‘cudgel’ — someone to beat wavering Bolsheviks back into line, to convey uncompromising messages to his political opponents, to carry out uncomfortable missions which Lenin himself preferred to avoid".

Armand was upset that many socialists in Europe chose not to fight against the war effort during World War I. She joined Lenin in helping to distribute propaganda that urged Allied troops to turn their rifles against their officers and to start a socialist revolution.

Lenin appointed her as the Bolshevik representative to the International Socialist Bureau conference in Brussels in July 1914. Bertram Wolfe remarked, "He was sending her to meet and do battle with such large figures as Kautsky, Vandervelde, Huysmans, Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Trotsky and Martov. He counted on her mastery of all the languages of the International, her literal devotion to him and his views, her steadfastness under fire". He wrote to her:

I am convinced that you are one of those who develops, grows stronger, becomes more energetic and bolder when alone in a responsible post … I stubbornly disbelieve the pessimists who say that you — are hardly — nonsense and again nonsense.

In March 1915 Armand went to Switzerland where she organised the anti-war International Conference of Socialist Women.

Russian Revolution

On 2 March 1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, leaving the Provisional Government in control of the country, which declared the Russian Republic. The Bolsheviks in exile became desperate to return to Russia to help shape the future of the country. The German Foreign Ministry, which hoped that Bolshevik influence 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.

She did not participate in most of the revolutionary events, choosing to take care of her ill son Andrei instead. It is still unclear why she chose to be inactive during this crucial period of seizing power, although she had interrupted her revolutionary activities for the sake of her children in 1905, 1908 and 1913. On 19 April, she did attend a Moscow Oblast Conference, in which she made forceful speeches on the necessity of the election of officers and the fraternization of combatant forces, as well as on the opportunism of the Second International's leaders.

After the October Revolution, Armand headed the Moscow Economic Council and served as an executive member of the Moscow Soviet. She became a staunch critic of the Soviet government's decision to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. On her return to Petrograd, she became the first director of Zhenotdel, an organisation that fought for female equality in the Communist Party and the Soviet trade unions (Zhenotdel operated until 1930), with powers to make legislative decisions. She drove through reforms to allow women rights to divorce, abort, participate in government affairs and create the facilities like mass canteens and mother centers. In 1918, with Sverdlov's assistance against opposition from Zinoviev and Radek, she succeeded in getting a national congress of working women held, with Lenin as a speaker. According to Elwood, the reason the party leadership agreed to back up Armand’s agitation for communal facilities was that the Civil War required enlisting women into factory work and auxiliary tasks in the Red Army, which created the need to release women from traditional duties. Armand also chaired the First International Conference of Communist Women in 1920. The spring of 1920 saw the appearance, again on Armand’s initiative, of the journal Kommunistka, which dealt with "the broader aspects of female emancipation and the need to alter the relationship between the sexes if lasting change was to be effected".

Death

Realizing that she was exhausted from an overload of work, Lenin had urged Armand to go to the Caucasus for a holiday, without knowing that the area was suffering an epidemic and had not been pacified by the Red Army. She and other patients had to be evacuated from the region. On the evening of 21 September 1920, she ventured out to meet the Nal'chik Executive Committee, perhaps to get accommodation for her group, and contracted cholera. She died in the morning hours of 24 September, aged 46. A state funeral was organized, with a mass singing of the Internationale. She was buried in Mass Grave No. 5 of the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Red Square, Moscow, being the first woman to receive this honour.

In the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published in 1926, she was commemorated as a "senior and dedicated Bolshevik" and as "a close friend and aide of Lenin", but by the 1930s her work had been forgotten. The Zhenotdel was abolished in 1930.

In literature and film

Inessa Armand is assumed to be the model for the fictional heroine of the novel A Great Love, written in 1923 by Alexandra Kollontai, who knew both Lenin and Armand. The heroine is in love with a revolutionary leader, assumed to be based on Lenin who "takes her devotion to him for granted and returns it with resentment and suspicion."

Armand has been portrayed in the films Lenin in Paris (1981, played by Claude Jade), Lenin...The Train (1988, played by Dominique Sanda) and All My Lenins (1997, played by Janne Sevchenko). She was also portrayed as the heroine in the fictionalised account of Lenin's Russian return: Seven Days to Petrograd (1988 by Tom Hyman, Penguin Books).