Inessa Armand

Vocation

French communist politician and member of the Bolsheviks who spent most of her life in Russia. Her mother was a comedian who was of half French and half English descent, and her father was a French opera singer. At 19 she married Alexander Armand, the son of a wealthy Russian textile manufacturer. They opened a school for peasant children outside of Moscow. In 1903 she joined the illegal Social Democratic Labour Party. Sentenced in 1907 to two years' internal exile in Mezen in Northern Russia, she escaped in November 1908, settling in Paris where she met Vladimir Lenin and other Bolsheviks living in foreign exile. Armand returned to Russia in July 1912, to help organise the Bolshevik campaign to get its supporters elected to the Duma. Two months later she was arrested and imprisoned, only to be released against bail in March 1913. Once again illegally leaving Russia, she went to live with Vladimir Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya in Galicia. In March 1915, Armand went to Switzerland where she organised the anti-war International Conference of Socialist Women. After the October Revolution Armand served as an executive member of the Moscow Soviet, and she became director of Zhenotdel, an organisation that fought for female equality in the Communist Party and the Soviet trade unions. She also chaired the First International Conference of Communist Women in 1920. While she was on a holiday in the Caucasus, she contracted cholera and died on September 24, 1920 at the age of forty-six. Link to Wikipedia biography