Armand, Inesse

(born I. Steffanne; Russian name, Elizaveta Fedorovna). Born Apr. 26, 1874; died Sept. 24, 1920. Active in the Bolshevik Party and the international communist movement. Member of the Communist Party from 1904. Born in Paris, into an actor’s family. Having lost her father when she was young, she was brought up in Moscow in the home of the manufacturers Armand; she married A. E. Armand.

Inesse Armand was an active participant in the Revolution of 1905–07. She was arrested and exiled many times and lived in exile outside Russia. She gave lectures at the Party school in Longjumeau, located near Paris. In 1912 she was sent to Petersburg to work underground for the Party. During the years 1915–16, she was a representative of the Bolshevik Party at the International Women’s Socialist Conference and the International Youth Conference, as well as the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences of Internationalists. In 1916 while living in Paris, she translated a number of the works of V. I. Lenin and Party decisions into French. The letters of Lenin to Armand, which are of great interest to Party historians and scholars, were published in the Complete Collected Works (5th ed., vols. 48–49). After the February Revolution of 1917 she returned to Russia. She was a delegate at the Seventh (April) All-Russian Party Conference and the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). She participated in the preparations for the armed uprising in Moscow. After the October Revolution she was a member of the bureau of the Moscow province committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) and the provincial executive committee and chairman of the provincial sovnarkhoz (regional economic council). From 1918 she headed the women workers’ division of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). She contributed to the magazine Kommunistka under the pseudonym Elena Blonina. She participated actively in the work of the Second Congress of the Comintern and directed the work of the First International Conference of Women Communists (1920). She is the author of popular brochures. She is buried in Red Square in Moscow.