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.

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.

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.

Armand distributed illegal propaganda; after her arrest in June 1907 she was sentenced to two years' internal exile in Mezen in Northern Russia.

[9] 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.

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.

[11] 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.

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.

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.

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 drove through reforms to allow women rights to divorce, abort, participate in government affairs and create the facilities like mass canteens and mother centers.

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".

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.

[21][5][22] 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",[23] but by the 1930s her work had been forgotten.

Like the heroine, she broke her ties with one man to live with another, concerned herself with good deeds to redeem the poor female and the prostitute, tried to solve the problems of woman’s too servile place in society.

Just as Marx could be the spiritual ancestor of people as various as Bernstein, Kautsky, Bebel, and Luxemburg, so Chernyshevsky was a formative influence for the two men who in their persons incarnated the two opposing poles of socialism in 1917: Tsereteli and Lenin.

[13]Bob Gould stated "It is fairly clear from Armand’s last diary entries, and from Lenin’s utter devastation at her death, that they may both have had some vague perspective of resuming the physical side of their relationship at some more favourable time in the future, as people often do in such circumstances.

[13] According to Elwood, since Bertram Wolfe proved the existence of the romantic relationship in 1963[citation needed], Western scholarship has focused so much on it that her achievements as a revolutionist and a feminist are usually obscured.

Elwood tried to call attention to her work first as an underground propagandist, then as a Bolshevik organizer in emigration, and finally as a defender of women's rights in the workplace and in society.