Armand, Inessa Fedorovna

The daughter of the French opera singer Theodore d'Herbenville (stage name is Theodore Stefan) ( French: Théodore Stéphane ) and comedian actress Natalie Wild (of English-French origin, but of Russian citizenship), also an opera singer, and subsequently a teacher of singing.

Father died when his daughter was five years old. At the age of fifteen, she and her sister came to Russia to visit her aunt, who taught music and French in a wealthy family of textile industrialists Armand ^[2] . Four years later, in 1893, she married Alexander Armand, son of the merchant of the first guild E.I. Armand . Her sister Renee married Alexander's brother, Nikolai Armand (film director Pavel Armand is their son) ^{[3] [4] [5]} .

Inessa lived with her husband for 9 years and gave birth to four children - 2 daughters and 2 sons. She taught at a school for peasant children in Eldigino , organized at the expense of the Armand family.

In 1902, Inessa left her husband for his younger 18-year-old brother Vladimir, from whom in 1903 she gave birth to a son, Andrei. Under the influence of Vladimir, she became close to the Moscow group of Social Revolutionaries .

Inessa was carried away by the revolutionary struggle: “After a short hesitation between the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social Democrats , under the influence of Ilyich ’s book“ The Development of Capitalism in Russia “I become Bolshevik ” ^[2] .

In 1904 she joined the RSDLP . For active participation in the revolution of 1905-1907, the authorities sent her to exile in the north of Russia to Mezen , from where Armand fled to St. Petersburg in 1908, and then with the help of the Socialist Revolutionaries on a false passport left for Switzerland, where Vladimir died of tuberculosis on her hands. ^[6] . She moved to Brussels , where she entered the University of Brussels , completed the full course of the Faculty of Economics during the year and was awarded the degree of Licensed in Economic Sciences ^[2] . For a long time, meetings of socialist revolutionaries took place in her apartment, weapons, ammunition and subversive literature were hidden ^[7] .

February 6-7, 1905 Schekoldin (Cook) was arrested in the apartment of Inessa Fedorovna and Vladimir Evgenievich Armand. The spouses of Armand, who, like Shchekoldin , belonged to the Social Democratic Party, established contacts with the Socialist Revolutionaries with the aim of acquiring weapons for the party, for which they settled in the same apartment as one of the members of the Moscow terrorist group engaged in the manufacture of explosives and missiles . Inessa and Vladimir are exposed by a questioning of a servant who claimed that “the defendants Shchekoldin , Fortunatov, Benny and Matveyev visited Armandov and Nikolaev living with them.” “ Shchekoldin himself , having given information about his personality, refused to explain the merits of the charge” ^[8] . “To this I add that of the transferred persons, Vladimir and Inessa Armand, until recently, according to secret information, belonged to the local social democratic organization, which explains the discovery in their apartment of the representative of the Central Committee of this party, a convinced and very serious social-democratic Shchekoldin’s leader. The latter, according to reports, arrived in Moscow to take part in the congress of district representatives of the Central Committee of the aforementioned party held on February ⁹ ... " ^[9]

The meeting of 39-year-old Lenin and 35-year-old Armand took place in 1909, according to one version, in Brussels ^[10] , according to another version - in Paris ^[11] (a meeting in Paris took place at the funeral of Marx’s daughter and son-in-law ^[12] (Death and the funeral of the daughter of Marx Laura and her husband Paul Lafargue, who took potassium cyanide, occurred in 1911)). Armand became a confidant and, according to some historians, Lenin’s mistress ^{[13] [14]} . The proximity of Lenin and Inessa Armand is denied by the historian J. Trofimov, who wrote that “I. Armand’s love for Lenin” remained, apparently, “unclaimed”, despite Lenin’s “warm attitude” to her ^[15] . She worked at the party school of propagandists in Longjumeau , where she became the head teacher, campaigned among the French workers. Translated the work of Lenin, the publication of the Central Committee of the party. In 1912, she wrote a pamphlet, On the Women's Issue, in which she advocated freedom from marriage.

In 1912, she illegally came to Russia, was again arrested for clandestine work, and spent the entire autumn and winter of 1912 in a St. Petersburg prison. Thanks to her husband, she was released on bail on March 20, 1913.

In 1913, she was treated for tuberculosis at the Lesnoye sanatorium (in fact, she simply rented a summer cottage), where she was from late April to early August. After she fled through Finland abroad ^[16] .

In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I , she engaged in agitation among French workers, urging them to abandon work in favor of the Entente countries.

In April 1917, Armand arrived in Russia in the same compartment as a sealed wagon with Lenin. She was a member of the Moscow District Committee of the Bolshevik Party , participated in the battles that took place in the city in October - November 1917 ^[12] . Then she was the chairman of the Moscow Provincial Economic Council .

In 1918, as the head of the Red Cross mission, Armand was sent by Lenin to France to take out several thousand soldiers from the Russian Expeditionary Force . There she was arrested by the French authorities for subversive activities, but released due to the threat of Lenin to shoot for her the entire French mission in Moscow ^[12] .

In 1919-1920, Armand headed the women's department of the Central Committee of the RCP (B.) . She was the organizer and leader of the 1st International Women's Communist Conference in 1920, took part in the struggle of women revolutionaries with a traditional family.

According to historian V. M. Lavrov , Armand "was a beautiful and adventurous social democrat." For the sake of serving the revolution, Lenin chose to stay with his legal wife ( Nadezhda Krupskaya was a revolutionary comrade-in-arms). In this love triangle between women, friendships were established ^[13] .

Died in Nalchik from cholera , taken up at Beslan station ^[17] .

She was buried on October 12, 1920 on Red Square in Moscow, in a necropolis near the Kremlin wall .

Children:

• Alexander Alexandrovich (1894-1967), worked as secretary of the trade mission in Tehran .
• Fyodor Aleksandrovich (1896-1936), a red war hero, died of tuberculosis, is buried in the Novodevichy cemetery .
• Inna Alexandrovna (1898-1971), worked in the apparatus of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1921-1923, then served in the Soviet embassy in Germany.
• Varvara Alexandrovna (1901-1987), Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR , Honored Artist of the RSFSR.
• Andrei Vladimirovich (1903-1944), died at the front of the Great Patriotic War .

• In 1984, Inessa Armand Street appeared on the map of Moscow .
• In Nalchik, one of the streets is named after I. Armand.
• In the city of Pushkino, Moscow Region, the name I. Armand is a neighborhood.
• In the Black Sea Shipping Company ( Odessa ) in 1968-1998 the Inessa Armand motor ship (IMO 7030078) of Polish construction was operating .

• Armand I.F. Articles, speeches, letters. M .: Politizdat , 1975.

• Sixth of July ( 1968 ) - Nina Veselovskaya .
• Strokes to the portrait of V.I. Lenin (1969) - Natalia Verova.
• Lenin in Paris ( 1981 ) - Claude Jade .
• Lenin ... The Train ( 1988 ) - Dominic Sanda .
• All My Lenins ( 1997 ) - Zhanna Shevchenko .
• Demon of the Revolution ( 2017 ) - Victoria Isakova .

• Krupskaya N.K. Inessa Armand (1879-1920) // In Memory of the Fallen Leaders: Album of Memoirs. (Approved by the Commission on the Decade of the October Revolution at the Central Executive Committee of the USSR) / Ed. Felix Cohn ; Hood. G. Klutsis . - M .: Moscow Worker , 1927 .-- 88 p.

• Inessa Armand
• Armand Inessa - biography of the beloved V.I. Lenin
• Nikolai Druzhinin "On the three participants in the revolutionary struggle"
• Inessa Armand in the history of Pushkino
• Inessa Armand on the Project website1917