Inessa Armand's mother, Nathalie Wild, was a comedienne of half-French and half-English descent, and her father, Theodore Pecheux d'Herbenville, was a French opera-singer.
21 Facts About Inessa Armand
2.
Inessa Armand's father died when she was five and she was brought up by her aunt and grandmother living in Moscow, both teachers.
3.
Inessa Armand joined a charitable group dedicated to helping the city's destitute women.
4.
Inessa Armand distributed illegal propaganda; after her arrest in June 1907 she was sentenced to two years' internal exile in Mezen in Northern Russia.
5.
In November 1908 Inessa 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.
6.
In 1911 Inessa Armand became secretary for the Committee of Foreign Organisations established to coordinate all Bolshevik groups in Western Europe.
7.
Krupskaya, with admiration, noted that exhausted as Inessa Armand was, she threw herself immediately into the party works.
8.
The Okhrana considered Inessa Armand to be the right hand of Lenin.
9.
In March 1915 Inessa Armand went to Switzerland where she organised the anti-war International Conference of Socialist Women.
10.
Inessa Armand did not participate in most of the revolutionary events, choosing to take care of her ill son Andrei instead.
11.
Inessa Armand became a staunch critic of the Soviet government's decision to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
12.
Inessa Armand drove through reforms to allow women rights to divorce, abort, participate in government affairs and create the facilities like mass canteens and mother centers.
13.
Inessa Armand chaired the First International Conference of Communist Women in 1920.
14.
Inessa Armand was buried in Mass Grave No 5 of the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Red Square, Moscow, being the first woman to receive this honour.
15.
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.
16.
Inessa Armand was portrayed as the heroine in the fictionalised account of Lenin's Russian return: Seven Days to Petrograd.
17.
We had known Inessa Armand in Paris, but there was a large colony there.
18.
Inessa Armand rented a room in the same family with which Kamenev lived.
19.
Inessa Armand often went to talk with her, sit with her, have a smoke with her.
20.
Inessa Armand deeply loved music, and this Krupskaya could not give him.
21.
Inessa Armand did not dare to come himself, sat downstairs in a little adjacent cafe drinking tea, getting reports from her, giving her instructions.