Inessa Armand
Revolutionary and Feminist

Revealing information on the first Director of the Women's Section of the Russian Communist Party.

R. C. Elwood (Author)

9780521894210, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 July 2002

320 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.47 kg

"Professor R.C. Elwood of Carleton Uniersity has written a magnum opus, the story of Armand's life and work....The book will be of great interest to students of Russian history and women's history." T. Yedlin, Canadian Slavonic Papers

Inessa Armand was the first Director of the Women's Section of the Russian Communist Party (the Zhenotdel). She was one of the most important women in the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party, and second only to Aleksandra Kollontai in the ranks of early Soviet feminists. Yet if Armand is mentioned at all in Western literature, it is solely as Lenin's protégée and probable mistress. In this political biography of Armand, the first to appear in English, Professor R. C. Elwood seeks to correct this picture by portraying her as an accomplished revolutionary propagandist and Bolshevik organizer before 1917 and as a feminist who devoted much of her life to defending women's interests in the home, in the workplace and in society. Based on unpublished police reports, memoirs. Armand's letters to her five children and two husbands, and Lenin's 118 published letters to her, this study provides revealing information on her upbringing in the wealthy Armand family, on the revolutionary sympathies of many members of that family, on their subsequent and controversial financial support of the Bolshevik Party, and on her career as a Tolstoyan and feminist long before she became a revolutionary.

List of illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1. In the nest of gentlefolk
2. From feminism to Marxism
3. Underground propagandist
4. Years of wandering
5. Building a 'party of new type'
6. In defence of women workers
7. Lenin's 'girl friday'
8. The end of an affair?
9. On the eve of revolution
10. Return to Moscow
11. French fiasco
12. Soviet feminism
13. Death in the Caucasus
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Biography: general [BG]