Inessa Armand

Inessa Fyodorovna Armand was a French-Russian communist politician, member of the Bolsheviks and a feminist who spent most of her life in Russia. Armand, being an important figure in pre-Revolution Russian communist movement and early days of the communist era, had been almost forgotten for a long time until the partial opening of Soviet archives during the 1990s. Historian Michael Pearson wrote about her: "She was to help him (Lenin) recover his position and hone his Bolsheviks into a force that would acquire more power than the tsar, and would herself by 1919 become the most powerful woman in Moscow."