Following the abdication of the Tsar during the February Revolution of 1917, Armand joined Lenin and 25 other revolutionaries in the sealed train to Petrograd’s Finland station. As a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, she became a familiar figure around Moscow. In June 1917, she published the journal Working Woman’s Life and, following the October Revolution, became a member of the Executive of the Moscow Soviet. That same year, Armand became Chair of the Moscow Branch of the Economic Council, establishing schools and organising the First All-Russia Congress of Working and Peasant Women with Alexandra Kollontai and Konkordia Samoilova.



She returned to Petrograd in 1919 to found and become the first director of the Zhenotdel, the world’s first government department dedicated to improving the position of women. It set about fighting illiteracy, and educating women about the new marriage, abortion, education and workplace laws in the Soviet Republic. In the face of innumerable difficulties, she worked hard to establish nurseries, clinics, communal laundries and canteens, to ease the burden on working-class women. (The Zhenotdel would be shut down in 1930 following the Stalinist counter-revolution, which also saw the repeal of Russia’s abortion laws and other libertarian social measures).



Armand chaired the First International Conference of Communist Women, the women’s section of the Communist International. In the spring of 1920, she founded the journal Kommunistka, to deal with “the broader aspects of female emancipation.” But the fifth edition of this journal carried her obituary for, over-worked and poorly-fed amidst the tribulations of the Russian Civil War, she contracted cholera and died at the age of 46.



A Bolshevik feminist leader, Worker's Liberty