It is the nightmare of most authors that just before or immediately after the publication of a book that has taken years to complete, someone will find an unknown archive or gain access to a previously closed file and that material found therein will seriously undermine an argument the author has made. This happened to me in 1992. A year and a half earlier I had delivered a 400-page manuscript entitled Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist to Cambridge University Press. I had consulted the few relevant archives in the West, all of the pertinent primary materials published in the Soviet Union, and the secondary literature on my topic. I was aware that the Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism–Leninism had unpublished material in Moscow but I knew from personal experience and that of other researchers that access to these particular records, even in the name of glasnost', was virtually impossible. The publisher's referees recognized this fact and accepted my argument that Armand's long overlooked career as a Bolshevik revolutionary and later as a Soviet feminist could be convincingly documented with the evidence then available. I was reasonably certain that no ‘smoking gun’ lay in Soviet archives that might demolish my picture of her professional career.

Armand's private life was another matter. Western scholarship, ever since Bertram Wolfe's exposé in 1963, has concentrated on her relationship with Lenin.