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 the pre-Revolution Russian communist movement and the early days of the communist era, had been almost forgotten for some 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."

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.