Inessa Armand gave birth to five children, four in her marriage to Alexander Armand and one illegitimate son, Andrei, from his younger brother Vladimir. After their mother's death in 1920 from cholera, the children were raised by their father, while Lenin and Krupskaya informally took them under their wing.
The eldest, Alexander, became an engineer, with Lenin's patronage, he started as a secretary in Tehran and later worked as Sergo Ordzhonikidze's deputy in the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry. He married a friend of his sister and raised four sons.
Fyodor went to the front of World War I as a student in 1914, rose to the rank of company commander, and after being wounded, trained as a pilot at the Gatchina aviation school, becoming a navigator and receiving the gold Georgievsky weapon. During the Civil War, already on the side of the Reds, he fought in Belarus. Later, in his questionnaires, he openly indicated his noble origins and French nationality, a risky openness for the 1930s. He died of tuberculosis in 1936.
Andrei, a mechanic at the Gorky Automobile Plant, volunteered for the Great Patriotic War, carried a general off the battlefield near Yelnya, rose to the rank of artillery captain, and died from wounds in Lithuania in 1944. Rumors called him Lenin's son, but the timeline (Andrei was born in 1903, and Inessa's acquaintance with Lenin dates no earlier than 1909) disproves this version.
The daughters lived longer than their brothers. Varvara became an artist, a specialist in tapestries, and married painter Yakov Romas; she named her daughter Blona, in honor of her mother's party pseudonym, Elena Blonina. Inna pursued history, worked at the Soviet embassy in Berlin and at the Marxism-Leninism Institute, and married German communist Hugo Eberlein.
Kinship with Inessa did not save the family from repression: in 1937, Eberlein was shot at the Butovo firing range, and Inna was temporarily demoted to librarian in a disabled workers' cooperative.