Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, known familiarly by Soviet citizens as
"Kalinych", was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Stalinist functionary,
who served as the nominal head of state of Russia and later of the Soviet Union
from 1919 to 1946, but effectively subordinate to Joseph Stalin. From 1926
he was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
where he was a member of Stalin's inner circle.
Early life Kalinin was born to a peasant family of
ethnic Russian origin in the village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa, Tver Governorate,
Russia. He was the elder brother of Fedor Kalinin.
Kalinin finished his education at a local school in 1889 and worked for a
time on a farm. He moved to Saint Petersburg, where he found employment as
a metal worker in 1895. He also worked as a butler, then as a railway worker at
Tbilisi depot, where he met Sergei Alliluyev, father of Stalin's second
wife. In 1906, he married the ethnic Estonian
Ekaterina Lorberg). Political career in Russia
Kalinin joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898, the
year of its foundation. He got to know Stalin through the Alliluyev family.
During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Kalinin worked for the Bolshevik party
and on the staff of the Central Union of Metal Workers. He was later active on
behalf of the RSDLP in Tiflis, Georgia, Reval, Estonia, and Moscow. In April
1906 he was a delegate at the 4th Congress of the Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party. Kalinin was an early and devoted
adherent of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, headed by Vladimir Lenin. He was
a delegate to the 1912 Bolshevik Party Conference held in Prague, where he was
elected an alternate member of the governing Central Committee and sent to
work inside Russia. He did not become a full member because he was suspected of
being an Okhrana agent. Kalinin was arrested for his political
activities in 1916 and freed during the February Revolution of 1917 which
overthrew the tsarist state. During this period, Kalinin joined the Petrograd
Bolshevik committee and assisted in the organization of the party daily Pravda,
newly legalized by the post-Tsarist regime.
In April 1917 Kalinin, like many other Bolsheviks, advocated conditional
support for the Provisional Government in cooperation with the Menshevik
faction of the RSDLP — a position at odds with that of Lenin. He continued to
oppose an armed uprising to overthrow the government of Alexander Kerensky
throughout that summer. In the elections held for the Petrograd
City Duma in the Autumn of 1917, Kalinin was chosen as mayor of the city, which
he administered during and after the Bolshevik Revolution of 7 November.
In 1919 Kalinin was elected a member of the governing Central Committee of the
Russian Communist Party as well as a candidate member of the Politburo. He
was promoted to full membership on the Politburo in January 1926, a position
which he retained until his death in 1946.
When Yakov Sverdlov died in March 1919 Kalinin replaced him as President of the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the titular head of state of Soviet
Russia. The name of this position was changed to Chairman of the Central
Executive Committee of the USSR in 1922 and to Chairman of the Presidium of the
Supreme Soviet in 1938. Kalinin continued to hold the post without
interruption until his retirement at the end of World War II.
In 1920, Kalinin attended the Second World Congress of the Communist
International in Moscow as part of the Russian delegation. He was seated on the
presidium rostrum and took an active part in the debates.
Political career in the Soviet Union Kalinin was a factional ally of Stalin
during the bitter struggle for power which erupted following the death of
Lenin in 1924. He delivered a report on Lenin and the Comintern to the Fifth
World Congress in 1924. Kalinin was one of comparatively few
members of Stalin's inner circle springing from peasant origins. These
lowly social origins were widely publicized in the official press, which
habitually referred to Kalinin as the "All-Union headman" — a term hearkening
to the village commune — in conjunction with his role as titular head of state.
In practical terms, by the 1930s Kalinin's role as a decision-maker in
the Soviet government was nominal. He held little power or influence beyond
receiving diplomatic letters from abroad. Recalling him, future Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev said that, "I don't know what practical work Kalinin
carried out under Lenin. But under Stalin he was the nominal signatory of
all decrees, while in reality he rarely took part in government business.
Sometimes he was made a member of a commission, but people didn't take his
opinion into account very much. It was embarrassing for us to see this; one
simply felt sorry for Mikhail Ivanovich."
Kalinin kept a low profile during the Great Purge of 1937. He was well aware
of the repression; between 1937 and 1941 hundreds of people went to his dacha or
sent petitions to him asking for help against the arrests. Although he opposed
the executions of personal friends like Avel Enukidze, he remained submissive to
Stalin, who under the pretext of protecting him had his apartment
constantly monitored by NKVD officers. Kalinin's own wife was arrested by the
NKVD on 25 October 1938. She was forced under torture to confess to
"counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sent to a labor camp.
She was released in 1945, not long before her husband's death.
Death and legacy Kalinin retired in 1946 and died of
cancer on 3 June of that same year in Moscow. Kalinin was honored with a major
state funeral and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
Three large cities — Tver, Korolyov and Königsberg — were named or renamed in
his honor; the last has retained the name Kaliningrad since the fall of the
USSR. References