Kalinin remained the titular head of state of the Soviet Union after the rise ofJoseph Stalin, with whom he enjoyed a privileged relationship, but held little real power or influence. He retired in 1946 and died in the same year. The formerEast Prussian city ofKönigsberg, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945, was renamedKaliningrad after him a year later. The city ofTver was also known asKalinin until 1990, when its historic name was restored, one year before the eventualfall of the Soviet Union. At 19 years, Kalinin's tenure was the longest of any Russian head of state until it was surpassed byVladimir Putin in 2020.
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was born on 19 November 1875 to a peasant family of ethnic Russian origin in the village ofVerkhnyaya Troitsa (Верхняя Троица),Tver Governorate,Russia.[4]
Kalinin worked with his father on the land until the age of 13. When he was 10, he was taught to read and write by an army veteran. At 11, he entered a primary school run by a local landowning family.[5] When he finished school, the family took him toSaint Petersburg to work as a footman. At 16, he was sent as an apprentice in a cartridge factory, and at 18, he was employed as a lathe operator in thePutilov factory.[5]
Kalinin joined theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898, while still working at the Putilov works. The following year, he was arrested, imprisoned for 10 months, then exiled to the Caucasus,[5] and found work as a craftsman at theTbilisi railway depot, where he met Sergei Alliluyev, the father ofJoseph Stalin's second wife.[6] He came to know Stalin through theAlliluyev family. Dismissed for taking part in a strike, and later deprived of the right to work in the Caucasus, he moved toReval, in Estonia, where he was arrested again in 1903, he spent six months in custody in St Petersburg, then two and a half months inKresty Prison. After his release, he returned to Reval, but was arrested again in 1904 and exiled in Siberia.[5]
Released in 1905, Kalinin returned to St Petersburg, and moved from job to job. In 1906, he married the ethnic EstonianEkaterina Lorberg (Russian:Екатерина Ивановна Лорберг (Yekaterina Ivanovna Lorberg, 1882–1960).[7] She changed her last name toKalinina after the marriage. In the same year, he joined theBolshevik faction of the RSDLP, headed byVladimir Lenin, and was on the staff of the Central Union of Metal Workers.[5]
Kalinin pictured in his hometown in 1922
He served as a delegate at the4th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, in April 1906, and to the 1912 Bolshevik Party Conference held inPrague, where he was elected an alternate member of the governing Central Committee and sent to work inside Russia.[6] He did not become a full member because he was suspected of being anOkhrana agent (the real agent wasRoman Malinovsky, a full member). In November 1916, duringWorld War I, while he was again working in a factory in St Petersburg, Kalinin was arrested again and was due to be deported to Siberia, but was freed during theFebruary Revolution of 1917.[8]
Kalinin joined the Petrograd Bolshevik committee and assisted in the organization of the party daily newspaperPravda, now legalized by the new regime.[6]
In April 1917, Kalinin, like many other Bolsheviks, advocated conditional support for theProvisional Government in cooperation with theMenshevik faction of the RSDLP, a position at odds with that of Lenin.[8] He continued to oppose an armed uprising to overthrow the government ofAlexander Kerensky throughout that summer.[8]
In the elections held for thePetrograd City Duma in autumn 1917, Kalinin was chosen as mayor of the city, which he administered during and after theBolshevik Revolution of 7 November.[8]
In 1919, Kalinin was elected a member of the governing Central Committee of theRussian Communist Party as well as a candidate member of thePolitburo.[8] He was promoted to full membership on the Politburo in January 1926, a position which he retained until his death in 1946.[6]
Kalinin was a factional ally of Stalin during the bitter struggle for power after the death of Lenin in 1924.[8] He delivered a report on Lenin and the Comintern to theFifth World Congress in 1924.[6]
Kalinin was one of the comparatively few members of Stalin's inner circle springing from peasant origins. The lowly social origins were widely publicised in the official press, which habitually referred to Kalinin as the "All-Union Elder" (Всесоюзный староста), a term harking back to the village community, in conjunction with his role as titular head of state.[12] In practical terms, by the 1930s, Kalinin's role as a decision-maker in the Soviet government was nominal.[13]
Although he was a member of the Politburo, thede facto executive branch of the Soviet Union, and nominally held the second-highest state post in the USSR, Kalinin held little power or influence. His role was mostly limited to receiving diplomatic letters from abroad. Recalling him, future Soviet leaderNikita Khrushchev said, "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."[14]
Despite the very high offices he occupied, Kalinin had very little real power, and was principally a figurehead, easily dominated by Stalin. According to the Russian writerRoy Medvedev, "on the pretext of protecting Kalinin, Stalin kept him under virtual house arrest for a long time, withNKVD agents constantly in his apartment. Kalinin completely surrendered to Stalin, covering up the dictator's crimes with his great prestige.[17]Trotsky wrote:
For a long time, he was afraid to tie his own fate to Stalin's. 'That horse', he was wont to say to his intimates, 'will some day drag our wagon into a ditch.' But gradually, groaning and resisting, he turned first against me, then againstZinoviev, and finally, with even greater reluctance, againstRykov,Bukharin andTomsky, with whom he was more closely connected because of his moderate views.[18]
Kalinin was unable to protect his wife,Ekaterina Kalinina, who was critical of Stalin's policies and was arrested on 25 October 1938 on charges of being a "Trotskyist". At the time of her arrest Ekaterina and her husband were not living together.[19] Although her husband was the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1938–46), she was tortured in Lefortovo Prison and on 22 April 1939, she was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment in a labour camp. She was released shortly before her husband's death in 1946.[20]
Shortly before Kalinin died, theMontenegrin communist,Milovan Djilas, was one of a delegation ofYugoslav communists, led byJosip Broz Tito, who dined in the Kremlin with Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Djilas recalled:
Old Uncle Kalinin, who could barely see, had difficulty finding his glass, plate, bread, and I kept helping him solicitously ... Stalin certainly knew of Kalinin's decrepitude, for he made heavy-handed fun of him when the old man asked Tito for a Yugoslav cigarette. 'Don't take any – those are capitalist cigarettes,' said Stalin, and Kalinin confusedly dropped the cigarette from his trembling fingers, whereupon Stalin laughed and the expression on his face was like asatyr's.[21]
Three large cities (Tver,[25]Korolyov[26] andKönigsberg[27]) were renamed after Kalinin. Tver's historic name was restored in 1990. Korolyov, which had been known as Podlipki before 1938, was renamed in honour of the famous Soviet/Russian rocket scientistSergey Korolev in 1996.
Monument to Mikhail Kalinin at the Kalinin Square in Kaliningrad
^abcdeGeorges Haupt, and Jean-Jaques Marie (1974).Makers of the Russian Revolution. London: George Allen & Unwin. pp. 134–36 (This volume contains a translation of a short authorised biography of Kalinin published in a Soviet encyclopaedia c1927).ISBN0-04-947021-3.
^abcdefBranko Lazitch and Milorad M. Drachkovitch,Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern: New, Revised, and Expanded Edition. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986; pp. 204–205.
^Torchinov, V. A.; Leontiuk, A. M.Vokrug Stalina: Istoriko-biograficheskii spravochnik. ("Stalin's Circle: A Historico-Biographical Handbook") St. Petersburg: Philology Department of St. Petersburg State University, 2000; pp. 240–241.
^Torchinov and Leontiuk refer to Kalinin in the 1930s as a "decorative figure." SeeVokrug Stalina, p. 241.
^Khrushchev, Sergei (Ed.).Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev: Statesman: 1953–1964. Pennsylvania State University Press. 2007. p. 488.
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