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Mikhail Kalinin

Soviet politician (1875–1946)

Summary

Soviet politician (1875–1946)

Field	Value
image	Михаил Калинин.jpg
caption	Kalinin in 1939
order	1st
office	List of heads of state of the Soviet UnionChairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union
1blankname	Leader
1namedata	Joseph Stalin
2blankname	Premier
2namedata
3blankname	Deputy
3namedata	Nikolai Shvernik
term_start	17 January 1938
term_end	20 March 1946
predecessor	Office established; Himself (as Chairman of the Central Executive Committee)
successor	Nikolai Shvernik
order1	Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union
term_start1	30 December 1922
term_end1	17 January 1938
predecessor1	Office established
successor1	Office abolished; Himself (as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet)
office2	3rd Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets
term_start2	30 March 1919
term_end2	15 July 1938
predecessor2	Yakov Sverdlov

successor2	Office abolished; Aleksei Badayev (as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR)
{{Collapsed infobox section begin	Other offices held	titlestyle	border:1px dashed lightgrey}}
office3	Full member of the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th Politburo
term_start3	1 January 1926
term_end3	3 June 1946
office4	Member of the Orgburo
term_start4	16 March 1921
term_end4	2 June 1924
office5	Candidate member of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th Politburo
term_start5	25 March 1919
term_end5	1 January 1926
birth_date
birth_place	Verkhnyaya Troitsa, Russia
death_date
death_place	Moscow, Soviet Union
resting_place	Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow
spouse	Ekaterina Ivanovna Lorberg-Kalinina
party
occupation	Civil servant
native_name	Михаил Калинин
native_name_lang	ru
signature	БСЭ1. Автограф. Автографы. 11.svg
premier1	{{Plainlist

Mikhail Vladimirsky (acting)

Vladimir Lenin
Alexei Rykov
Vyacheslav Molotov}}

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (, ; 3 June 1946) was a Soviet politician and Russian Old Bolshevik revolutionary who served as the nominal head of state of the Soviet Union from 1919 until his resignation in 1946. From 1926 until his death, he was a member of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

Born to a peasant family, Kalinin worked as a metal worker in Saint Petersburg and took part in the 1905 Russian Revolution as an early member of the Bolsheviks. During and after the October Revolution, he served as mayor of Petrograd (St. Petersburg). After the revolution, Kalinin became the head of the new Soviet state, as well as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Politburo. He also was the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee in the Russian Federal Republic.

Kalinin remained the titular head of state of the Soviet Union after the rise of Joseph 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 former East Prussian city of Königsberg, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945, was renamed Kaliningrad after him a year later. The city of Tver was also known as Kalinin until 1990, when its historic name was restored, one year before the eventual fall of the Soviet Union. At 19 years, Kalinin's tenure was the longest of any Russian head of state until it was surpassed by Vladimir Putin in 2020.

Early life

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was born on 19 November 1875 to a peasant family of ethnic Russian origin in the village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa (Верхняя Троица), Tver Governorate, Russia.

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. When he finished school, the family took him to Saint 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 the Putilov factory.

Early political career

Kalinin joined the Russian 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, He came to know Stalin through the Alliluyev family. Dismissed for taking part in a strike, and later deprived of the right to work in the Caucasus, he moved to Reval, in Estonia, where he was arrested again in 1903, he spent six months in custody in St Petersburg, then two and a half months in Kresty Prison. After his release, he returned to Reval, but was arrested again in 1904 and exiled in Siberia.

Released in 1905, Kalinin returned to St Petersburg, and moved from job to job. In 1906, he married the ethnic Estonian Ekaterina Lorberg ( (Yekaterina Ivanovna Lorberg, 1882–1960). She changed her last name to Kalinina after the marriage. In the same year, he joined the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, headed by Vladimir Lenin, and was on the staff of the Central Union of Metal Workers.

Kalinin pictured in his hometown in 1922

He served as a delegate at the 4th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, in April 1906, and 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 (the real agent was Roman Malinovsky, a full member). In November 1916, during World 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 the February Revolution of 1917.

Russian Revolutions

Kalinin joined the Petrograd Bolshevik committee and assisted in the organization of the party daily newspaper Pravda, now legalized by the new 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 autumn 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 from influenza,*{{cite book |author-link=Stephen Kotkin |author-link=Nikita Khrushchev

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.

Soviet Union

Frunze]], October Revolution military parade, 1924

Kalinin was a factional ally of Stalin during the bitter struggle for power after 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 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. In practical terms, by the 1930s, Kalinin's role as a decision-maker in the Soviet government was nominal.

Although he was a member of the Politburo, the de 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 leader Nikita 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."

On 5 March 1940, six members of the PolitburoKalinin, Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, and Anastas Mikoyansigned an order to execute 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" (Polish intelligentsia, priests, and military officers) kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus, ultimately leading to the Katyn massacre.

Personality

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 writer Roy Medvedev, "on the pretext of protecting Kalinin, Stalin kept him under virtual house arrest for a long time, with NKVD agents constantly in his apartment. Kalinin completely surrendered to Stalin, covering up the dictator's crimes with his great prestige. Trotsky wrote:

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.{{cite book|author=Graeme Gill|title=Collective Leadership in Soviet Politics|year=2018|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|location=Cham, Switzerland|isbn=978-3-319-76961-5|page=115| doi=10.1007/978-3-319-76962-2

Shortly before Kalinin died, the Montenegrin communist, Milovan Djilas, was one of a delegation of Yugoslav communists, led by Josip Broz Tito, who dined in the Kremlin with Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Djilas recalled:

Death and legacy

Kalinin's tomb in the [[Kremlin Wall Necropolis

Kalinin retired in 1946 and died of cancer on 3 June that year in Moscow. He was honoured with a state funeral and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, in one of the twelve individual tombs located between the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin Wall.

Three large cities (Tver, Korolyov and Königsberg) 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 scientist Sergey Korolev in 1996.

Monument to Mikhail Kalinin at the Kalinin Square in Kaliningrad

Kalinin Square and Kalinin Street, which were named after Kalinin, are located in Minsk, Belarus. Kalinin Street in Tallinn, Estonia was renamed Kopli Street following Estonian independence. Prospekt Kalinina in Dnipro, Ukraine was renamed Prospekt Serhiy Nigoyan in January 2015 as part of decommunization in Ukraine.

References

Agentstvo pechati "Novosti". (1975). "Socialism: Theory and Practice". Novosti Press Agency.
(1947). "Calendar: Thirty Years of the Soviet State, 1917–1947". Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, ''Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party: A Study in the Technology of Power.'' New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959; p. 1.
"Биография: Калинин Михаил Иванович - Praviteli.org".
(1974). "Makers of the Russian Revolution". George Allen & Unwin.
and found work as a craftsman at the [[Tbilisi]] railway depot, where he met Sergei Alliluyev, the father of [[Joseph Stalin]]'s second wife.Branko Lazitch and Milorad M. Drachkovitch, ''Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern: New, Revised, and Expanded Edition.'' Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986; pp. 204–205.
Ernest A. Rappaport. (1975). "Anti-Judaism: a psychohistory". Perspective Press.
Jackson, George; Devlin, Robert (eds.), ''Dictionary of the Russian Revolution.'' Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989; pp. 295–296.
Waksberg, Arkadi. (21 January 2011). "From Hell to Heaven and forth".
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." See ''Vokrug Stalina,'' p. 241.
Khrushchev, Sergei (Ed.). ''Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev: Statesman: 1953–1964''. Pennsylvania State University Press. 2007. p. 488.
Brown, Archie. (2009). "The Rise and Fall of Communism". Ecco/HarperCollins.
(31 August 2015). "Order for the Katyn Massacre".
(1976). "Let History Judge, The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism". Spokesman.
(1969). "Stalin, Volume Two: The Revolutionary in Power". Panther.
Vadim J. Bristein. (2001). "The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science". Westview Press.
(1969). "Conversations with Stalin". Penguin.
Brent, Jonathan and Naumov, Vladimir P. in ''Stalin's Last Crime'', John Murray (Publishers), London, 2003, page 231
"Funeral Of Russia's President Kalinin".
Colton, Timothy J.. (1995). "Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis". Harvard University Press.
(18 January 2017). "Довоенные годы".
"Korolyov {{!}} city, Moscow oblast, Russia {{!}} Britannica".
"Kaliningrad {{!}} History, Map, & Points of Interest {{!}} Britannica".
{{in lang. uk [https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/news/29057369.html Dnipro municipality for the second time decided to rename Kalinin avenue to Sergey Nigoyan], (23 February 2018)

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