Mikhail Kalinin

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (Template:Langx, Template:IPA; Template:OldStyleDateTemplate:Spaced ndash3 June 1946)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party: A Study in the Technology of Power. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959; p. 1.</ref> 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 (Template:Lang), Tver Governorate, Russia.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

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.<ref name=Hau>Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref name=Hau />

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,<ref name=Hau /> and found work as a craftsman at the Tbilisi railway depot, where he met Sergei Alliluyev, the father of Joseph Stalin's second wife.<ref name="Lazitch">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.</ref> 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.<ref name=Hau />

Released in 1905, Kalinin returned to St Petersburg, and moved from job to job. In 1906, he married the ethnic Estonian Ekaterina Lorberg (Template:Langx (Template:Lang, 1882–1960).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref name=Hau />

File:Mikhail Kalinin working on a farmland.jpg

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.<ref name="Lazitch" /> 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.<ref name="Dictionary">Jackson, George; Devlin, Robert (eds.), Dictionary of the Russian Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989; pp. 295–296.</ref>

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.<ref name="Lazitch" />

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.<ref name="Dictionary" /> He continued to oppose an armed uprising to overthrow the government of Alexander Kerensky throughout that summer.<ref name="Dictionary" />

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.<ref name="Dictionary" />

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.<ref name="Dictionary" /> He was promoted to full membership on the Politburo in January 1926, a position which he retained until his death in 1946.<ref name="Lazitch" />

When Yakov Sverdlov died in March 1919 from influenza,<ref>*Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> 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.<ref name="Dictionary" /> 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.<ref name="Lazitch" />

Soviet Union

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Bubnov, Voroshilov, Trotsky, Kalinin and 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.<ref name="Dictionary" /> He delivered a report on Lenin and the Comintern to the Fifth World Congress in 1924.<ref name="Lazitch" />

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.<ref>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.</ref> In practical terms, by the 1930s, Kalinin's role as a decision-maker in the Soviet government was nominal.<ref>Torchinov and Leontiuk refer to Kalinin in the 1930s as a "decorative figure." See Vokrug Stalina, p. 241.</ref>

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."<ref>Khrushchev, Sergei (Ed.). Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev: Statesman: 1953–1964. Pennsylvania State University Press. 2007. p. 488.</ref>

On 5 March 1940, six members of the PolitburoTemplate:SndKalinin, Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, and Anastas MikoyanTemplate:Sndsigned 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,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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.<ref name=vadim>Template:Cite book</ref>

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

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Kalinin's tomb in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis

Kalinin retired in 1946 and died of cancer on 3 June that year in Moscow.<ref>Brent, Jonathan and Naumov, Vladimir P. in Stalin's Last Crime, John Murray (Publishers), London, 2003, page 231</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Three large cities (Tver,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Korolyov<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and Königsberg<ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref>) 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.

File:Памятник М.И. Калинину (Калининград).jpg

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.<ref>Template:In lang Dnipro municipality for the second time decided to rename Kalinin avenue to Sergey Nigoyan, (23 February 2018)</ref>

See also

• Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union
• Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941, contains significant information about Kalinin

External links

• Mikhail Kalinin Archive at marxists.org
• Mikhail Kalinin by A. Dementyev and A. Pyanov, a 1975 English-language Soviet work in PDF format
• Template:PM20