Mikhail Kalinin

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 non-monarchical 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 (), 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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

thumb|upright|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.

thumb|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.

Notes

References

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