The Soviet head of state for 19 years had almost no power
Mikhail Kalinin held the Soviet Union's top state office from 1919 until 1946, a tenure no non-royal Russian leader surpassed until Vladimir Putin in 2020. Yet the peasant-born metalworker was largely a figurehead who signed Stalin's decrees, and could not even prevent his own wife from being sent to a labour camp.
Kalinin was born on 19 November 1875 in the village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa in Tver Governorate and worked the land with his father until he was 13. An army veteran taught him to read at 10; a local landowning family later took him to Saint Petersburg as a footman. He was apprenticed in a cartridge factory at 16 and ran a lathe at the Putilov works by 18. After joining the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898 he was arrested the following year, jailed for 10 months and exiled to the Caucasus, where at the Tbilisi rail depot he met Sergei Alliluyev and, through that family, Stalin.
In 1906 he married Ekaterina Lorberg and sided with Lenin's Bolsheviks. At the 1912 party conference in Prague he became only an alternate Central Committee member, because comrades suspected him of spying for the Okhrana; the real informer was Roman Malinovsky. Arrested again in November 1916, he was freed by the February Revolution of 1917. That spring he favoured conditional backing for the Provisional Government, against Lenin's line, and he opposed an armed rising, yet in the autumn he was elected mayor of Petrograd and ran the city through the Bolshevik seizure of power.
When Yakov Sverdlov died of influenza in March 1919, Kalinin succeeded him as titular head of state, a post renamed in 1922 and again in 1938, and he became a full Politburo member in January 1926. Official newspapers fondly called him the All-Union Elder, a village term meant to advertise his humble roots. Nikita Khrushchev later said Kalinin signed every decree under Stalin while rarely doing real government work, and the writer Roy Medvedev described NKVD agents living in his flat. On 5 March 1940 he was one of six Politburo members who signed the order to shoot 25,700 Polish prisoners, which led to the Katyn massacre. His wife, critical of Stalin, was arrested on 25 October 1938 and sentenced on 22 April 1939 to fifteen years in a camp.
He retired in 1946 and died of cancer in Moscow on 3 June, receiving one of the twelve individual tombs beside the Lenin Mausoleum. Königsberg, taken by the Soviet Union in 1945, became Kaliningrad the next year and keeps the name; Tver, called Kalinin for decades, got its old name back in 1990.
Source: Mikhail Kalinin
