Leader
Mikhail Kalinin
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin · 1875–1946
Portrait. Wikimedia Commons.
Kalinin was the formal head of state while the executions, the deportations, and the famine orders went out in the government’s name. His wife was arrested in 1938 and sent to a camp. He stayed in office.
Origin and religion
Russian, from a peasant family in Tver province. The regime used his biography as a costume: the worker-peasant head of state on the postage stamp, while the police answered to other men.
Russian peasant family, Orthodox cultural background. Atheist. The regime's ceremonial head of state.
Responsibilities
- Chairman of the All-Russian and then USSR Central Executive Committee
- Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
- Nominal head of state, 1919–1946
As formal head of state his name sits on statutes of the dekulakization and wartime years. Peasants wrote to “the all-union elder” begging for relief. The letters are an archive of people who still believed the man on the stamp might be different from the quota.
The record
His wife, Ekaterina Lorberg (Kalinina), was arrested in 1938, accused of counter-revolution, and sent to a camp. He did not save her. She survived him. He died in 1946 still in office. The marriage is not gossip. It is evidence about how little formal office was worth.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
Others filed as Russian
- Nikolai Bukharin — Editor of Pravda
- Nikolai Yezhov — People’s commissar of internal affairs, 1936–1938
- Vyacheslav Molotov — Chairman of Sovnarkom, 1930–1941
Evidence marks such as Opened archive are explained in How to read.