Political Career in The Soviet Union
Kalinin was a factional ally of Stalin during the bitter struggle for power which erupted following 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 comparatively few members of Stalin's inner circle springing from peasant origins. These lowly social origins were widely publicized in the official press, which habitually referred to Kalinin as the "All-Union headman" (Всесоюзный староста) — a term hearkening to the village commune — 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. He held little power or influence beyond receiving diplomatic letters from abroad. Recalling him, future Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said that, "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. Sometimes he was made a member of a commission, but people didn't take his opinion into account very much. It was embarrassing for us to see this; one simply felt sorry for Mikhail Ivanovich."
Kalinin kept a low profile during the Great Purge of 1937. He was well aware of the repression; between 1937 and 1941 hundreds of people went to his dacha or sent petitions to him about asking help against the arrests. Although he opposed the executions of personal friends like Avel Enukidze, he remained submissive to Stalin, who under the pretext of protecting him had his apartment always watched by NKVD officers.
Kalinin's own wife was arrested by the NKVD on 25 October 1938. She was forced under torture to confess to "counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sent to a labor camp. She was released in 1945, not long before her husband's death.
Read more about this topic: Mikhail Kalinin
Famous quotes containing the words soviet union, political, career, soviet and/or union:
“If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let’s all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.”
—Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)
“... by and large, wife-changing and high office are not compatible. This inequity accounts for the many dull women in Washington and is the cause of much smug complacency on the distaff side of political marriages.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“So they lived. They didn’t sleep together, but they had children.”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“We are constantly thinking of the great war ... which saved the Union ... but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before—a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)