70 years ago, on June 3, 1946, the "All-Union Headman" and the man who most of all in the XX century headed the Russian state, Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, passed away. For 27 years, almost until his death, he was the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, and then the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, that is, the formal head of the Soviet state. For 25 years, Kalinin managed to talk to 8 million people in the CEC building on Mokhovaya Street! As a result, Kalinin became a kind of defender of ordinary people. The Soviet people have developed a tradition of writing letters to Kalinin to protect him from unjust actions by local authorities or the NKVD. And very often he provided real help.
The future head of the Soviet state was born on November 20, 1875 in the village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa, Korchevsky district, Tver province, in the most impoverished peasant family. Father Ivan Kalinovich, a retired soldier, returned from the tsarist service sick, and the care of the family fell on his wife Marya Vasilievna. From the age of six, the eldest son Mikhail helped his parents around the house and in the field. True, a neighbor, a fellow soldier of his father, taught the boy to read and write.
Mikhail, one might say, was lucky. He was noticed in the family of the landowner Mordukhai-Boltovsky and was taken into service. In 1889 the Mordukhai-Boltovskys left for St. Petersburg and took Mikhail with them. He was a "home service boy". The duties were ordinary: wake up the children of the owners to school, feed them breakfast, run to the shop, etc. At the same time, Mikhail got access to the library, where he avidly read everything that came to hand. True, he never fell in love with fiction, but for the rest of his life he was addicted to educational literature, especially historical literature. And later he more than once surprised his party comrades with his knowledge of the history of Russia.
When Mikhail was 18 years old, he had to choose a profession. In 1893 he entered the St. Petersburg Cartridge Plant as an apprentice. A diligent and well-educated young man quickly became a professional in his field and in 1895 he moved to the Putilov factory as a turner. They paid more there. Mikhail became a "working aristocrat", but he diligently sent most of the money to his family. The educated young worker quickly attracted the attention of revolutionary agitators and was "converted" to Marxism. Kalinin became an active Marxist. He held the first May Day at the plant, created a Marxist circle, and arranged the production of leaflets.
A typical life for a professional revolutionary began: illegal activities, arrests, prison and exile. Kalinin was the standard of the Bolshevik biography: "a locksmith during the day, an underground worker in the evening." This later helped him enter the "Leninist Guard". For two decades, revolutionary activity was the main pivot of his life. In July 1899, together with other members of the Marxist circle he organized, he was arrested and, after a short prison sentence, was exiled to Tiflis. It is worth noting that tsarist prisons and exile were comparatively humane and repressive instruments. In them, revolutionaries could replenish their knowledge base in good libraries, undergo medical treatment, listen to lectures by more experienced and knowledgeable party comrades, and establish contacts. For two decades, Kalinin was arrested 14 times, but more often than not he was immediately released.
In Tiflis, Kalinin continued his revolutionary activities as part of the Tiflis Social Democratic organization, for which he was arrested again and in March 1901 was exiled to Revel. There he worked as a mechanic at the Volta factory and organized an underground printing house. In early 1903 Mikhail Kalinin was arrested and sent to the St. Petersburg prison "Kresty". In July 1903 he was again exiled to Revel. From 1904 to 1905 he served his exile in the Olonets province. He took part in the 1905 revolution, enrolled in a workers' combat squad in St. Petersburg.
In 1906 he married an Estonian woman Ekaterina Ivanovna (Iogannovna) Lorberg, a weaver from Revel. The spouses were not close, the marriage was considered a party marriage. Catherine had a son, Valerian, adopted from someone, then the couple had a daughter, Julia, and then two more children - Alexander and Lydia. All of Kalinin's children grew up as intelligent and hard-working as he was: sons became engineers, daughters - doctors.
In 1916 he was again arrested and sentenced to exile in Eastern Siberia. But he fled and went into an illegal position, continued his revolutionary activity in Petrograd. During the February Revolution he was one of the leaders of the disarmament of the guards and the capture of the Finland Station. In August 1917, he was elected a member of the Petrograd City Duma.
Kalinin took an active part in the preparation and implementation of the October Revolution. After the revolution he instantly became popular, for the simple and understandable speeches of "Kalinich" they fell in love. In November 1917, he was again elected a member of the Petrograd City Duma and, by the decision of the Duma, became the mayor. After the dissolution of the Petrograd City Duma in August 1918, he headed the Commissariat of Urban Farms of the Union of Communes of the Northern Region and the Petrograd Labor Commune. It was a difficult time: the old police were dispersed, the new police were just gaining experience, crime was proliferating; urban economy and industry collapsed during the Civil War; the workers, in order not to die of hunger, went to the villages, plowed wastelands in Petrograd for vegetable gardens.
In 1919, Kalinin was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, after the death of Y. Sverdlov he was elected chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. V. I. Lenin, recommending Kalinin for this post, said: “This is a comrade, behind whom about twenty years of party work; he himself is a peasant in the Tver province, having a close connection with the peasant economy … The Petrograd workers were able to make sure that he had the ability to approach broad layers of the working masses …”. Almost immediately after the election, Kalinin was put on the October Revolution propaganda train and sent to the Eastern Front to agitate for Soviet power. Kalinin spent almost five years on such trips. All this time, Soviet Russia did without a formal head, but many people were attracted to the side of the Reds by a simple, understandable and friendly "Kalinich".
So, during the Kronstadt uprising, Kalinin went to the naval fortress to persuade the sailors to surrender. At first they wanted to shoot him, but then they released him, because Kalinin was very harmless. He looked like a simple country teacher or librarian. His image is a beard, tarpaulin boots, a crumpled jacket, a stick, which he absolutely did not need, and glasses. The image of a walker from the village who ended up in the Kremlin made Kalinin popular among the people and ensured his safety during the struggle for power of various internal party groups.
Kalinin took an active part in overcoming the consequences of the famine in the Volga region of 1921-1922. At the 1st Congress of Soviets of the USSR on December 30, 1922, MI Kalinin was elected Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR from the RSFSR. He remained in this position until January 1938. From 1926 to 1946 - a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b). On January 17, 1938, at the I session of the USSR Supreme Soviet of the first convocation, Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was elected Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.
The main thing in Kalinin's life was to look after the unjustly humiliated and insulted. Soviet citizens in 1920-1940. it was customary to write letters to Mikhail Kalinin with a variety of requests for help - with dispossession, unfair arrest, admission to a military school or difficulties in finding a job. Often Kalinin personally or through his secretariat provided such assistance to those who wrote to him. In March and early May 1932, when deciding in the Politburo the question of the expulsion of kulaks expelled from collective farms, he expressed his dissenting opinion. On May 4, on the ballot sheet, by polling the decree on the expulsion of 38,000 peasant families, he wrote: "I consider such an operation unjustified." Two weeks later, the Politburo reversed its decision, halting the operation that had already begun.
They wrote to Kalinin on a variety of occasions. Here is a story about Anatoly Ivanovich Uspensky: “Uspensky Sr. was a unique person. Hereditary nobleman, until 1917 he served in the tsarist army, then his entire corps went over to the side of the Reds. After the Civil War, Anatoly Ivanovich graduated from the courses of the red professorship and until 1936 he calmly worked as an accountant. And then the persecution began. For more than two months he was not kept anywhere, and soon they began to completely refuse the services of a former nobleman. Then his wife recommended Anatoly Ivanovich write a letter to Kalinin, which he did. He told his whole story and waited for him to be "taken away with his things." But instead of the Chekists, a messenger came to Uspensky with an invitation to appear before the "All-Union headman." Imagine the surprise of Anatoly Ivanovich when Kalinin invited him to take the place of the chief accountant of the Moscow Art Theater.
Another example of the period of repression in 1937: “The family of Pavel Ruzhitsky had a bitter fate. He himself, a simple furrier craftsman, was repressed in 1937 as a "petty bourgeois element." Most likely, the denunciation was written by one of the neighbors, out of envy. The relatives of the "enemies of the people" at that time had a hard time: the grandmother was immediately fired from her job, there was nothing to live on. We lived from hand to mouth. But the most offensive was the tacit contempt and gloating of people who yesterday called themselves "friends." Many of them chose to forget their comrades, so as not to be accused of having ties with a disgraced family. In order to somehow survive, my grandmother was advised to write a letter to Kalinin - after all, there are three children, now everyone does not die! Only after the personal intervention of Mikhail Ivanovich did the grandmother manage to get a job, and life began to improve somehow."
And you can find many such examples. It is clear that Kalinin did not help everyone who turned to him. Obviously, there were a lot of letters, and it was simply impossible to help everyone, and it was not always possible for political reasons. In particular, Kalinin was unable to help his wife, Ekaterina Lorberg. She was sharp on the tongue, criticized Stalin's course. In 1938 she was arrested and sentenced to ten years for "terrorism." Kalinin then did not intercede for his wife and did not save her from arrest. She was sentenced to 15 years. He was able to provide some help to her when she was already in the camp. Thanks to his petitions, the medical commission assigned her a "weak category", thanks to which she got a job in the bathhouse. She lived right there, in the linen room, the conditions in which, of course, were not the same as in the cell. Soon she was allowed to visit the children.
Only in 1944, on the eve of a dangerous medical operation, did he write such a letter to Stalin: “T. Stalin, I calmly look into the future of the Soviet people and wish only one thing, that your strengths remain as long as possible - the best guarantee of the success of the Soviet state. Personally, I turn to you with 2 requests: to pardon Ekaterina Ivanovna and to assign a pension to my sister, on whom I have entrusted the responsibility of raising 2 full orphans living with me. From the bottom of my heart, last greetings, M. Kalinin. " However, then Kalinin's wife was not pardoned. This happened only in May 1945. On Victory Day in the Great Patriotic War, May 9, 1945, Ekaterina Ivanovna wrote to Stalin for a pardon, where she recognized the crimes imputed to her and repented (this is a prerequisite for petitioning for pardon). Stalin put a resolution on the letter: "You need to pardon and release immediately, providing the pardoned woman with travel to Moscow."
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin died on June 3, 1946. He was buried in Red Square in Moscow, near the Kremlin wall. In honor of Kalinin's name, the city of Tver was renamed in 1931, and on July 6, 1946, the city of Königsberg and the region of the same name were renamed in honor of the "All-Union Headman".
The activity of Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin in intercession for ordinary people was reflected in a song written by the poet M. Isakovsky in 1940 and set to music by the composer V. Zakharov:
Fly, welcome letter, Fly to a distant land.
Bow to Kalinin from us
In the capital, tell me, -
From all big and small
From wives and old people, From today's collective farmers, From former men.
Tell me a letter to Kalinin
That we love him -
Mentor, comrade
And his friend.
To him both day and evening
From all corners of the earth
For Lenin's truth
We drove and walked.
And joys and sorrows
The people handed him over:
Kalinich, they say, will think it over, Kalinich will understand.
He talked to us
Until the morning dawn -
A simple worker from St. Petersburg, A peasant from Tver.
Good for everyone
He found the word
From the straight road of Lenin
I did not turn off anywhere.
Fly, welcome letter, Fly over the whole country.
Take Kalinina to Moscow
From us bow to the earth, -
From all big and small
From wives and old people, From today's collective farmers, From former men.
