31 Facts About Mikhail Kalinin

Mikhail Kalinin served as head of state of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1946.

Mikhail 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.

Mikhail Kalinin retired in 1946 and died in the same year.

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.

Mikhail Kalinin finished his education at a local school in 1889 and worked for a time on a farm.

Mikhail Kalinin moved to Saint Petersburg, where he found employment as a metal worker in 1895.

Mikhail Kalinin worked as a butler and then as a railway worker at Tbilisi depot, where he met Sergei Alliluyev, the father of Joseph Stalin's second wife.

Mikhail Kalinin changed her last hame to Kalinina after the marriage.

Mikhail Kalinin joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898, the year of its foundation.

Mikhail Kalinin came to know Stalin through the Alliluyev family.

Mikhail Kalinin later became active on behalf of the RSDLP in Tiflis, Georgia ; Reval, Estonia ; and Moscow.

Mikhail Kalinin was an early and devoted adherent of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, headed by Vladimir Lenin.

Mikhail Kalinin was a delegate to the 1912 Bolshevik Party Conference held in Prague, where he was elected an alternate member of the governing Central Committee and sent to work inside Russia.

Mikhail Kalinin did not become a full member because he was suspected of being an Okhrana agent.

Mikhail Kalinin was arrested for his subversive activities in 1916 during World War I and then freed during the February Revolution of 1917.

Mikhail Kalinin joined the Petrograd Bolshevik committee and assisted in the organization of the party daily newspaper Pravda, now legalized by the new regime.

Mikhail Kalinin continued to oppose an armed uprising to overthrow the government of Alexander Kerensky throughout that summer.

In 1919, Mikhail Kalinin was elected a member of the governing Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party as well as a candidate member of the Politburo.

Mikhail Kalinin was promoted to full membership on the Politburo in January 1926, a position which he retained until his death in 1946.

When Yakov Sverdlov died in March 1919 from influenza, Mikhail Kalinin replaced him as President of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the titular head of state of Soviet Russia.

Mikhail Kalinin continued to hold the post without interruption until his retirement at the end of World War II.

In 1920, Mikhail Kalinin attended the Second World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow as part of the Russian delegation.

Mikhail Kalinin was seated on the presidium rostrum and took an active part in the debates.

Mikhail Kalinin was a factional ally of Stalin during the bitter struggle for power after the death of Lenin in 1924.

Mikhail Kalinin delivered a report on Lenin and the Comintern to the Fifth World Congress in 1924.

Mikhail Kalinin was one of the comparatively few members of Stalin's inner circle springing from peasant origins.

Mikhail Kalinin's role was mostly limited to receiving diplomatic letters from abroad.

At the time of her arrest Ekaterina and her husband Mikhail Kalinin were not living together.

Mikhail Kalinin was released shortly before her husband's death in 1946.

Mikhail Kalinin retired in 1946 and died of cancer on 3 June that year in Moscow.

Mikhail Kalinin 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.