Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin

Kalinin was one of the comparatively few members of Stalin's inner circle of peasant origin, and these lowly social origins were widely publicised in the official press, which habitually called him the 'All-Union Elder', a term going back to the village community, alongside his role as titular head of state. By the 1930s his role as a decision-maker in the Soviet government was nominal.

The elder persona functioned through a mass petition apparatus. Soviet citizens in the 1920s-1940s habitually wrote to Kalinin with requests for help, during dekulakization, over unjust arrest, for entry to a military school or for difficulties finding work, and Kalinin often helped the writers personally or through his secretariat. Over a quarter of a century about eight million visitors passed through his reception office, and many of their requests were granted.

The image was actively manufactured. In the period of the Stalin personality cult the figure of 'grandfather Kalinin' was widely reproduced in art as one of the top leaders of the state, and cases of help he gave to victims of repression are known. Yet it was under the anti-terrorist law he himself had signed after Kirov's murder that his own wife, Ekaterina Lorberg, was arrested in October 1938; she was released only in June 1945.

His power was nominal. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that in the Stalin era Kalinin held purely nominal posts with very little real influence. Researchers hold that after his wife's arrest his capacity to help the unjustly repressed shrank, and that in most cases he could give real help only in household and everyday matters.

A recorded remark at a meeting with residents of Khibinogorsk captures the contradiction: 'Don't ask me for anything, I am a powerless man. Turn to Molotov.' Khrushchev's account is that under Stalin Kalinin was 'the nominal signatory of all decrees, while in reality he rarely took part in government business,' and Trotsky recorded that for a long time Kalinin was afraid to tie his own fate to Stalin's.

Despite his loyalty, Kalinin was recorded as privately critical of Stalin. Ivan Gronsky preserved a 1936 exchange in which the critic Pyotr Rozhkov asked Kalinin why there were so many enemies, noting that under Lenin they had not been arrested; Kalinin answered: 'Stalin is not Lenin... Under Lenin everyone would have worked, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin. But Stalin is different, he has neither Lenin's knowledge, nor experience, nor authority. He is set on cutting these people off.'

The counter-theme to the elder figure is his signature on the terror laws. The Russian source places this immediately after its account of his 4 May 1932 dissent: 'at the same time, the signature of Kalinin certifies the notorious laws of the period of mass repressions of the 1930s.' The same source records that Kalinin was not among the Politburo members who took an active part in approving the shooting lists, while elsewhere recording his support for expanded repression in the BSSR and the entry 'Kalinin, for' on the Sharangovich cipher.

On December 1, 1934, immediately after Kirov's assassination, Kalinin signed the notorious decree that slashed trial procedures for terror cases to ten days, denied defendants any right of appeal or pardon, and mandated immediate execution. The decree became a key legal instrument of the Great Purge. Four years later, on October 25, 1938, Kalinin's own wife Ekaterina Lorberg, an Estonian weaver he had married in 1906, was arrested by the NKVD under the very law he had signed. Charged with 'anti-Soviet activity and ties to Trotskyists and the Right,' she was tortured in Lefortovo prison and sentenced on April 22, 1939 to fifteen years in a labor camp. Kalinin, the 'All-Union Elder' who received hundreds of thousands of petitions yearly, proved powerless to save his wife: witnesses recall him saying, 'Don't ask me for anything. I am a man without power.' Only in 1944, facing life-threatening surgery for intestinal cancer, did he make a written plea to Stalin for her release. Ekaterina was freed in June 1945 and cared for her dying husband until his death. She was rehabilitated in 1954. The episode remains one of the most searing illustrations that even Stalin's inner circle lived in terror.