Ekaterina Kalinina

Ekaterina Ivanovna Kalinina (Russian: Екатерина Ивановна Калинина; née Lorberg; 1882–1960) was the wife of Soviet politician Mikhail Kalinin (1875–1946). Although she was the spouse of the Soviet head of state from 1922 to 1946, she was in a labor camp from 1938 to 1946.

Biography

Ekaterina was born into a large Estonian peasant family in 1882.[1][2] She was an active revolutionary and worked at a textile factory in Estonia.[3] In 1905 she met Mikhail Kalinin in St. Petersburg where she fled due to her revolutionary activities.[3] There Kalinin was working as a lathe operator.[4] They married in 1906[3] and lived in Kalinin's home in the village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa, Tverskaya Gubernia, until 1910.[1][5] Then they settled in St. Petersburg.[1]

Before the Revolution Kalinina worked in a bottle factory[6] and was a member of the Bolshevik Party.[1] The Kalinins had four children, two sons and two daughters.[3][6] According to another report the Kalinin family had three children.[1][5] She along with the children accompanied Kalinin in his exile to Siberia in 1916.[4]

Following the revolution they moved to Moscow.[4] On 30 March 1919, her husband was named head of the party's executive committee and on 30 December 1922, he became head of the central executive committee.[7] Initially the Kalinins lived in a Kremlin apartment which they shared with the Trotskys.[1] They adopted two children and Ekaterina served as the deputy director of a weaving mill in the aftermath of the revolution.[4] In 1924, she left Moscow and her family for the Caucasus to be involved in a literacy campaign in the region, but returned to Moscow in the same year.[4] She became the manager of a big state grain farm in a remote district near Novosibirsk, Siberia, in the early 1930s.[6] Then she served as a member of the Supreme Court until 1938.[1]

She and her friends criticized Stalin's policies, and informers and operative officers transmitted this information to Stalin.[8] Thus, on 25 October 1938 Ekaterina was arrested on charges of being a "Trotskyist".[9] Although her husband was the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1938-1946), she was tortured in Lefortovo Prison and on 22 April 1939, she was sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment in a labor camp.[9] She served in the camp until 14 December 1945 when a special decree of the Presidium ordered her release, which was signed by the secretary of the Presidium, not by her husband, Kalinin.[9] Her release occurred shortly before Kalinin's death.[10][11] However, she was sent into internal exile shortly after her husband's death.[10] Her official rehabilitation took eight more years, and she finally received a document stating that "there was no evidence against her anti-Soviet activities."[9] Ekaterina died in 1960.[3]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Larisa Vasilyeva (1994). Kremlin Wives. Arcade Publishing. p. 116. ISBN 978-1-55970-260-7. Retrieved 3 September 2013.
  2. ↑ Evan Mawdsley; Stephen White (2000). The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917-1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 59. Retrieved 3 September 2013. – via Questia (subscription required)
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Olga Prodan. "Prominent Russians: Mikhail Kalinin". RT. Retrieved 3 September 2013.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 James Peter Young (2008). "Bolshevik Wives" (PhD Thesis). University of Sydney. Retrieved 3 September 2013.
  5. 1 2 Екатерина Калинина Tatianis Retrieved 4 October 2013
  6. 1 2 3 Grace Hutchins (1934). Women who work. New York: International Publishers. Retrieved 3 September 2013. – via Questia (subscription required)
  7. ↑ "The Soviet Union". Rulers. Retrieved 3 September 2013.
  8. ↑ Miklós Kun (2003). Stalin: An Unknown Portrait. Budapest: Central European University Press. p. 267. – via Questia (subscription required)
  9. 1 2 3 4 Vadim J. Bristein (2001). The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. p. 68. Retrieved 3 September 2013. – via Questia (subscription required)
  10. 1 2 Robert C. Tucker (1997). Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941. New York: W.W. Norton. p. 447. Retrieved 3 September 2013.  – via Questia (subscription required)
  11. ↑ Andrew Higgins (17 January 1993). "Secret lives of Kremlin wives". The Independent. Retrieved 3 September 2013.
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