(“Moron, Monster, Genius, Saint” is a jocular allusion to John le
Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
This entry obviously comes out of my Russian/Soviet history subsection,
alongside many already posted entries. See, for instance, my postings of
February/March 2011.)
Mikhail
Ivanovich Kalinin (1875-1946) was a distinguished Soviet statesman, nominal
head of state from 1919 until his natural death in 1946. Russia’s westernmost outpost,
the former German city of Königsberg, was annexed to the USSR after World War
II, and renamed Kaliningrad in his
honor.
Habitually
depicted as an ignorant fool, picked as a compliant stooge for the post of
President of the USSR, he is also described by some post-Soviet re-discoverers
of history as an insatiable sexual predator, with one dark allegation of a
mysterious disappearance of his mistress, later found dead. It is a fact,
however, that his wife separated from him at least twice (which may, or may
not, have been linked to her alleged espousal of free love), and when in 1938
she was arrested and sent to a prison camp (from which she would be released
shortly before Kalinin’s death in 1946), Kalinin did not seem to protest too
much…
That
was one side of the picture, the ugly side. There is another side, too, of
course. It shows Kalinin as an unrivaled genius in his work, and as a very nice
and kind man, during one of the roughest times in Russia’s history. Need I tell
the reader that my father Artem promoted this other side, dismissing the former
one as a vicious calumny?
But
as for myself, I will prefer to start with what I see as a peculiar irony.
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was of peasant birth, but instead of inheriting the
peasant gene, sending him into the fields to plough, to sow and to reap, he was
anxious to get away from his village and village work, to the city, where he
learned the trade of metalwork and was by all accounts a master turner of the
greatest level of skill. Thus, he could rightfully call himself a worker,
yet he was always called a “peasant” by those same people who hailed the worker as the prime
mover of the Proletarian Revolution, but denigrated the Russian peasant as a
second-class citizen. Recommending him for the post equivalent to President of
Soviet Russia, in 1919, Lenin had the following to say about Comrade Kalinin: “This is a Comrade who is counting twenty years of Party
work to his credit; he is himself a peasant from the Tver Region, who has the
closest connection to peasant economy...”
Why
was he billed as a lowly peasant, even by Lenin himself, when all along
he had repudiated his peasant roots and had chosen to be a worker, and to
substantiate his claim, his worker’s skills were, indeed, second to none, and became
legendary among his comrades? To my knowledge, this legitimate question has
never been asked by historians, yet it certainly needs to be asked, as the
paradox here is quite obvious.
The
most likely answer is that, although extolling the supremacy of the blue-collar
worker, the new Soviet power tacitly recognized the national core of Mother
Russia, and her intimate and unbreakable connection to the Russian soil. That connection
could hardly be expressed through the internationalized symbol of the
industrial worker, but it was veritably crystallized in the Russian peasant. Therefore,
contrary to its revolutionary Marxist proletarian-rich rhetoric, the new Soviet
order sorely needed to find a way to re-emphasize that connection to the
peasant, and comically assigned the epitome of a determined defector from
peasanthood for that indispensable role. New Russia’s President simply had to
be a man of the soil, the all-Russian Village
Starosta, whether Comrade Kalinin the
master turner liked it or not…
Such
is my answer, which is presented here in lieu of a personal opinion of Kalinin,
which I do not have, as my “objective” knowledge of him is virtually
non-existent. I shall not repeat here the rather bland official tribute to him
from the erstwhile Soviet sources, nor shall I dignify with my further
attention the indignities attributed to him by old Soviet rumors or new
post-Soviet gossip which has little or no value to monumental history. But in
Part II of this entry, to be posted tomorrow, I shall be quoting, and commenting on, my father’s
memories and opinion of Kalinin, from his 2006 book Conversations About Stalin, co-authored
with his interviewer Ekaterina Glushik.
No comments:
Post a Comment