This
is Part II of my two-part Kalinin
entry. Part I was published yesterday. The following are the Kalinin-related
excerpts from my father’s 2006 book Conversations About Stalin, co-authored
with his interviewer Ekaterina Glushik. The book is in Russian. All
translations into English are mine. Artem’s quotes are given in blue color; my
comments are in automatic color.
…Stalin was a good pool player. Once he invited Kalinin to play
pool at his dacha, and cleaned his clock. Kalinin pretended to be furious: “A
decent host ought to have honored his guest by losing the game to him, and look
what you have done! What kind of uncouth creature are you anyway?” (Unlike some other stories of this nature, I have no
reason to doubt this one, which rings authentic to me from everything I know.
Such humor was common in Stalin’s company, as Stalin always encouraged it, and
only some obsequious lackeys of his entourage, whom Stalin despised, never
trusted, and eventually repressed, would never engage in such exchanges.
It follows, therefore, that Kalinin was not an obsequious lackey, as often
depicted.)
Stalin loved and respected Kalinin, who was a peculiar man and a
true original. And besides, he was a metal turner of the highest caliber,
working not on straight lines only but on all curved configurations: the
hardest job in the metal turning profession. And Stalin respected him not just
for his dedication and sharp mind, but also for his attainment of such a high
level of worker’s skill. (This is true,
but once again it shows Kalinin as a skilled worker, and not as a peasant.) He was also a big specialist in peasant affairs. (But
this is already a disingenuous nod to Kalinin’s official Soviet legend. Now see
how Artem will next try to substantiate his platitude not from personal
experience, and not even from the experience of his friends and comrades,
but in generalities, quite uncharacteristic of his usual style of memoir.) Peasants used to say that
during harvest time he would take a scythe and start working with the others,
like a natural-born reaper. (In the last sentence my father is by no
means making something up. He is simply repeating an official Soviet legend,
created to promote Kalinin’s connection to Soviet peasantry. Nor is the
credibility of his narrative compromised here: he is clearly sourcing this
story, but this time it is coming from a source of rather dubious credibility:
the official Soviet agitprop.)
Now,
here is another Kalinin story, this time from Artem’s personal experience, and
I am convinced that it is quite true and practically unembellished, as this is
not one of those “obligatory cases” where my father feels compelled to alter
history for public consumption, ad majorem Russiae gloriam. The story is
taken from his interview to the Express Gazette, as always in my translation.
The Kremlin had one barbershop for all. Once-- I was just a boy
then-- I was waiting for my turn to have my haircut. Suddenly Mikhail Ivanovich
Kalinin comes in. My turn happened to be next and I offered him to go in front
of me. And he suddenly tells me: “No, one must not do it. It’s your turn now
and so you go first. Do we have a law on the books anywhere, which says that Mikhail
Ivanovich Kalinin must be served ahead of the line at the barbershop? No, we
don’t, and I know it because I write them and sign them. So, take your turn
now, and I will wait for mine.”
For
the benefit of those eager to dismiss this story as sugary and disingenuous
hagiography (after all, Artem was Comrade Stalin’s son, and Kalinin
certainly knew that), I’ll note that deviousness was not in Kalinin’s nature.
From what I heard about him from my parents and from other people who
personally knew him, he would have done exactly the same thing for someone who
was not Stalin’s son, simply out of a
general sense of fairness. On the other hand, I know of quite a few men and
women at the Kremlin, the obsequious lackeys, I spoke of earlier, who were
plotting day and night how to keep themselves in Stalin’s good graces, but
would never see anything wrong in taking a little boy’s turn at the barbershop.
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