Mikhail Kalinin

Mikhail Kalinin

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (November 19 [O.S. November 7] 1875 – June 3, 1946) was an Old Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician. He served as head of state of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1946. From 1926, he was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Two large cities, Tver and Königsberg, were renamed in his honor; the latter has retained the name Kaliningrad after the fall of the USSR. Kalinin was honoured with a major state funeral and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Quotes

• You must remember that we persecute nobody for religion. We regard religion as an error and fight it with education.
  • To Red Army political agitators, May 19, 1943. Quoted in "Stalin's Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics" - Page 109 - by Steven Merritt Miner - History - 2003

• The national question is purely a peasant question...the best way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands of workers..., which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat.
  • Quoted in "The Affirmative Action Empire" - Page 147 - by Terry Martin - Political Science - 2001

• The Jews will become socialist colonisers with strong fists and sharp teeth, a strong national group within the Soviet family of nations.
  • Quoted in "Inside the Middle East" - Page 232 - by Dilip Hiro - History - 1982

• For thousands of years humankind's finest minds have been struggling with the theoretical problem of finding the forms that would give peoples the possibility, without the greatest of torment, without internecine strife, of living side by side in friendship and brotherhood. Practically speaking, the first step in this direction is only being taken now, today.
  • Closing speech after the formation of the USSR by the Unification Congress. Quoted in "Survivor From An Unknown War: The Life of Isakjan Narzikul" - Page 3 - by Stephen Lee Crane - 1999

• But even now, after the greatest victory known to history we cannot for one minute forget the basic fact that our country remains the one socialist state in the world. You will speak frankly about this to the collective farmers...Only the most concrete, most immediate danger, which threatened us from Hitlerite Germany, has disappeared.
  • August 1945. Quoted in "The Soviet Union Since World War II" - Page 4 - by American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philip Edward Mosely - History - 1949

• The whole history of my life, and in essence the whole history of the working class consists of this: that we have lived and fought under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin.
  • Quoted in "USSR Information Bulletin" - Page 322 - World War, 1939-1945 - 1942

• These [traits] are first: love, love for his people, love for the working masses...Second, honesty...Third, courage...Fourth, comradely solidarity...Fifth, love for labor. Not only love but an honest attitude to labor, firmly bearing in mind that if a man lives, eats and does not work, this means that he eats someone else's labor.
  • Quoted in "USSR Information Bulletin" - Volume 10, Issue 11 - Page 322

• The contingencies of the moment may justify the omission of certain conveniences in the building of temporary accommodations.
  • Quoted in "From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol After World War II" - 2009

• If you are called upon to govern humans, treat them humanely.
  • Quoted in "Words of the wise: a book of Russian quotations" - 1979