During World War II, the USSR’s formal head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, had so little real power that he was not even a member of the State Defense Committee, the emergency body that concentrated full state authority in its hands and actually ran the Soviet war effort. His wife, Yekaterina Kalinina, spent most of the war in the Gulag. According to later Soviet reporting, Kalinin repeatedly pleaded with Stalin to release her, but she was freed only in December 1945, after the war.
The irony is that Kalinin, a largely ceremonial Soviet head of state, ended up giving his name to one of Russia’s most strategically important territories: Königsberg, the former German city on the Baltic, was renamed Kaliningrad on 4 July 1946, shortly after his death. Tver, the major city in his home region, had already been renamed Kalinin in 1931, but got its old name back in 1990.
by Last_Adhesiveness530
14 Comments
The more I read about this Stalin fellow…I’m starting to think he may have not been that nice of a guy.
For those of you wondering Stalin says “ara”
Huh, didn’t know Colonel Sanders became President of the USSR, what an interesting life that man led.
Every Meme I see about Stalin makes Me glad he died because of his own paranoia and covered in his own piss. All because he got rid of the competent doctors because of anti-semetism and the guards literally afraid of Stalin.
RIH Stalin (Rot In Hell)
Molotov’s wife was also arrested by NKVD while Molotov was Minister of Foreign Affairs
Is this AI?
Molotov’s wife too.
[removed]
FUCK AI
This is not best example. First of all they werent couple when Ekaterina was imprisoned. Second he didnt signed her release later. Better example would be Polina Molotova.
Don’t use AI.
nyat
Wait, is this AI?
Better example was Stalin’s aide Poskrebyshev.
Called a walking encyclopedia by his peers, he work 16-18 hour days, accompanying Stalin and planning his activities, drafting his ideas into policies, laws, he even wrote constition of USSR in 1936.
His swcond wife wife got arrested in 1939 and executed in 1941. She was a doctor and her brother traveled to Paris for a symphozium, where he met Trocky. This was enough for Jezhov/Beria to arrested both of them, starting with brother in 1939. Stalin dismissed Poskrebyshev pleas to amnest his wife.