Ekaterina Kalinina

Ekaterina was born into an Estonian [2] peasant family on 2 July 1882 from Estonia.[3][4] She was an active revolutionary and worked at a textile factory in Estonia.[5] In 1905 she met Mikhail Kalinin in St. Petersburg where she fled due to her revolutionary activities.[5] There Kalinin was working as a lathe operator.[6] They married in 1906[5] and lived in Kalinin's home in the village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa, Tverskaya Gubernia, until 1910.[3][7] Then they settled in St. Petersburg.[3]

Before the Revolution Kalinina worked in a bottle factory[8] and was a member of the Bolshevik Party.[3] The Kalinins had four children, two sons and two daughters.[5][8] According to another report the Kalinin family had three children.[3][7] She along with the children accompanied Kalinin in his exile to Siberia in 1916.[6]

Following the revolution they moved to Moscow.[6] 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.[9] Initially the Kalinins lived in a Kremlin apartment which they shared with the Trotskys.[3] They adopted two children and Ekaterina served as the deputy director of a weaving mill in the aftermath of the revolution.[6] 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.[6] She became the manager of a big state grain farm in a remote district near Novosibirsk, Siberia, in the early 1930s.[8] Then she served as a member of the Supreme Court until 1938.[3]

She and her friends criticized Stalin's policies, and informers and operative officers transmitted this information to Stalin.[10] Thus, on 25 October 1938 Ekaterina was arrested on charges of being a "Trotskyist".[11] Although her husband was the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet - formally the head of state of the USSR (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.[11] 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.[11] Her release occurred shortly before Kalinin's death.[12][13] However, she was sent into internal exile shortly after her husband's death.[12] Her official rehabilitation took eight more years, and she finally received a document stating that "there was no evidence against her anti-Soviet activities."[11] Ekaterina died on 22 December 1960 at the age of 78.[5]