Kalinin Quotes

You must remember that we persecute nobody for religion. We regard religion as an error and fight it with education. ~ Mikhail Kalinin

The transitional nature of the 1920's can also be discerned in what may be labeled a new kind of 'dvoeverie' (or dual faith), a syncretistic belief that combined peasant ways and new Communist practices in tentative and uneasy assimilation. For example, there were reports of portraits of Lenin or Kalinin turning up in icon corners and of habit-ridden old peasants crossing themselves in front of these holy images. ~ Lynne Viola

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. ~ Mikhail Kalinin

If you are called upon to govern humans, treat them humanely. ~ Mikhail Kalinin

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. ~ Mikhail Kalinin

On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad - they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin! ~ Nadezhda Mandelstam

The Jews will become socialist colonisers with strong fists and sharp teeth, a strong national group within the Soviet family of nations. ~ Mikhail Kalinin