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Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (Russian: Михаи́л Ива́нович Кали́нин) (November 19 [O.S. November 7] 1875...

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (Russian: Михаи́л Ива́нович Кали́нин) (November 19 [O.S. November 7] 1875 – June 3, 1946) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and the titular head of state of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1946. Though only four years older than Joseph Stalin, Kalinin was celebrated as Dedushka ("Grandpa") by the Young Pioneers. Three large cities, Tver, Korolyov and Königsberg, were renamed in his honor; the latter has retained the name Kaliningrad after the fall of the USSR. Born to a peasant family in the village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa (Верхняя Троица), Tverskaya Gubernia, Russia, he moved to Saint Petersburg in 1889 as a servant of a rich neighbour and became a metal worker in 1895. In 1898 he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. In 1906 he married the ethnic Estonian Katarina Loоrberg (Russian: Yekaterina Ivanovna Lorberg)(1882–1960), who was arrested in October 1938, forced under torture to confess to "counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activities" and sent to a labor camp (released in 1945 a few days before her husband's death). Kalinin was a candidate member of the Politburo from 1919 until 1925 when he became a full member. He remained on the body until 1946.