Mikhail Kalinin certainly was something of an odd-duck in the Stalinist state apparatus. Despite the massive cult of personality surrounding the General Secretary, Kalinin was nominally the head of the Soviet state. His Old Bolshevik background was also atypical by the late 1930s as some of the more prominent veterans of the RSDLP died during the Purges. But in this regard Kalinin was not alone; Kagonovich, Voroshilov, and Mikoyan were also Old Bolsheviks and survived the Purges. These men were a part of what the historians Stephen Wheatcraft and Sheila Fitzpatrick have termed "Team Stalin," a circle of Bolshevik veterans and managers that cut their teeth in the Lenin period and managed to ensconce themselves into Stalin's decision-making process. Rather than act as a tyrant, Stalin often preferred pushing a consensus among informal meetings in his offices and then delegating to his team to carry out the consensus he had forced. Although the Stalinist decision-making process was capricious and missteps could be fatal, it was not that much different from the type of collective leadership of the Lenin era where Lenin as the first among equals would bend decisions towards his own ends. Kalinin owed his survival both to the dynamics of Stalin's executive system and the role he played inside of it.

For the Team, Kalinin was a source of both stability and consensus-building among Stalin's servitors. Although Kalinin, like Voroshilov, had toyed with Bukharin's plan to oust Stalin as General Secretary in, both men backed out at the last minute. Since this abortive maneuverings in the mid-1920s, Kalinin became less active in internal political debates and his peasant-background meant he often dispensed folky wisdom in meetings rather than hard policy. Kalinin's own advanced age and sociability helped further endear him to members of the Team as a force that brought much needed social lubrication to a tense and informal situation. Kalinin emerged as something of a village peasant elder in these meetings, giving his assent (in practice meaningless in light of Stalin's power) that managed impart a homespun quality to these decisions.

But beyond the internal politics of the Team, Kalinin was also useful for the wider project of Soviet power. Not only did his titular head of the Soviet state deflect charges of an individualistic dictatorship, albeit imperfectly, but his age and peasant ways was a popular form of politics in the 1930s. After Stalin, Kalinin received the greatest volume of personal petitions from Soviet citizens. His persona as the "all-union peasant elder", carefully cultivated by both Kalinin and the Soviet state, meant that a good number of the peasantry saw him as a friendly voice in the corridors of Soviet power. This popularity was obviously of great utility for Stalin as it gave sanction to his various collectivization initiatives since the state's "first peasant" agreed with them. Additionally, Kalinin's role as the titular head of state allowed him to act in a ceremonial position for dignitaries in Moscow when Stalin was unable to meet with them His affability and age lent lent a degree of dignity to the Kremlin and Supreme Soviet, and masked the increasing cult of personality that Kalinin rubber-stamped.

This does not mean that Kalinin operated without any fear of Stalin in the 1930s. He had earned a public rebuke from the dictator during collectivization and the Holodomor for being too close to the peasantry in 1930. More dangerously, Beria had Kalinin's wife, Ekaterina Lorberg, arrested in the fall of 1938 on charges of anti-Soviet activity and received a 15 year Gulag sentence. Lorberg's arrest was likely a fishing expedition on Beria's part to gain ammunition against Kalinin, but Loberg had little in the way of a formal relationship with her husband. The couple had lived apart for years and whatever material Beria obtained remained in his files.

Kalinin remained as titular head of state through the Second World War. His age and eventual blindness further restricted his activities in this period, and it became obvious to many that he was nowhere near the levers of power. While he may have posed a threat to Stalin early on in the dictatorship, such a threat had rapidly decreased with Kalinin's own infirmities and level-headed recognition of Stalin's ascendancy. Other Old Bolsheviks like Bukharin were not so old as Kalinin and were thus were a threat that Stalin needed to eliminate or neutralize.

Sources

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2015.

Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg V. Naumov. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1999.

Khlevniuk, O. V., and Nora Seligman Favorov. Master of the house: Stalin and his inner circle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Wheatcroft, Stephen G. "From Team-Stalin to degenerate tyranny." In The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship, pp. 79-107. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2004.