Ekaterina Kalinina

Ekaterina Kalinina (; Lorberg; 2 July 1882 – 22 December 1960) was the wife of Soviet politician Mikhail Kalinin, the chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and formally the head of state from 1938 to 1946. She was in a labor camp between 1938 and 1946 which is called the period of the Great Purge perpetrated by the Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin.

Early life and marriage Ekaterina Lorberg was born into an ethnic Estonian She was an active revolutionary and worked at a textile factory in Estonia. They married in Riga in 1906 and lived in Kalinin's home in the village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa, Tverskaya Gubernia, until 1910. Then they settled in St. Petersburg. and was a member of the Bolshevik Party. However, she was not given a visa. Thus, on 25 October 1938 Ekaterina was arrested on charges of being a Trotskyist. At the time of her arrest Ekaterina and her husband Mikhail Kalinin were not living together. She was tortured in Lefortovo Prison, and on 22 April 1939 she was sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment in a labor camp in Chemal. ) 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. However, she was sent into internal exile shortly after her husband's death. Her official rehabilitation took eight more years, and she finally received a document stating "there was no evidence against her anti-Soviet activities." Ekaterina died on 22 December 1960 at the age of 78.