Most of the Communists did not approve of Kalinin’s election. Lenin alone sensed the proper time to place a peasant as nominal head of the Soviets; a peasant who should begin as Master of Ceremonies and who, in his peasant’s garb and with his peasant’s tongue, should bring Lenin’s ideas to the people; a peasant who would never cease being a peasant and who would come back to Lenin and say, “This and this they will have, here they cannot follow and there they will lead.” Lenin gazed at Russia through Kalinin’s eyes as one gazes in a crystal. In 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized control of the state, a delicate little man called Jacob Michaelovitch Sverdlov, a chemist by profession and a revolutionist by conviction, was Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Workers and Soldiers Deputies; this meant that he controlled the Red Guards, the conscious workers and the revolting soldiers; it meant he held a position of such tremendous authority that he could not be ignored by anybody. So when the first Council of the People’s Commissars was formed, which is really no other than the cabinet of the Russian Government, Sverdlov was the first person taken into consideration by them. And in order to find a place for him they created the office of President. When he accepted that office he gave up his direct control and became but one voice in a group. Nevertheless, all through the barricade days he continued to act as the spokesman in the cabinet for the Petrograd workers who were, for at least the first year, a power above the cabinet. In the winter of 1918 Sverdlov died of typhus and was buried on the Red Square in Moscow. During the time Sverdlov was president the government was in continual difficulty with the peasants. They resisted the government’s requisitioning expeditions, retreated within themselves and almost ignored the central power until the provinces were in a continual state of guerilla warfare. They managed their local Soviets with little or no thought of the Moscow Government. Civil war continued and, with the aid of France and England, grew apace; hard dark days settled over Russia. Sverdlov looked about for an entering wedge which would somehow pierce the way to an eventual understanding and co-operation with the local and central Soviets. In this search Sverdlov discovered Kalinin. Kalinin was already immensely popular with the peasants; he had been on every Land Committee of importance since the beginning of the first revolution, under both Miliukov and Kerensky. During his term of office Sverdlov used Kalinin as a mediator in many difficult situations and Lenin watched his work with interest. An old Communist explained Kalinin’s election in these words: “He was a ‘find’ of Sverdlov’s, but it was Lenin alone who realized that days might come when he would be invaluable in holding Russia together.” Those days have come; they came with the tightening of the blockade and continued with the famine.