She was in a labor camp between 1938 and 1946[1] which is called the period of the Great Purge perpetrated by the Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin.

[2] Ekaterina Lorberg was born into an ethnic Estonian[1] farmhand's family on 2 July 1882 in the village of Esna near Paide, Estonia (then part of Russian Empire).

[5] They married in Riga in 1906 and lived in Kalinin's home in the village of Verkhnyaya Troitsa, Tverskaya Gubernia, until 1910.

[3] They adopted two children and Ekaterina served as the deputy director of a weaving mill in the aftermath of the revolution.

[5] She became the manager of a big state grain farm in a remote district near Novosibirsk, Siberia, in the early 1930s.

[14] 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.