Along with other soldier delegates from the division in April 1917, he came to Petrograd to meet with Nikolay Chkheidze, Matvey Skobelev, Alexander Kerensky, Nikolai Krylenko, and Vladimir Lenin.

He graduated from school in September, was promoted to the rank of ensign, and was sent as acting company commander to the 12th reserve regiment (Karachev, Oryol province).

From March 1918, with a detachment of revolutionary soldiers, he was in Samara, subordinate to Valerian Kuybyshev, organizing the dispatch of trains with food from the Volga region to Petrograd.

After the uprising of the Czechoslovak Legion in May-June 1918, he participated in the defense of Samara from the Czechs as the commander of an artillery battery.

At the beginning of World War II he was appointed commander of the 24th Army, which was formed from district troops on June 28, 1941.

Author of a report prepared at that time by order of the Military Council of the Western Front on shortcomings in the actions of Soviet troops in the first months of the war.

At the beginning of the German general offensive on Moscow (October 1941), he was caught in the disposition of troops and independently led several divisions that were out of contact with the headquarters of the army and front, and managed to organize their breakthrough to his own, albeit with significant losses.

In mid-October, he was recalled to the command of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR and was urgently sent to Novosibirsk with the task of sending several Siberian divisions to Moscow as soon as possible.

On May 18, 1944, while Kalinin was serving as Commander of the Kharkov Military District, riots broke out at the Krasnoarmeyskaya station, leading to several deaths, robberies, and beatings of officers.

Kalinin was charged with dereliction of duty and was removed from his post of Commander of the Kharkov Military District.

The NKVD's dossier concerning him noted: “In conversations with his colleagues and in public speeches, he declared the unprofitability and low productivity of labor on collective farms, took repressed kulaks under his protection, and expressed dissatisfaction with the punitive policies of the Soviet government.

During the Patriotic War, he expressed doubts about the correctness of the war, accusing the Supreme High Command of the Red Army of not caring about preserving human reserves and allowing large losses in certain operations”.The investigation added other charges of “anti-Soviet propaganda” based on his conversations with other prisoners in his prison cell, as well as his close connection with Ivan Semenovich Kutyakov (ru), an “enemy of the people” who had been executed in 1937 and with whom Kalinin “had criminal conversations” since 1932.

During a search of Kalinin's apartment, his diaries with sharply critical reviews of the Soviet leadership were discovered.

Kalinin was sent to the “AG” forced labor camp of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in the city of Mariinsk, Kemerovo oblast to serve his sentence.

While serving his sentence, the camp court convicted him again on March 11, 1953 under Article 58-10, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for the crime of carrying out anti-Soviet agitation among prisoners and slandering the leaders of the Soviet government and the Communist Party.