Andrei Kalachev was born into a peasant family in the Blagoveshchensky Zavod settlement, in Ufa province . He received a basic education, and an incomplete secondary education.
He worked as a telegraph operator, before being drafted into the Red Army in around 1920. He became an anarchist communist that year, and was one of the organisers of the Ufa anarchist communist group, set up in March 1920.
He was arrested by the Soviet authorities on October 6th, 1920, and sentenced to 2 years in a concentration camp. At the end of 1921, local Chekists described him as an active anarchist communist agitator.
After his release, he lived first in Ufa, now capital of the Bashhir Soviet Socialist Republic, and then in the village of Topornino. Together with his brothers, Timofei and Alexander, he set up the underground Ufa Anarchist Union. This group was very active, organising within the local agricultural commune Zarya. They published the illegal handwritten magazine Voice of the Underground. By 1925, Andrei was chairperson of the commune.
The local OGPU (new name for the Cheka) reported on April 11th of that year on the “significant scale” of the activities of the Topornino anarchist communist group, and its spreading of propaganda among workers and peasants.
Andrei was arrested on September 21st and charged with organising an “anarchist gang.” The group was liquidated, and Andrei was sentenced to another 3 years in prison.
In 1930 Andrei was living in exile in the Tomsk district of Siberia. He kept up vcontact with groups of exiled anarchists in Siberia and Kazakhstan, and with the Foreign Aid Fund of the International Workers’ Association for Imprisoned and Exiled Russian Anarchists and Anarcho-Syndicalists. He was released from exile around 1931 and returned to Bashkiria.
He was again arrested on June 5th, 1933, on charges of anti-Soviet agitation. Once again, he was sentenced to 3 years exile, this time in Kazakhstan.
By 1937, he was living in Kustanai in Kazakhstan, and working as an economist and statistician. He was arrested by the NKVD on February 19th, 1937, and charged with anti-Soviet agitation and blonging to a counter-revolutionary organisation. He was sentenced to death on November 2nd, 1937 and shot by firing squad on the same day, alongside fellow anarchists Vasily Fedorovich Kosov (born 1897), Vasily Dimiteivich Makhov (born 1893), Vladimir Dimitreivich Novozhilov (born 1897), and Nikolai Matveyevich Tumanov (born 1902).
Nick Heath
Sources:
https://ru.openlist.wiki/ Калачев_Андрей_Николаевич_(1900)
Dubovik, Anatoli. Entry on Kalachev as well as photograph, at:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2990629131201367/posts/3949679918629612/