Approximately by the time this photo was taken Joseph Stalin was launching his campaign to compel all Soviet artists to observe the rules of ‘socialist realism’. The hunting took a step further and the Meyerhold weren’t the exception. In this new scenario of persecution there was no room for avant-gardists; it did not matter at all that he was one of the first prominent Russian artists to welcome the Bolshevik Revolution.

Reich and Meyerhold married in 1922 after Meyerhold return to Moscow and the foundation of his own theater in 1920, which was known from 1923 to 1938 as the Meyerhold Theatre. In the 1930s the Stimmung became more and more toxic and after Shostakovich had been singled out as being guilty of ‘formalism’, in January 1936, Meyerhold evidently surmised that he would soon be a target, and in March 1936 delivered a talk entitled “Meyer against Meyerholdism”.

A year later, in April 1937, his wife, Zinaida Reich, wrote Stalin a long letter alleging that her husband was the victim of a conspiracy by Trotskyists and former members of the disbanded Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.

In June 1939, Meyerhold was arrested in Leningrad (the 20th). Three weeks later two assailants stabbed Reich to death at the couple’s apartment in Moscow (July 14-15th). The murder is generally regarded as having been organized by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). According to Arkadiy Vaksberg: “Beria needed this sadistic farce” because the actress was extraordinarily popular, independent, outspoken and known for saying: “if Stalin can make no sense of art, let him ask Meyerhold, and he will explain” (Toxic Politics; 2011)

Following his arrest, Meyerhold was taken to NKVD headquarters in Moscow and tortured repeatedly. But it was not until the 1st February 1940 after his “confession” of being a British or Japanese spy that he was sentenced to death by firing squad and executed the next day.

The images of this post are from an earlier, brighter era for the Meyerhold and in the USSR.