"Can you believe that I am a traitor to the Motherland?" Meyerhold's Shot Theater

Meyerhold will remain for a long time not just one of the largest figures in Russian culture, but also one of the most mysterious. When in the early 1960s we decided to organize an evening in memory of Vsevolod Emilievich at Moscow University and came to talk about him with Dmitry Shostakovich, he warned: “Keep in mind, Meyerhold is like the horizon: the closer you get to him, the further away he turns out to be.”

This is how our conversation about the legendary Master began with a person who has been studying his life and work for more than forty years - with art critic, Professor Alexander Sherel.

In those days, this form of public denunciation was very widespread,” explains Sherel. - Look who became the “accuser” of Vsevolod Emilievich.

I read old newspaper lines.

People's Artist of the USSR Boris Shchukin: “You were the author of a number of performances that slandered our Soviet reality...”

Another accusation: the chief director of the Maly Theater, Prov Sadovsky, calls Meyerhold’s theater “a school of formalistic tricks.”

I am against vague directorial tricks that distort the meaning of events and the appearance of the characters. [...] The bankruptcy of the Meyerhold Theater is the logical end of the wrong, erroneous path...” Signed - Colonel Valery Chkalov.

Could the famous pilot really write such a thing?

Most likely, the text was written by others, but it was he who signed it - Valery Pavlovich, the idol of the entire Union. Did he do this out of despair, fulfilling the “higher” will? After all, at that time clouds had already gathered over the hero, he was walking, as they say, on the edge. In any case, this collection of “open letters” was published and served as a compelling argument to justify the liquidation of the Meyerhold theater, which was closed in early January 1938.

Signs of trouble

In the 1930s, for example, he sued the party archive of the city of Nikolaev, where Vsevolod Emilievich was refused a certificate stating that in the early 1920s he fought with the White Guards, taking part in the “green” detachments of Father Makhno. And this at a time when Makhno was already recognized as an enemy in the USSR!

One might say that Meyerhold was looking for trouble. After his rehabilitation in 1955, much was said about the fact that he was a convinced communist. Is it so? Or maybe Meyerhold was only playing out his loyalty to communist ideals in front of the “tops”?

Couldn't he really leave the country?

Back in the early 1930s, when the Meyerhold Theater came on tour to Berlin, the Master met with the great actor Mikhail Chekhov, who lived in exile. And he said: “Vsevolod Emilievich! You should not return to Moscow: you will be destroyed there.” As Chekhov recalled, Meyerhold was clearly at a loss: “But my return is a matter of honor!”

The director could have taken refuge abroad later: there were friends in Czechoslovakia who would have helped him stay and find work... Why didn’t he do this? After all, he saw how the authorities were bullying his friend Shostakovich, he saw that the wave of arrests was growing... Did he really not understand what awaited him? There are several options here.

For example, our famous director Pluchek, when I asked his point of view on this matter, said: “This man believed in communism!” Another version, the most simple one (it was adhered to by Maria Vallentei, the Master’s granddaughter): Vsevolod Emilievich very much loved his wife Zinaida Reich and her two children, who were like family to him. If they stay abroad, they will find themselves in the position of hostages. And from one director, Mikhail Levitin, I heard a completely different opinion: “Meyerhold played so much with everyone in his life - and outplayed everyone. Perhaps, having gained confidence in himself, he decided to play with death?”

Surely there were some prophetic signs long before the arrest?

Of course, the clouds over the Master’s head gradually thickened. At the end of 1937, his new performance based on Ostrovsky’s novel “How the Steel Was Tempered” was banned, and Pravda subsequently published a devastating article “Alien Theater,” in which Vsevolod Emilievich was called a director “alien to Soviet art.” Soon GOSTIM, the Meyerhold theater that had existed since 1931, was also closed... A new derogatory word appeared in the newspapers: “Meyerholdism.”

The last sign of trouble appeared literally on the eve of the arrest. In June 1939, the All-Union Directors' Conference was held. The country's leadership was represented by the deputy. Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and recent Prosecutor General A. Vyshinsky. A ceremonial photograph was taken for publication in the press: a group of leading Soviet directors together with the formidable “Deputy Prime Minister”. On it Meyerhold sits on the left hand of Andrei Yanuaryevich. However, on the pages of central newspapers, readers saw something completely different: to the left of Vyshinsky is the famous director Alexei Popov! The retouchers were ordered to install it instead of Meyerhold.

Black rats

What an aberration of artistic memory! The actor and his wife saw two black cars in the form of rats, following on the heels of Meyerhold... When he arrived at his place in Karpovka, they were already waiting for him near the entrance of the house. NKVD operative Antropov presented an arrest and search warrant. And yet, at this desperate moment, the Master had the courage to resist. He noticed that the paper was issued in Moscow, and for some reason the stamp on it was from Leningrad: “This is the wrong order, I’m not going anywhere!” And the security officers, sensing his will, did not dare to get into trouble. One car was guarding the director at the entrance, and the second rushed to the department to urgently issue the “correct” warrant. An unexpected hitch occurred, and the procedure for Meyerhold’s arrest itself took place in the morning - some residents of the building were returning to their apartments from walks along the embankments, from guests...

The story of what happened next is only a version. I want to especially emphasize this! No official documents confirming this episode have yet been discovered, but only logical reasoning and some indirect data. Nevertheless, this version was insisted on by the recently deceased Maria Alekseevna Vallentei, the director’s granddaughter, the keeper of his archive, who managed (the only one of all) to familiarize herself with the Master’s criminal case at the KGB.

Vsevolod Emilievich’s neighbor at the entrance was returning home. The security officers stopped him at the door and demanded that he be a witness during the search. After what he saw while the NKVD officers were working in Meyerhold’s apartment, the neighbor suffered a severe nervous shock, as a result of which he began to noticeably stutter and constantly did this with his hands: he caught his nail on his nail. A very characteristic gesture - do you recognize who we are talking about? Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich! After all, his apartment was really in the same entrance.

Appointed chief conspirator

Among the other charges that were read to Meyerhold as soon as he was taken to the “Big House” on Liteiny Prospekt was the following: “For criminal connections with Boris Pasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg and Yuri Olesha.”

But none of these three were under arrest then!

In fact of the matter. There is a version that Stalin was going to organize another massive purge. This time among the creative intelligentsia. It was for this future reprisal that the “actors” were trained. The names of three of them appeared in the Meyerhold case... But the planned trial did not take place. What stopped the “leader of the peoples”? Apparently, the war with the Finns played a major role - when we were hit hard in the face, Stalin decided to slow down: in such a situation it was dangerous to imprison famous artists and writers, with whom the head of the army was friends at that time... But I think that if such a process had If it did take place, Meyerhold would become one of the key figures.

The decree on the arrest of the Master was signed personally by People's Commissar Beria. Among the charges brought against him at the very first interrogation, in addition to “criminal connections” with writers, was “working for Japanese and Lithuanian intelligence.” The director did not forget one more “sin”: in the 1920s he communicated a lot with Trotsky. And he even dedicated his play “The Earth on End” to “the first Red Army soldier Lev Davidovich Trotsky” (for the fact that he helped design the production, ordering the provision of military ammunition, searchlights, field telephones and even a motorcycle).

We do not know what happened to Meyerhold in the first hours after his arrest. Maybe they had already started beating him, or maybe the security officers showed the director some “murderous” documents that had a very strong effect on him... In any case, he surrendered and at night in his cell he wrote his testimony on several sheets of paper. Already in our time, the KGB gave these papers to Maria Vallentei to read, she told me that he confessed everything there. A letter written by Vsevolod Emilievich later has been preserved: “... Through humiliation and pain they tore out my confession, my signature on a sheet of paper where there is not a single word of truth...”

Just a day later, on June 22, 1939, Meyerhold was sent to the capital. The head of the Leningrad NKVD department received a telegram signed by Deputy People's Commissar Goglidze: to transport Meyerhold to Moscow “with a special escort, as a particularly dangerous criminal.”

At first, the director was kept in Lubyanka, then transferred to Butyrka prison.

A closed court session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR took place on February 1, 1940, right in one of the offices of Butyrka prison. There, in the prison office, the indictment was read to him: “...In 1934-1935. Meyerhold was involved in espionage work. As an agent of British and Japanese intelligence, he conducted active espionage work directed against the USSR... He is accused of being a career Trotskyist, an active participant in the Trotskyist organization that operated among art workers...” Then came the sentence: death penalty.

Waiting for a terrible moment in his cell, Vsevolod Emilievich wrote his last letter - addressed to the chairman of the government, Molotov:

To the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR V.M. Molotov from Meyerhold-Reich Vsevolod Emilievich

STATEMENT

… “Here is my confession, brief, as it should be a second before death. I've never been a spy. I was never a member of any of the Trotskyist organizations (I, together with the party, cursed Judas Trotsky). I have never been involved in counter-revolutionary activities... They beat me here - a sick sixty-year-old man, they put me on the floor face down, they beat me on my heels and back with a rubber band while I was sitting on a chair, they beat me on my legs with the same rubber (from above, with great force) and in places from the knees to the upper parts of the legs. And in the following days, when these places of the legs were filled with profuse internal hemorrhage, then these red-blue-yellow bruises were again beaten with this tourniquet, and the pain was such that it seemed like boiling water was being poured onto the sore sensitive places of the legs (I screamed and cried from pain). They hit me on the back with this rubber, they hit me in the face with swings from above.”

Genius in the trash

For many years the Master's grave remained unknown. Only relatively recently this “Chekist secret” was declassified. The murdered director was taken from Butyrka to the Donskoy crematorium, and after burning, the ashes were poured into a common hole dug on the outskirts of the Donskoy cemetery.

There, along with Vsevolod Emilievich, rest the ashes of Babel, Marshals Tukhachevsky and Egorov and many thousands more victims of the 30-40s... Now the burial place has been put in order, a white memorial plate “Common Grave No. 1” has been installed. Burial of unclaimed ashes 1930-1942 inclusive". And I remember the time when there was still a garbage dump in this place, where fallen leaves, garbage, old wreaths were taken out from the cemetery...

P.S.
There are testimonies from witnesses who were present during the interrogations of Meyerhold. The great director was lying on the floor with a broken hip, with a broken, bleeding face, and the investigator was urinating on him... He was credited with participation in the Trotskyist organization and espionage in favor of four countries at once: Japan, England, France and Lithuania. The transcripts of Meyerhold's interrogations include the names of Pasternak, Shostakovich, Olesha and Ehrenburg - the protagonists of the planned unprecedented performance.
Yes, the owner did not think of stopping even after Yezhov. Having completed the defeat of the party, the army and the Soviet elite, he logically decided to deliver the final blow - to culture. But mass extermination was no longer possible - the country was exhausted, and the Leader, regulating the Sacred Fire, replaced quantity with quality. The process had to concern names that the whole country knew - so that once and for all the creative intelligentsia, which allowed itself to whisper opposition, would understand everything, so that it would solidify forever the lesson already learned by both the party and the army...
But apparently, observing the investigation, he doubted the possibility of Babel, Meyerhold and others participating in the planned process. He couldn't rely on these strange people. For example, Babel, who had already admitted everything, renounces his testimony on October 10, 1939... And the Master understood: these nervous, great artists are dangerous, because they are excitable and unpredictable, you cannot rely on them!
He was disappointed in the actors, and the performance did not take place. They simply shot Babel, Meyerhold, and Koltsov, having received the necessary testimony from them, and continued to search for new worthy performers in the finale of the thriller... But the war got in the way.
During the days of the investigation, Meyerhold's wife, actress Zinaida Reich, wrote letters to Stalin and walked around Moscow, talking about injustice. It was a riot - and the reaction followed... The killers entered her apartment through the balcony door. They killed sadistically, stabbed for a long time - 17 stab wounds. She screamed madly, but no one helped her, people were afraid of night screams in those years...
Beria's driver and Lavrenty Pavlovich's 16-year-old lover settled in Meyerhold's vacated apartment. The satanic ending is in the spirit of Woland.

I read the second chapter from B. Sopelnyak’s book “The Tragic Fates of Great People.” It is dedicated to Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold. The favorite of liberals. To the genius director. OK then. He was rehabilitated in 1955. Because the so-called “thaw” began, that is, N.S. Khrushchev, saving himself. Stalin placed all the blame for the mass repressions on the shoulders of Stalin. And during this period they began to dig. Allegedly, great people were shot for no reason. .And this is what I read in Sopelnyak’s book. Well, he handed over secret information about the policies of the party and government. That is, he was a political intelligence agent. He admitted this himself - and ratted out all his colleagues and acquaintances. all of all (By the way, like the same M. Koltsov who betrayed Meyerhold) That is, he, saving his skin, did not think about it. how bad it will be. who did he betray? Sopelnyak is so surprised - why did he rat everyone out? So it split right away?

Yes. and was also a Japanese spy. More precisely, he gave Japanese political intelligence what it asked for through its agents. Well, let's say Seki Sano was not an agent. Not proven. But the second Japanese, Yoshimasu, was illegally eager to join him. He was caught. And he passed Vs.E.M. Yes. He also collaborated with Fred Gray, an English citizen. arranged meetings for him with Rykov. in his apartment. He admitted this frankly. when he was arrested. Well, a child or what?

And as for bribes. He also admitted it. Rafail, the head of the Moscow Department of Public Education and the head of the Theater of Revolution, gave him bribes. where V.E. was the director. Meyerhold admits that Raphael generously allocated funds for my productions. Anti-Soviet. They paid well for the music they ordered.

Well, what can one do with the facts?

the director was brilliant. good. But why did you follow the lead (for money) from Olga Davydovna Kameneva (Rosenfeld) - the wife of the enemy of the people Kamenev and Trotsky’s sister? For money. Avarice, greed. He was later convicted under the article.

That is, he sold himself wholeheartedly to Trotsky. He admitted everything. And in the end, kneeling down, he asked for mercy from the head of government, Malotov - “I beg you. head of government, save me. give me back my freedom... I love my Motherland and will give it all my strength... I, together with the party, cursed Judas Trotsky." This is all from a letter to Molotov. And Trotsky praised him in his articles for directing. He repaid, as they say.

Sopelnyak writes. which was a few hours before the arrest. anticipating. I was drinking right on the street with my friend.

And he married Zinaida Reich, who was 20 years older than him. Yesenin could not with her. fool, live. She left him. with his two children

Vsevolod Emilievich is careless, but talented - well, almost like the devil.

He is financially secure, with open arms to Trotsky.

The life of a bohemian - you have to get used to it, your head is spinning, your soul is black.

And what is there more in it - honey or poison? or a buzz from wine?

The director is both famous and dexterous, But his theater is like a bone in the throat.

Revolutionary productions Triumphant. like a nail on the head.

Not born - late or early - On time, right in the midst of the war.

And the Suckers of the elite are involved in it cheerfully and zealously.

But when the hour of reckoning comes, the Evil One. inevitable judgment

How fraudulent. Yesterday's geniuses are cowardly then

They fall to their knees, lackeys. No, alas, they have no idea...

That is, Bohemian life. slutty. cheerful. And somehow people didn’t understand that the head should be on the shoulders and they felt sorry for them. and according to merit.

What does Stalin have to do with this? As Putin said, cutlets are separate. flies separately.

Nemirovich-Danchenko demanded with a scandal not to listen to “a mad genius offering some kind of scrambled eggs with onions - a wild mixture Nietzsche, Maeterlinck and radicalism."
One of Meyerhold's students was Igor Ilyinsky. But the young actor left the famous director. Meyerhold staged the play “The Bedbug,” where Ilyinsky played Prisypkin. In one of the scenes, Meyerhold invited him to climb onto the table, walk along it, crushing the plates, and then slam the icon on the floor and wipe his feet on it - this was the director’s creative search. To which Igor Vladimirovich replied: “I don’t know what religion you are, but I will never do this!” After which he jumped off the table and left... Meyerhold dedicated one of his first performances, “The Earth Standing on End” "to the first Red Army soldier Lev Davidovich Trotsky."

Original taken from ukhudshanskiy V

Original taken from prong777 in How Meyerhold wrote denunciations against his colleagues

Original taken from maxfux in How Meyerhold wrote denunciations against his colleagues

Last week I read an interview with the daughter of the outstanding theater director Leonid Varpakhovsky. She created a professional Russian drama theater in Canada. The journalist asked her not only about the theater she created, but also about her famous father.

Leonid Varpakhovsky was a student of Meirhold and simply idolized the young actor. your teacher. But in 1936, 28-year-old Varpakhovsky was arrested “for promoting Trotskyism,” and he returned to Moscow only in 1956.

After rehabilitation, Varpakhovsky accidentally learns that he was imprisoned, it turns out, based on the denunciation of his teacher Vsevolod Meirhold that “this is a person alien to us.” Varpakhovsky’s daughter says that after her father found out, he lay facing the wall for two days. She still keeps a copy of this letter in Canada.

Vsevolod Meyerhold greeted the Bolshevik revolution with delight.

In 1917, he came to Smolny to declare his readiness to cooperate with the new government. By this time, Meyerhold was 43 years old, he was the father of three adult daughters, an apologist for the “new theater” he invented... and the chief director of the Imperial Theaters: drama and opera - the Alexandrinsky and the Mariinsky - in St. Petersburg. He now saw his task as helping the new government through the means of revolutionary propaganda theater.

In 1919, he joined the CPSU(b), and for several months headed the Theater Department of the People's Commissariat for Education. Feeling like a kind of theatrical dictator from Bolshevism, Meyerhold declared “Theatrical October,” put on a leather jacket, attached a parabellum and demanded that all theater workers follow his path. He threatened those who would not or could not, with nothing more and nothing less than execution.

The communist press under his leadership actively attacked academic theaters: the Moscow Art Theater and others. Meyerhold called for a rebellion against the old theater, “whoever admires this, catch yourself being eaten up by the all-powerful philistinism, from whose fetters you must break free if you want to become a citizen of the new, communist world.”

In 1920, he became the head of the First Theater of the RSFSR and dedicated one of the first performances of “The Earth on End” to “the first Red Army soldier Lev Davidovich Trotsky.”

One of Meyerhold's students was Igor Ilyinsky. But the young actor left the famous director. Meyerhold staged the play “The Bedbug,” where Ilyinsky played Prisypkin. In one of the scenes, Meyerhold invited him to climb onto the table, walk along it, crushing the plates, and then slam the icon on the floor and wipe his feet on it - this was the director’s creative search. To which Igor Vladimirovich replied: “I don’t know what religion you are, but I will never do this!” Then he jumped off the table and left.

From the revolution until the end of the 20s, there were active artistic discussions, which could often turn into political demagoguery. Without orders from above, people of different convictions accused each other of things for which they were later arrested - bourgeoisism, mysticism, formalism.

Once in the early 30s, when discussions of the artistic values ​​of works could already end with arrests and the closure of theaters, Meyerhold at a public meeting publicly called Tairov's performance "Motherland" an example of pure formalism.
Tairov turned to him:
- Vsevolod Emilievich, you haven’t seen this performance! You weren't at the performance!"
To which Meyerhold replied to his colleague:
“Yes, I didn’t see the performance, but they told me about it in detail.”

(During the fight against formalism, Meyerhold could calmly blame his colleagues, which at that time led to the closure of the theater and the arrest of the director.)

After 1934, public reprimands were already regulated by party decisions, reached the level of wild rudeness and were aimed at eliminating people.

Meyerhold was close friends with Tukhachevsky. And, apparently, he was very worried when Tukhachevsky was arrested. On June 12, 1937, Tukhachevsky was shot, and five days later Meyerhold wrote in the newspaper “Soviet Culture”

“With an unwavering hand, we beheaded the vile bunch of conspirators who dared to encroach on the happiness and life of the country of the Soviets. These days, all our thoughts are turned to our people, who are completing the work of socialist construction, to our heroic Bolshevik Party, led by the brilliant leader of working humanity, Comrade Stalin.”

In the early 30s, the Meyerhold Theater went on tour abroad. The first city where the achievements of the theatrical art of the Soviet Union were to be demonstrated was Berlin. Here Meyerhold met with the great Russian actor Mikhail Aleksandrovich Chekhov, who had recently left the USSR.

Meyerhold, who may have had a secret mission to persuade the artist to return to his homeland, went on a date with Mikhail Chekhov with his wife, his theater actress Zinaida Reich. As Mikhail Chekhov later recalled, he told Meyerhold: “You don’t need to return to Moscow, you will be destroyed there.” Hearing this, Zinaida Reich attacked Chekhov, shouting: “Meanness! Provocation! We will not tolerate this!..”

What if then she could only assume that in a few years her world-famous husband would be arrested and killed in Lubyanka, and she herself would be stabbed to death in her own apartment.

The original of this post is located at http://ukhudshanskiy.dreamwidth.org/7474066.html

Do you know such a vile creature Svanidze?
which the other day, along with the rest of the special. the group that had gathered fieryly rushed to defend the one who had embezzled the allocated funds for the theater the so-called "director" Serebrennikov? - ..What behind Serebrennikova vouched, in particular, by singer Philip Kirkorov, TV presenters Andrei Malakhov, Ivan Urgant, Nikolai Svanidze and Ksenia Sobchak... This Svanidze was also worried about his congenial Meyerhold.

Original taken from mpotapoff in about Meyerhold

<...>Nowadays it is not customary to pronounce Meyerhold’s name without the epithet “brilliant” or at least “great”, and Mr. Wulf is no exception here. In his “hysterical chronicles,” Svanidze also extols Meyerhold as a theatrical genius of all times and peoples. But here is the opinion of the famous Russian publicist M. Menshikov, who was shot in 1918 by Meyerhold’s ideological comrades literally in front of his family:

“Has Mr. Meyerhold really taken root on the imperial stage?
Recently I saw Mr. Meyerhold for the first time at a cleanup event of the Literary and Artistic Society. I was simply petrified with amazement: could this really be the famous Mr. Meyerhold, the actor about whom they were shouting so much - right, the Jewish newspapers? Did the once talented Mrs. Komissarzhevskaya really make this skinny, reddish, ugly gentleman with a cap of curly hair the chosen one of her taste, her half-crazy love for the theater? True, Ms. Komissarzhevskaya finally broke up with Mr. Meyerhold, convinced that he was ruining her theater, just as she had to break up with Mr. Flexer (Akim Volynsky), who was also trying to do something mind-blowing on her stage. But how did an insignificant Jew, rejected even by a minor stage, suddenly jump into the directorship of the Imperial Alexandria Theater? Just miracles are happening in our unfortunate fatherland! In St. Petersburg they say that only one colonel liked Mr. Meyerhold, and she gave him patronage. So is it really the first theater in Russia, our national theater, depending on the taste of some staff officer, completely unknown to the fatherland?

The point, of course, is not at all that Mr. Meyerhold is a Jew. If he had been a man of genius, he could have been a Hottentot, and everyone would have come to terms with it. But Mr. Meyerhold is just a somewhat disheveled, agitated, nervous, and, moreover, quite mediocre representative of the Jewish race.
Brilliant people are very rare, but even a talented one would be a godsend - but there is not even a smell of talent here. I judge from the lecture that Mr. Meyerhold gave us very cheekily about the “theater of quest.” Lord, what nonsense that was!

It must be said that the subbotniks of the Literary and Artistic Society are attended by a more or less select public - writers, artists, theatergoers, people familiar with both the best Russian and European scenes. Have courage
to come out in front of such a partner with a decadent newspaper article - this alone already indicates the lack of talent of Mr. Meyerhold. Talent, when it’s not in full swing, is silent: it is the first to despise its accidental emptiness and is afraid to bring it onto the stage. Either it’s a pretension, or it’s a fake talent. The fake thinks that
the public is a fool, they won’t notice a fake - it’s worth stunning them with some “Blue Bird”, or a comparison of Leonid Andreev with Goethe, or cleverly twisted phrases about a new, unknown, unprecedented, incomprehensible art of “searching”.

As an actor, I do not know Mr. Meyerhold at all: it seems that I have never seen him in any play. In this regard, I must trust the taste of Yu. D. Belyaev; and the other day he wrote the following: “The actor Mr. Meyerhold is a very bad actor. This figure, these gestures, this voice! “He stands woodenly, close to the wall” ...” Here is a review of our best theater critic. But if so, if Mr. Meyerhold is even a very bad actor, then tell me, by what inscrutable fate did this mediocre Jew end up not only as an actor, but even as a director of the imperial troupe? "

I was also very confused by the descriptions of the terrible torture that the disgraced director was subjected to in the dungeons of the NKVD. It’s not that I don’t believe in torture in general - in Rus' people under investigation have always been beaten, starting from Khan Mamai and ending with the current “democratic” police department. But in the case of Meyerhold, I somehow don’t believe it. Usually the intelligentsia of that time “surrendered” their friends and relatives without any torture. And the fact that Meyerhold talks about terrible
torture in a letter to Stalin seems strange, to say the least. It is unlikely that such a letter will find its addressee.

Some may think that Meyerhold was treated too harshly. May be. But I remember a fact that fans of the “brilliant director” keep silent about: in 1937, Meyerhold wrote a letter to Stalin in which he proposed shooting “enemies of the people” on the stage of his theater. To bring the scene closer to the viewer, so to speak... Well, as they say, what I fought for, that’s what I ran into. And after this, how can one not believe in both God’s Judgment on Earth and in the Supreme Providence?!

Portrait of V. Meyerhold, 1916 B. Grigoriev

"Raging Genius"

Karl Casimir Theodor Meyergold born in Penza into a family of Russified Germans, owners of a wine and vodka factory. The young man's rebellious nature manifested itself as a student - he refused to participate in the family business, converted to Orthodoxy, married against his parents' will, took a new name and changed his surname in accordance with the norms of the Russian language.

This is how Vsevolod Meyerhold appeared - a future lawyer who dropped out of Moscow University on the same day he saw the play "Othello" staged Konstantin Stanislavsky. He entered the theater and music school at the Moscow Philharmonic, where a theater director, playwright and critic became his mentor Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. In 1898, Meyerhold was one of the 14 chosen and became an actor in the troupe of the Moscow Art Theater, created by his teachers.

Meyerhold became a star of the Moscow Art Theater, but as a result of creative differences, he broke off relations with his mentors, formed his own troupe, the New Drama Association, and toured with it throughout the province.

Two years later, he proposed to Stanislavsky to organize a radically new theater, but Nemirovich-Danchenko, with a scandal, demanded not to listen to “a mad genius offering some kind of scrambled eggs with onions - a wild mixture Nietzsche, Maeterlinck and radicalism."

Meyerhold was distinguished by his fantastic ability to work - in one season he staged 13 performances in the theater of the famous Russian actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya, and over ten years of work at the Alexandrinsky and Mariinsky theaters - 21 dramas and 10 musical performances, including Lermontov’s legendary “Masquerade”.

Fact: He spent 300 thousand rubles in gold and six years of rehearsals on his main “Alexandrinsky” performance. "Masquerade" was in the current repertoire even after the disgrace and death of the creator until 1947. Performance “Masquerade. Memories from the Future” was restored in 2014 based on Meyerhold’s score by the artistic director of Alexandrinka V. Fokin.

"Theatrical Chameleon"

Meyerhold greeted Soviet power with enthusiasm and turned out to be the leader of the new revolutionary art. In 1918, he joined the party and received the post of chairman of the theater department of the People's Commissariat for Education (an analogue of the Ministry of Education). The young reformer launched an ideological battle with academic theaters. His former teachers, Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky, suffered the most.

Reference: In contrast to the famous Stanislavsky system, which is based on the art of experience, Meyerhold developed his own system of acting training - biomechanics. This is a method that allows the actor to go from external to internal, from movement, reflexive play and discharge of “excess acting energy” to the image.

Inspired by communist ideas, he came up with new theatrical genres: a performance-meeting, where spectators were allowed to walk, smoke and talk during the action, and a performance-political review. With his light hand and with the support of the poet V. Mayakovsky A wave of propaganda theater spread across Soviet Russia.

At the dawn of the “new life” in the Polytechnic Museum and the Hermitage Theater there were regular public fierce disputes between irreconcilable theatrical giants - Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexandra Tairova.

The verbal cannonade of the leaders of the two theaters was always harsh, and therefore invariably attracted the audience. Tairov called his opponent a theatrical chameleon, and Meyerhold contemptuously called his ideological opponent’s work “theater literacy for the illiterate.”

Search a woman...

After Meyerhold's arrest in June 1939, rumors spread throughout the capital that security officers had dragged the director off the plane of the British ambassador. Doubts of Moscow bohemia poet Anna Akhmatova dispelled it with one phrase: “Who will believe that he decided to flee the country without Reich?”

In the open theater named after itself - the State Theater named after. Meyerhold (GosTiM) - the main actress, muse and second wife was the beautiful Zinaida Reich. Obsessed with love, Meyerhold took the surname of his wife, who was 21 years younger than him, and became Meyerhold-Reich. The offended Munt cursed her ex-husband in front of the icons, begging the saints to punish the lovers. Judging by how gruesome their deaths were, her prayers had been answered.

Contemporaries considered Reich a mediocre actress. After Meyerhold's decision to give his wife the role of Hamlet himself, the famous actor Nikolay Okhlopkov furiously wrote an application for the role of Ophelia and was fired. After a quarrel with Reich, the great man left the theater Erast Garin. The director who idolized his wife fired Prima Maria Babanova because the audience applauded her more.

Fact: The press admired the inhuman passions and screams of Reich's heroines. In life she behaved the same way as in the theater. Once at the market she threw such a tantrum after her wallet went missing that the thief came back and returned the money.

The rainbow period of family life lasted 16 years. Reich became a welcome guest at government receptions. But Meyerhold was concerned about the health of his young wife, who was suffering from nervous breakdowns. She could make a public scene, regardless of the place and status of those present. Once, at a major government event in the Kremlin, she attacked the all-Union headman M.I. Kalinina, known for his adventures with young ballerinas, with the words: “Everyone knows that you are a womanizer!”

In 1937 Joseph Stalin watched the performance with Reich and said that it was too bourgeois a production, after which the theater was closed, and organized persecution began in the press.

The actress’s letter to Stalin became fatal for this family - a desperate and daring message in which she stood up for her husband, condemned “a Georgian who understands nothing about Russian art” and made an appointment with him. During her arrest, Reich screamed that the authorities had killed her first husband and were now taking on her second, and even wrote a complaint about the behavior of one of the NKVD officers.

Three weeks after Meyerhold's arrest, his 45-year-old wife was brutally murdered in her own bed - unknown assailants stabbed her 17 times and cut out her eyes. At her funeral, the children were ordered to leave their parents' apartment within two days. The large living space was immediately divided between the family of the personal driver Lavrentiy Beria and secretary of a loving dignitary.

Rehabilitated posthumously

After three weeks of torture, Meyerhold signed all the charges against himself and famous cultural figures, and before his death he renounced them.

To date, there are two documented versions of the director’s death. According to one, on February 1, 1940, in one of the rooms of the Butyrka prison, an indictment for espionage was read out and the sentence was announced - the death penalty.

The night before his execution, Meyerhold wrote his last letter to the Chairman of the Government V. Molotov, in which he spoke about humiliation, systematic beatings and torture: In the archival documents of the Butyrka prison there is a record: “The sentence was carried out on February 2, 1940.”

But there is a second version, based on eyewitness accounts. Many years later, they said that before his death, 66-year-old Meyerhold was brutally beaten, all his fingers were broken and he was drowned in a barrel of sewage.

The director's body was burned in the Donskoy crematorium, and the ashes were thrown into a common pit on the outskirts of the Donskoy cemetery along with the writer's ashes Babel, marshals Egorov, Tukhachevsky and other victims. For more than 70 years, there was a cemetery dump on this site, and only relatively recently was a memorial plaque installed.

In November 1955, Meyerhold was posthumously rehabilitated. In 1991, a theater center named after him was created in Moscow.

Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold (1874-1940) - Soviet theater director, actor and teacher. Theorist and practitioner of theatrical grotesque, author of the “Theatrical October” program and creator of the acting system called “biomechanics”. People's Artist of the RSFSR (1923). On June 20, 1939, Meyerhold was arrested in Leningrad; At the same time, a search was carried out in his apartment in Moscow. The search protocol recorded a complaint from his wife Zinaida Reich, who protested against the methods of one of the NKVD agents. Soon (July 15) she was killed by unidentified persons. After three weeks of interrogations, accompanied by torture, Meyerhold signed the testimony required by the investigation: he was accused under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. The meeting of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR took place on February 1, 1940. The board sentenced the director to death. On February 2, 1940, the sentence was carried out. In 1955, the Supreme Court of the USSR posthumously rehabilitated Meyerhold.

From Meyerhold's statement to the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR Vyacheslav Molotov

When the investigators, in relation to me, the person under investigation, used physical methods to influence me and added to them the so-called “psychic attack,” both of them aroused in me such monstrous fear that my nature was exposed to the very roots... Nervous my tissues turned out to be located very close to the body, and my skin turned out to be as soft and sensitive as a child’s, my eyes turned out to be capable (in the face of unbearable physical and moral pain) of shedding tears in streams. Lying face down on the floor, I discovered the ability to squirm, writhe and squeal, like a dog being whipped by its owner. The guard who once led me from such an interrogation asked me, “Do you have malaria?” My body has discovered such a capacity for nervous trembling. When I lay down on the bed and fell asleep, so that an hour later I would go back to the interrogation, which had lasted 18 hours before, I woke up awakened by my groan and the fact that I was tossed up and down on the bed, as happens with patients who die from fever.

Fear causes fear, and fear forces self-defense. "Death, oh, of course! death is easier than this!" - the defendant says to himself. I told myself this too, and I resorted to self-incrimination in the hope that they would lead me to the scaffold. And so it happened, on the last page of the “case” No. 537 completed by the investigation, the terrible numbers of paragraphs of the criminal code appeared: 58, paragraphs 1a and 2.

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich! You know my shortcomings (remember what you once said to me: “Are you all being original!?”), and a person who knows the shortcomings of another person knows him better than the one who admires his merits. Tell me: can you believe that I am a traitor to the Motherland (an enemy of the people), that I am a spy, that I am a member of a right-wing Trotskyist organization, that I am a counter-revolutionary, that I carried out Trotskyism in my art, that I carried out (consciously) hostile work in the theater, to undermine the foundations of Soviet art?

All this is evident in case No. 537. There, the word “formalist” (in the field of art) became synonymous with “Trotskyist.” In case No. 537, the Trotskyists are: me, I. Ehrenburg, B. Pasternak, Yu. Olesha (he is also a terrorist), Shostakovich, Shebalin, Okhlopkov, etc.... I will finish my statement in a decade, when they give me such a leaflet .

Continuation of the statement

The fact that I could not stand it, having lost all power over myself, being in a state of foggy, dull consciousness, was facilitated by another terrible circumstance: immediately after my arrest (VI. 20, 1939), I was plunged into the greatest depression by the power of an obsession over me “Then that’s how it should be.” It seemed to the government - I began to convince myself - that for those sins of mine, which were spoken about from the rostrum of the 1st session of the Supreme Council, the punishment assigned to me was not enough for me (closing the theater, dispersing the team, taking away the new theater building that was being built according to my plan in Mayakovsky Square), and I must endure another punishment, the one that is now imposed on me by the NKVD. “So this is how it should be,” I repeated to myself, and my “I” split into two faces. The first began to look for the crimes of the second, and when it did not find them, it began to invent them.

The investigator was a good, experienced assistant in this matter, and we began to write together, in a close alliance. When my imagination was exhausted, the investigators paired up (Voronin + Rhodes, Voronin + Shvartsman) and dissected the protocols (some were copied 3, 4 times). When I, from hunger (I couldn’t eat anything), from insomnia (for three months) and from heart attacks at night and from hysterical fits (she shed streams of tears, trembled, as one trembles with a fever), drooped, sagged, haggard for 10 years Having aged, which frightened the investigators, they began to diligently treat me, then I was in the “internal prison” (there is a good medical unit there), and intensively feed me.

But this helped only externally - physically, and the nerves were in the same condition, and the consciousness was still dulled, clouded, for the sword of Damocles hung over me: the investigator kept repeating, threatening: “You will not write (that is, compose, that means !?) we will beat again, leave the head and right hand intact, and turn the rest into a piece of a shapeless, bloody, mangled body.” And I signed everything until November 16, 1939. I renounce my testimony, as if it was knocked out of me, and I beg you, the head of the Government, save me, give me back my freedom. I love my Motherland and will give it all my strength in the last years of my life.

Sun. MEYERHOLD - S. REICH

This footnote is for both footnotes of the statement dated January 2, 1940.

They beat me here, a sick sixty-six-year-old man. They put me face down on the floor and hit my heels and back with a rubber band; when I was sitting on a chair, they beat me with the same rubber on my legs (from above, with great force) and in places from my knees to the upper parts of my legs. And in the following days, when these places of the legs were filled with profuse internal hemorrhage, these red-blue-yellow bruises were again beaten with this tourniquet, and the pain was such that it seemed as if boiling water was being poured onto the sore sensitive places of the legs (I screamed and cried in pain). They hit me on the back with this rubber, they hit me in the face with swings from a height...

Sun. MEYERHOLD

Published: Soviet culture. 1989. 16 Feb. Here the text is given from the publication: History of Russia. 1917-1940. Reader / Comp. V.A. Mazur et al.; edited by M.E. Glavatsky. - Chelyabinsk, 1994. - P. 325-327.