Free Artist in the Strong Arms of Power (1928–2020)

Abstract

In the summer of 1928, the famous Soviet Director, Creator of biomechanics and Director of the theater named after him, GOSTIM Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold (1874–1940) went to Paris to organize a foreign tour and suddenly received an order from the leadership of the cultural authorities to immediately return back. Tours are prohibited, and his theater faces liquidation. The Director is going through a severe moral crisis, a nervous breakdown forces him to go to the South of France for treatment. The subject of this article is the study of Parallels between the cultural policy of the Soviet party bureaucracy of the 1920s and the Russian authorities of the 2020s, which were particularly acute during the trial of the 7th Studio under the leadership of Kirill Serebrennikov. As before, so now the authorities exercise censorship and ideological supervision by means of administrative and financial regulation, regardless of the artist’s reputation and ethical issues. The article examines the obvious and secret reasons for the persecution of a prominent proletarian Director, the stages of his despair, emotions and resistance, as well as the picture of events on the other side of the fight in Moscow — in the corridors of the Narkompros. This is a period when the obvious opposition to Stalin to Meyerhold has not yet found clear outlines but has already affected indirectly, bringing the tragic denouement of the end of the 1930s — the closure of the theater and the execution of the Director. Most of the article is a montage of documentary archival materials published for the first time-transcripts of meetings and correspondence between Meyerhold and his wife Zinaida Reich with cultural authorities and friends in the theater (the so-called “frantic letters”). The drama of the artist and the triumph of a soulless bureaucracy speak for themselves in the documents of the era. The lesson of history, unfortunately, has not been learned, as the trial of the head of the Gogol Center Kirill Serebrennikov showed, fortunately, not deprived of the opportunity to work, but accused of embezzling a huge amount of money, allegedly irrationally used for productions in the youth 7th Studio.