12Meyerhold and Trotsky
Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested in June 1939. He was interrogated, tortured, and made to ‘confess’ his crimes. Prominent among these was his ‘Trotskyism’. According to his confessions, he had joined Trotsky in defending the poet, Sergei Esenin, he had been assisted by Trotsky to procure materials for his 1923 production of Zemlya Dybom (The World Upside Down) by Sergei Tretyakov, and the production itself had been dedicated to Trotsky. In the 1930s he had joined a Trotskyist faction that included Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, Alexei Rykov, and others, all now shot as ‘enemies of the people’, and finally in 1930 he had been ‘the head of the anti-Soviet Trotskyist group Left ...
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