for which he was, as he put it, "expelled from the Gates of Heaven." In his films, Eisenstein used actors who worked in Meyerhold's tradition. He also cast actors based on what they looked like and their expression, and followed Meyerhold's stylized acting methods. In Strike, for instance, the bourgeois are always obese, drinking, eating, and smoking, whereas the workers are more athletic. For the original production of The Bedbug, in February 1929, Meyerhold hired the young Dmitri Shostakovich as a pianist. Many years later, Shostakovich reputedly recalled: "It's impossible to imagine now how popular Meyerhold was. Everyone knew him, even those who had no interest or connection with the theatre or art. In the circus, clowns always made jokes about Meyerhold. They go for instant laughs in the circus, and they wouldn't sing ditties about people the audience wouldn't recognise immediately. They even used to sell combs called Meyerhold." Repression In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin launched a campaign to bring Soviet artists to heel, and compel them all to observe the rules of 'socialist realism', which precluded avant-garde art and experimentation, and any art form reckoned to be 'formalist', in that the artist had paid more attention to the form of a work than to its political message. 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 delivered a talk entitled "Meyer Against Meyerholdism" in which he said – reportedly to 'thunderous applause' – that "the path to simplicity is not an easy one. Each artist goes at his own pace, and they must not lose their distinctive way of walking... Soviet subject matter is often a smoke screen to conceal mediocrity." A year later, in April 1937, his wife, the actress 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. The letter was not answered. In December 1937, Stalin's crony, Lazar Kaganovich went to a production at the Meyerhold Theatre, and walked out in disgust. The theatre was closed, by order of the Politburo, on 7 January 1938, on the grounds that 'throughout its entire existence, the Meyerhold Theatre has been unable to free itself from thoroughly bourgeois Formalist positions', his works were proclaimed antagonistic and alien to