the Soviet people. Arrest and death The ailing Stanislavsky, who was the director of an opera theatre now known as Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre, invited Meyerhold to be his assistant – an invitation that surprised many in Moscow, given their long standing artistic differences. Stanislavsky died soon afterwards, in August 1938. His dying wish was "Take care of Meyerhold; he is my sole heir in the theatre – here or anywhere else." Meyerhold directed his theatre for nearly a year, and was engaged with producing the première of Sergei Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko, when he was instructed that he was to choreograph a spectacle in Leningrad, involving 30,000 athletes. On 17 June 1939, he addressed a conference of theatre directors, in the presence of Andrey Vyshinsky, the state prosecutor who had presided over the infamous Moscow show trials. His speech was not reported in the Soviet press, giving rise to a report that he had declared, defiantly: If what you have been doing with the Soviet theatre recently is what you call anti-formalism, if you consider what is now taking place on the stages of the best theatres in Moscow as an achievement of the Soviet theatre, then I would prefer to be what you consider a formalist... in hunting formalism, you have eliminated art. This is from a version of the speech written up later by the emigre musician Yuri Yelagin, from notes he said that he made at the conference – but its accuracy is disputed. After the speech, he returned to Leningrad, and was arrested on arrival, on 20 June 1939. Shortly afterwards, intruders broke into his flat and repeatedly stabbed his wife, Zinaida Reich, who died from her injuries. Taken to NKVD headquarters in Moscow, and placed in the hands of the notorious torturer, Lev Shvartzman, Meyerhold broke down and confessed to being a British and Japanese spy. In his final days, he wrote a letter to the head of the Soviet government Vyacheslav Molotov, which was retained in police files, where it was discovered after the dissolution of the USSR by the journalist Vitaly Shentalinsky. In it, he wrote: He was sentenced to death by firing squad on 1 February 1940, and executed the next day. The Soviet Supreme Court cleared him of all charges in 1955, during the first wave of de-Stalinization. Marriage and family Meyerhold married his first wife, Olga Munt, in 1896 and