Army, calling it "mediocre". In September 1932, due to a report stating Bedny's debauched life during a CPSU Poliburo meeting, Stalin decided to evict Bedny from his Kremlin apartment. He was relocated to Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, which he called a rat's barn. He told the poet Osip Mandelstam that he had been reported by a secretary who had heard him complain that Stalin left grubby finger marks on books borrowed from Bedny's private library, but it appears that Bedny's real offence was that his writings were highly critical of Russia's imperialist past, whereas Stalin, though he was not a Russian, "nevertheless grasped that Russian nationalism was the glue that held the Soviet Union together". In November 1936 the Politburo condemned Bedny's opera The Bogatyrs for its "antihistorical and mocking depiction of Old Russia's acceptance of Christianity." He tried to regain favour with verses virulently attacking prominent victims of the Great Purge. His poem published in Pravda on 21 August 1936, to mark the show trial of Grigori Zinoviev and others, was headed 'No Mercy'. On 12 June 1937, he published a 54 line poem celebrating the previous day's announcement that Marshal Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders had been arrested, which included all of their names in a rhyming scheme. Nonetheless, in 1938 Bedny was stripped of membership in the Communist Party and the Union of Soviet Writers, and in 1941, Stalin remarked to Georgi Dimitrov "ten volumes of verse by Demyan Bedny are not worth one poem of Mayakovsky's" but slowly he regained the favour of Stalin through the years of World War II. His poem commemorating the Soviet victory was published in Pravda on May 3, 1945. Bedny died two weeks later, on May 19. Trivia Bedny's caustic anti-religious poem New Testament without defects (Новый Завет без изъяна) may have inspired Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita as a rebuttal. In addition, his character was a prototype for Mikhail Berlioz and Bezdomny (Homeless) was a parody on Bedny's pseudonym. Bulgakov did not normally take pleasure in hearing that someone had been denounced, but made an exception when Bedny ran into trouble in 1938. "He's not going to be chortling over anyone else. Let him feel it for himself," he said. Bedny attended the execution of Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan, who was convicted for attempting to kill Lenin, "for artistic inspiration", but according to witnesses he felt sick once the Chekists