28 January] 1874 to Russian-German wine manufacturer Friedrich Emil Meyerhold and his Baltic German wife, Alvina Danilovna (née van der Neese).

After leaving the MAT in 1902, wanting to break free of the highly naturalistic 'missing fourth wall' productions of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, Meyerhold participated in a number of theatrical projects, as both a director and actor.

He introduced classical plays in an innovative manner, and staged works of controversial contemporary authors like Fyodor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius, and Alexander Blok.

That evening has been described as "the last act of the tragedy of the old regime, when the Petersburg elite went to enjoy themselves at this splendidly luxurious production in the midst of the chaos and confusion.

"[6] Sergei Eisenstein, who was then a teenager but would later be a world-renowned film director, desperately wanted to see the production, having heard that it featured clowns, but having made his way across the city that was in the throes of a revolution was disappointed to discover that the Alexandrinsky was closed.

[7] Meyerhold was one of the first prominent Russian artists to welcome the Bolshevik Revolution – and one of only five out of 120 who accepted an invitation to meet the new People's Commissar for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky in November 1917.

He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918, narrowly escaping execution when he was caught on the wrong side of the battle lines during the civil war.

In his absence, the head of the Commissariat, Anatoly Lunacharsky, secured Vladimir Lenin's permission to revise government policy in favor of more traditional theatres and dismissed Kameneva in June 1919.

Some of these works included Nikolai Erdman's The Mandate, Mayakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe, Fernand Crommelynck's Le Cocu magnifique (The Magnanimous Cuckold) and Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin's Tarelkin's Death.

)[citation needed] Meyerhold gave initial boosts to the stage careers of some of the most distinguished comic actors of the USSR, including Sergey Martinson, Igor Ilyinsky and Erast Garin.

His landmark production of Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector (1926) was described as the following: Energetic, mischievous, charming Ilyinsky left his post to the nervous, fragile, suddenly freezing, grotesquely anxious Garin.

[12]Meyerhold also gave a start to his one time assistant of "The Queen of Spades" Matvey Dubrovin, who later created his own theater in Leningrad.

In autumn 1921, Meyerhold was appointed head of the State Higher Theatre Workshops, in Moscow, where one of his first students was Sergei Eisenstein, who later wrote The God-like, incomparable Meyerhold, I beheld him then for the first time and I was to worship him all my life.But they fell out, apparently because Eisenstein failed to treat the older man with sufficient deference, for which he was, as he put it, "expelled from the Gates of Heaven.

"[15] 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.

"[17] 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 15 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.

[19]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.

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.