"When he was in favour, he could do no wrong: 'Publish immediately,' Stalin scrawled on Kirshon's latest article when returning it to Pravda's editor.
"[2] His early plays Konstantin Terekhin (1926) and Rel'sy gudyat (Rails are Humming, 1927) "caused a sensation," but Khleb (Bread, 1931) "had but an ephemeral success.
[4] At the beginning of 1937, however, Kirshon fell out of favour due to his close association with Leopold Averbakh, former head of RAPP and brother-in-law of Genrikh Yagoda.
At a public meeting he was relentlessly attacked by Vsevolod Vishnevsky for associating with an "enemy of the people" and criticizing decisions of the Politburo; he attempted to defend himself, but was expelled from the Party and the Writers' Union and soon disappeared from Moscow.
[5] In August 1937 he was arrested along with other former RAPP leaders as Trotsky sympathizers, and the next year he was executed at Butyrka prison in Moscow.