Vsevolod Meyerhold gave his last public speech at the first all-Union conference of theatre-directors in Moscow on 15 June 1939. This conference was a final step in a campaign to establish as complete a control over the theatre as possible. Meyerhold was the one remaining recalcitrant obstinately refusing to conform to the new aesthetics of 'socialist realism". There is disagreement about the content of his speech: some say that it was suicidally courageous; others that, in fact, Meyerhold, like his pupil Eisenstein before him, recanted, and passed from the scene, absolutely broken in spirit. What we now know of this period, the late thirties, makes the second version far more probable: there was no glorious defiance. However, there is evidence to show that in his creative work he remained an unrepentant radical, spurning the new doctrine of socialist realism: his final production, A Life, an adaptation of an early classic of the New Art, How the Steel was Tempered, was suppressed before final rehearsal, and was not even mentioned in the Soviet press until the seventies; but eyewitnesses confirm that it was utterly heretical. As a consequence, Meyerhold's reputation as fiery opponent of all old forms, passionate advocate of new ones, as feverish experimenter and innovator, remains unblemished. As such is he remembered today.