Zinaida Reich

Zinaida Nikolayevna Reich (the last name also spelled Raikh or Raih; Зинаида Николаевна Райх; 3 July 1894 – 15 July 1939) was a Russian actress and one of the main stars of the Meyerhold Theatre until it was closed under Joseph Stalin.

Reich married poet Sergey Yesenin and had two children with him.

After their divorce, she married the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold.

As he continued his activity, during the Russian Revolution of 1905, the family was exiled from Odessa to Bendery.

Zinaida Reich studied in a gymnasium in Bendery but was expelled for her political activities before completing the eighth (last) grade.

She enrolled in the Kiev Higher Education Courses for Women, and in 1913 she became a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

She worked as a technical editor for Delo Naroda (People's Cause), a newspaper of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

There she met the poet Sergey Yesenin, who at that time was influenced by the Party.

Yesenin settled in Saint Petersburg in March 1917.

In spring 1917 Reich met Sergey Yesenin.

The young people fell in love.

They traveled to the White Sea and Russian North and got married in Kiriko-Ulitovskaya Church near Vologda on 4 August 1917.

After the wedding, the couple moved to Oryol, where her parents lived.

In September 1917 the couple returned to Saint Petersburg, where Reich worked for the People's Commissariat for Food (NarkomProd).

In 1918 the People's Commissariat moved to Moscow and so did the couple.

As Zinaida was pregnant, she moved to be with her parents in Oryol while Yesenin continued his literary career in Moscow.

Reich returned to Moscow when their daughter, Tatiana, was one year old, but she and Yesenin quarreled.

In February 1920 Reich gave birth to their son Konstantin, but the couple continued to live separately.

At that time Reich lived in a shelter for mothers with infants.

On 5 October 1921 Zinaida Reich and Sergey Yesenin were officially divorced.

He ended up getting a divorce, and Reich and Meyerhold married in 1922.

Yesenin and Reich had a relationship after her second marriage.

The poet often broke into the house of Meyerholds demanding to see his former wife and children.

Reich and Yesenin met secretly in her friend's apartment.

Yesenin committed suicide on 23 December 1925.

The story of the couple is known from the memoir Novel without Lies (1926) (Роман без вранья) written by Yesenin's close friend, room-mate and allegedly homosexual lover Anatoly Marienhof.

Marienhof described Reich as a "crummy Jewish dame with fleshy lips on a face round as a dinner-plate".

He wrote that Yesenin allegedly was upset when he saw his black-haired son, Konstantin.

"No Yesenin had ever been black-haired", he allegedly said.

Reich had dark hair, which is genetically dominant over light hair.

Historians have doubted that Marienhof's description of Reich is accurate.

She was of German-Russian ancestry and Russian Orthodox by faith.

Reich studied at the State Experimental Theatre Workshops, headed by famous theatrical director Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Meyerhold was 20 years older than she; at the time he had been married for 25 years to his wife Olga and had three daughters with her.

In 1939 Meyerhold was arrested by the NKVD, and she was brutally stabbed in her apartment by NKVD agents who staged a robbery.

Zinaida Nikolayevna Reich was born in the village of Blizhniye Melnitsy near Odessa.

Her mother was Anna Ivanovna Viktorova, a Russian noblewoman and niece of a notable Russian linguist and archaeologist, Alexey Viktorov.

Her father was of German descent, August Reich, who worked as a sailor and a railroad engineer.

In order to marry Anna, August Reich (originally a Roman Catholic) accepted Orthodox Christianity and was baptised as Nikolay Andreyevich Reich.

August Reich was an early social democrat and had been twice politically exiled to the North of Russia prior to meeting Anna.