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. After the speech, he returned to Leningrad, and was arrested on arrival, on 20 June 1939. Shortly afterwards, intruders broke into his flat and repeatedly stabbed his wife, Zinaida Reich, who died from her injuries. 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. In it, he wrote: