Vitali Golovin

Vitali Dmitrievich Golovin was born into the family of a famous Russian actor. His father, Dmitri Golovin, was a leading Opera soloist of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and an Honorable Actor of Russia. Vitali Golovin was a student at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied as a pianist and majored as an Opera Director. The Golovins family were friends with singer Feodor Chaliapin Sr. and director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold and Golovin were neighbors in the prestigious building No. 12 on Bryusovsky (now renamed Nezhdanovoi) Street in Moscow, and both families were prominent in the Moscow intellectual elite. Massive repressions and executions of innocent people surged during the 1930s under the dictatorship of Iosif Stalin. In 1939 Meyerhold's wife, actress Zinaida Raikh, was found dead. In 1940 Vsevolod Meyerhold was executed on political charges. In 1943 Vitali Golovin and his father were falsely accused of murder of Meyerhold's wife and both were arrested. The real reasons for their arrest were political. Golovin's father was accused of giving performances at the Paris Opera when Denikin and other prominent anticommunist figures were in the audience. Additional accusation was that Vitali Golovin and his father were telling political jokes. They were exiled in Gulag prison camp in Siberia. There, in the prison camp, they assembled a group of exiled actors, and started a theater of prisoners and performed for prisoners. After the death of Iosif Stalin in 1953 some efforts were made to liberate people in the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes and dictatorship of Stalin in his secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956. Later Vitali Golovin and his father were cleared of all charges. They were rehabilitated in their rights to return to Moscow and to comeback to their professional careers.