At the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev revealed Stalin's crimes against the Soviet people, denounced the cult of personality, and urged a return to Lenin's path. Ailing from heart disease at his Brandenburg retreat, Brecht began a cycle of poems appraising Stalin's legacy, a continuation of the Buckower Elegien (Buckow Elegies) critical of SED leadership after the Berlin Uprising of June 1953. These late poems would serve as his final testament: in six months he was dead. They depict Stalin variously as maggot-ridden god, butcher of the people, and Lenin's star pupil who then punched his mentor's chops. In Brecht's 1930 drama Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken), a political Lehrstück cited by his congressional inquisitors in 1947, he himself argued for the absolute imperative of party discipline, even to the point of murdering a comrade if need be. Then Marxism was mainly a theoretical exercise for him. He came to know firsthand from his 1935 visit to Moscow and from his perilous passage in 1941 through Stalin's empire to the US that Soviet communism had become something hideous.

Scenes from the prologue of Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), written in exile in Santa Monica and New York, were the last thing Brecht rehearsed with the Berliner Ensemble in the days before his death on August 14, 1956, a little over a year after he had returned to Moscow to accept the Stalin Peace Prize. Frail and failing, on his last legs, Brecht nonetheless insisted on directing. The bipartite play's heroine is Grusha, a proletarian woman who rears highborn Michael Abashvili, “the son of the tiger,” to humility and compassion. Its hero is Azdak, the judge-by-default who pronounces Grusha true mother to Michael and appropriates the vast Abashvili estates for the long-suffering populace of Grusinia. A disenfranchised intellectual who must denounce himself, take part in a series of show trials, and bow and scrape before a succession of tyrants to avoid the gallows becomes the unlikely instrument of sublime poetic justice.