By: Jay Figueredo
Edited by: Jeremy Smith
On January 25, 2024, Mikhail Lokshin’s film adaptation of Master and Margarita opened to a box office explosion: to date, it has been one of the most expensive and successful films ever to be made in Russia. And it ought to be: the 1967 novel Master and Margarita is a cultural touchstone in the Russian speaking world, as iconic as The Great Gatsby and Nineteen Eighty-Four rolled into one. As of March 22, the film has grossed over $25 million, with $16 million coming in the first three weeks, which is impressive for an R-rated film with a runtime of nearly three hours.
Based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece of the same name, the film takes the book’s critiques on censorship to the next level. And in light of Russia’s newer and harsher censorship laws and punishments, the film’s ‘unintentional’ critique of Putin’s government comes through loud and clear. Since its release, high-profile Russian nationalists have called for investigations into the director as well as the film, and criticism has worked its way from Telegram to TV and even to the State Duma.
August Diehl playing the handsome devil Woland. Source: Kinopoisk
Bulgakov was born in 1891 in Kyiv, where he was raised and briefly practiced medicine until moving to Moscow and pursuing his career as a writer for newspapers and stage plays. When it comes to length in Russian literature, one often places works on a scale of the Chekhov short story to the Tolstoy war epic. Bulgakov’s published work tends towards the shorter end. But Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита), his posthumously published masterpiece, is a lengthy novel crammed with all the satirically expressed angst of living in the Stalinist USSR.
Master and Margarita weaves two major plotlines across time and space—in one, the Devil arrives in 1930s Moscow, while in the other, Jesus comes to Jerusalem. The plots are linked by Margarita, a woman who makes a deal with the Devil to save her lover who is trapped in an asylum while working on a book about Pontius Pilate. It’s a satire. It’s magical realism. It’s absurd. It’s critical of authoritarianism. It’s a religious experience. It’s got a cat wielding a gun. Truly, something for everyone. The novel also boasts an impressive literary genealogy: it was inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s proto-surrealism, and its plot draws on Goethe’s Faust, in which the titular character also makes a bargain with the Devil. It also draws from Dante’s Inferno, and of course, the Bible. Bulgakov’s work went on to inspire similarly controversial, yet seminal works, such as Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
Since the 1970s, Master and Margarita has been adapted for theater, film, and TV, including the new 2024 film, which has been reframed as a “Quentin Tarantino-style revenge plot.” No adaptation can perfectly capture the source material, but Lockshin has made insightful changes to the original. In Bulgakov’s book, the two storylines—Margarita with the Devil and Pontius Pilate with Jesus Christ—run parallel to each other. In Lockshin’s version, however, he has the two storylines cross by having the titular Master write the book, Master and Margarita, which introduces the Christ storyline, even as the writing of it summons the Devil to Moscow. Master is a stand-in for Bulgakov: when the Master finds his work censored, audiences cannot help but remember how Bulgakov was persecuted in his time, and how writers are censored in ours. As one character points out when criticizing the Master’s play about Pontius Pilate, “This isn’t about Judea at all, this is about now!”
Moscow burning. Source: Kinopoisk
To understand the current state of Russia’s film industry and censorship, it’s helpful to understand how the system worked before. The key to ‘successful’ censorship in the Soviet Union was that the state largely controlled funding of the arts. There was no other way for artists to make a living, and so they were forced to hold the party line. Because of the flexible definition of subversive behavior, many artists self-censored, meaning they purposefully avoided making controversial art. In addition to self-censorship, there was also institutionalized censorship. Many of the works that ‘slipped through’ these censors needed to keep their anti-state elements as deep subtext, as jokes with double meanings, or as musical numbers. Other works were copied and handed around informally. These texts were called ‘samizdat’, which translates literally to ‘self-published’. In fact, this was how Master and Margarita was originally circulated. Although the USSR and its massive censorship organism has been dissolved for over thirty years, the old ways have seen a revival during Putin’s presidency.
Much like in Soviet times, Russia now uses grants from the Ministry of Culture’s Cinema Fund as carrots to make more patriotic cinema. The fund is officially known as the Federal Fund for Economic and Social Support of Russian Cinematography, and it often awards money to films that propagate certain themes. Often, the Cinema Fund’s criteria are crafted to serve patriotic narratives, but to varying degrees: war films and biopics of famous Russians are frequently given funding, but in the mid-2010s, after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, desirable topics went so far as to include ‘The Place of Crimea in Russia’s History.’ There is little doubt, therefore, that the Cinema Fund is a tool of state propaganda.
The stick to that carrot is that Russia can bankrupt a project by denying distribution rights to a film or TV show. That way, even if a film manages to secure non-state funding, the Ministry of Culture can deem the film inappropriate and deny it a distribution license, thus dooming the project to economic ruin. Perhaps then, receiving state funding can be a way of testing the waters; if a film’s content is encouraged early in the production timeline, then its license probably won’t be revoked.
In the case of Master and Margarita, the Cinema Fund awarded the project 800 million rubles (about $8.9 million). At that stage, Russia had not yet launched its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, so banning the project would have been as bizarre an occurrence as forbidding screenings of Tarkovsky or cancelling a new adaptation of War and Peace. And, because Michael Lockshin was bringing this national classic of Russian literature to the big screen, there was no reason (at least not then) for the Cinema Fund not to fund Master and Margarita. Furthermore, the film hoped to gain international appeal: not only was the story a classic, but many of its actors have also been in major Hollywood blockbusters such as Inglorious Basterds and A Good Day to Die Hard. Lockshin’s first movie, The Silver Skates, was the first Russian Netflix Original. Universal Studios was even an investor in Master and Margarita until the war escalated.
Only after 2022 was there any criticism for Master and Margarita, most notably of the film’s director, Michael Lockshin, who is Russian-American and deeply critical of the war on Ukraine. Years earlier, when developing the project with screenwriter Roman Kantor, he envisioned the world of Master and Margarita as a worst-case scenario for a future Russia. He never expected “that we would actually reach the level of Stalin’s purges in 2024 that we have reached today.”
Many people are familiar with the series of photos that are synonymous with the idea of Soviet censorship: the first depicts Stalin walking beside a river with Nikolai Yezhov, while in the second, Yezhov has been removed. Such erasure is also making a comeback: books by dissident authors are banned from bookstores or are sold without the authors’ names anywhere on the material. When audiences go to see Master and Margarita in Russia, they don’t see Lockshin’s name associated with the film in any way—his contribution has been scrubbed away.
Another tool in the censorship arsenal is the label of ‘foreign agent’. While Lockshin is not considered one because the term is only applied to Russian nationals (he is an American citizen), any discussion of censorship in Russia right now absolutely must mention ‘foreign agents’. It is perhaps Russia’s most overt tool at controlling NGOs, journalists, and artists: many artists critical of the Putin regime, such as the writer Boris Akunin, rock star Zemfira, actor Aleksei Panin, and poet Daria Serenko have been declared ‘foreign agents’. Many have left the country. If Bulgakov were alive today, he may also have been labeled as such.
But what does it mean to be a foreign agent? The foreign agent law came into effect in 2012 and has progressively expanded. Originally, the law demanded that all public associations that participate in political activities while receiving help from foreign sources must declare themselves as foreign agents. It was then expanded to include news outlets and individual journalists. The law remains extremely vague as to what constitutes ‘political activity’ and ‘foreign source’, which makes it an ideal tool for the government. For example, Putin’s regime was able to use a mere $50 donation from a Florida resident to Aleksey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation to justify giving the organization ‘foreign agent’ status.
Those classified as foreign agents must declare themselves as such, and must “report on their activities, including spending of foreign funds, at least once every six months” as well as declare that status on any materials they publish or distribute. People who don’t declare themselves can be fined between $400-700, and if caught again they could face up to five years in prison. ‘Foreign agents’ can also be punished for “confidential cooperation” with organizations outside Russia, which carries penalties comparable to high treason. No ‘subversive’ action is too small: in early March, dual US-Russian citizen Ksenia Khavana was arrested for a $50 donation to Razom Ukraine, a charity that provides aid and advocacy to Ukrainians impacted by Russia’s invasion. This act of ‘high treason’ could mean a life sentence. In this dangerous atmosphere, the Russia-based team members that worked on Master and Margarita have been extremely careful about expressing their own views. Lockshin, who is based in LA, has also been reluctant to say anything that would get anyone still living in Russia into trouble. As it was in the USSR, so it is now: there is little doubt that in this environment, many Russian artists are returning to self-censorship to protect themselves.
The likelihood of another film like this emerging from Putin’s Russia is low, but not impossible. Despite the grim situation in Russia, it’s worth noting that Master and Margarita is joining a long line of anti-authoritarian Russian cinema that has been slipping past censors since Soviet times. These include That Very Same Munchhausen, a comedy in which the titular character tragically refuses to lie about the magical feats he has accomplished, The Twelve Chairs, in which the search for hidden treasure showcases the destitution and contradictions throughout Soviet Russia, and even Watch Out for the Car!, whose main character goes to jail for helping orphans.
But more pressingly, what is the likelihood of anglophone audiences getting to see this masterpiece? Apart from a special screening at Yale University with a Q&A with Lockshin himself, the film has yet to be screened abroad. It is unlikely to arrive in US theaters anytime soon: Universal Studios, the movie’s original distributor, pulled out of Russia after the full-scale invasion, along with many other international distribution companies. But Lockshin is optimistic for an international release: “We don’t have any contracts signed,” he told the Moscow times, “but I’m working on it.”
Woland (August Diehl) burns a book. Perhaps the most famous quote from Master and Margarita is the phrase “Manuscripts don’t burn”. Source: Kinopoisk
Baron Munchhausen (Oleg Yankovskiy) throws his life’s work into the fire in That Very Same Munchhausen. Source: Youtube
The Master and Margarita poster. Source: Kinopoisk.