Neither Master Nor Margarita

A new ban on "Satanism" has the potential to impact a classic piece of Soviet literature: Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita."

On July 23, Russia’s Supreme Court banned the “International Satanism Movement.” This entity does not actually exist, but the law follows the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban of the also non-existent “International LGBT Movement.” Both of these bans now provide grounds for the persecution of art, artists, and people who criticize the Russian government if they use symbols associated with the amorphous, ill-defined imaginary movements that have been banned.

Rainbows and pentagrams alike are now deemed hostile, extremist, and prosecutable symbols. The moral foundation of these bans is especially flimsy, given Putin’s 2023 pardon of Nikolai Ogolobyak, a member of a Satanist cult responsible for the murder and cannibalism of four teenagers, who was acquitted after military service.

This new ban of the “Satanism movement” puts many arbitrary groups at risk. The Times recently reported on the potential danger that fans of heavy metal music face because of association with “Satanic” images. Interestingly, this new legislation could also threaten Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet-era opus The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov’s novel was completed and published posthumously by his wife Elena, though not until 1967, after decades of struggle with Soviet censors and Stalin himself.

The novel follows a writer in Moscow called the Master and his lover Margarita – largely modeled after Bulgakov himself and his wife. The Master is despondent after the rejection of his novel by Soviet literary society, and the two are taken under the wing of an eccentric professor, understood to be an avatar of Satan, and a slew of mythological demons. Bulgakov’s Satan is not one to be worshipped, nor is he purely evil – in fact, the Master’s suppressed novel centers on the interactions of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Nostri, or Jesus Christ.

Bulgakov maintained some correspondence with Stalin, who read extensively himself and had a personal stake in both the censorship and heralding of Soviet literature. He hoped that Bulgakov could be molded into a proletarian writer and even blocked him from leaving Russia. Bulgakov never acquiesced, and The Master and Margarita is sharply satiric, unsuitable for publishing in an authoritarian regime. The other limiting factor of Bulgakov’s work is its religious themes. While today the novel is in danger of censorship due to Satanic associations, under the strictly secular, atheistic Soviet regime, the writing was deemed too Christian in the Soviet era. Bulgakov’s Satan is complicated: mischievous and discordant, but occasionally benevolent; it is he who encourages the Master to complete his novel despite repression.

The Master and Margarita has had a recent revival in Russia, following the release of 2024 film adaptation - both a box office hit and a major controversy. Director Michael Lockshin was first approached about the project in 2019, but the production process faced a major setback in 2022, when Russia began its full-scale War on Ukraine. Lockshin denounced the invasion on social media immediately. In the following years he had funding pulled, watched other artists arrested for “spreading false information,” and feared that the film would never be released.

When the movie was eventually released, it met with unexpected success and intense backlash. Supporters of Putin called the film “unpatriotic” and called Lockshin a “notorious Russophobe.” The film struck home with the public, however, raking in $26 million. Thus, in Putin’s Russia, Bulgakov’s absurd, carnivalesque Soviet satire has found renewed relevance.

Yet it has also met new opposition, as these new laws, championed by the Russian Orthodox Church, demonstrate.

Perhaps more accurately than either the Soviet or Putinist interpretations, The Master and Margarita can be understood by a question posed in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “Does proving there’s a devil prove that there’s a God?”