Stalin banned Bulgakov—and saved his career
Mikhail Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita in secret; it appeared only in 1966–67, decades after his 1940 death. Stalin personally banned Flight yet sat through The Days of the Turbins at least fifteen times and once phoned the playwright to keep him in Moscow.
Born in Kiev on 15 May 1891 (O.S. 3 May) to a theological academic father and a teacher mother, Bulgakov was the eldest of seven. He studied medicine at Kiev University, graduated in 1916, and served with the Red Cross—experiences that fed A Young Doctor’s Notebook and Morphine, the latter drawn from his own addiction after a diphtheria exposure. Civil War Kiev saw him drafted by successive regimes while brothers fought for the Whites; typhus in 1919 left him bedridden. He abandoned medicine for writing by February 1920 in Vladikavkaz, reached Moscow in 1921, and scraped by on newspaper feuilletons.
The White Guard (finished 1924) became the hit Moscow Art Theatre play The Days of the Turbins (1926). Stalin loved it even while Glavrepertkom banned Flight in 1928 for allegedly glorifying emigration and White generals—staging resumed only in 1957. After further bans, Bulgakov wrote Stalin directly; on 18 April 1930 the dictator telephoned, asked if he truly wished to emigrate, and steered him to a MAT directing post when he said no. Protection from arrest did not mean publication. He burned an early Master and Margarita draft in 1930; the first version lacked the Master and Margarita and was titled The Engineer’s Hoof.
Married third to Elena Shilovskaya in 1932, he revised the novel through his last years while librettos for the Bolshoi went unproduced. Even a flattering 1939 play on young Stalin, Batum, was stopped before rehearsal; exit permission was refused. He died 10 March 1940. Posthumous Master and Margarita made him a twentieth-century Russian giant—proof that a writer can outlast the censor who both crushed and, selectively, spared him.
Source: Mikhail Bulgakov
