So blistering a critique of authoritarianism is Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita that it’s hard to imagine how Vladimir Putin’s Russia could ever have approved a new film adaption. The Soviet-era cult classic, written in the 1930s, exposes the disingenuity of the communist regime by mocking its culture of censorship, bureaucracy, and persecution. Bulgakov brandishes interwoven narratives, fantastical characters, and absurdist flourishes to underscore that truth and memory can persevere even in the face of heavy-handed oppression.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that Russian American filmmaker Michael Lockshin’s adaptation kicked up an unholy shitstorm in the land of Bulgakov’s native language. The production—which cost a reported $17 million, making it one of the country’s most expensive movies ever made—was filmed mostly in Russia in 2021 and financed in part by the state-run Cinema Fund. Yet Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the domestic clampdown that followed threw its funding and release into limbo, postponing its Russian debut to January 2024.

Despite threadbare promotion—perhaps a belated attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle—the two-and-a-half-hour production, once released, captured Russians’ fascination; became one of the country’s largest-ever box office smashes; and won of six awards from the Russian Guild of Film Critics, including best feature film. It’s more than likely that the independent critics and over 5 million Russians who bought tickets understood the production exactly as Bulgakov intended: a defiant slap to regimes that curtail rights, terrorize literati, and murder dissidents.

As Lockshin, who has publicly criticized Russia’s assault on Ukraine, put it, the story in a nutshell asks: “How do you remain free as a writer in the face of censorship?” The question is as relevant to Lockshin and his Russian colleagues today as it was to Bulgakov’s generation.

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The film’s circuitous journey befits that of the novel that inspired it. The book Bulgakov wrote between 1928 and 1940 had no chance of publication in his lifetime, as Bulgakov’s anti-communist politics put him in constant conflict with the authorities. Although, bizarrely, Joseph Stalin admired Bulgakov, by the end of the 1920s, the Soviet state had censored much of his work. Bulgakov never completed The Master and Margarita; the final text was compiled by others, including his widow. In the late 1960s, a heavily censored version appeared serialized in magazine form, while a more complete edition circulated in samizdat. Only in 1973 did the version we have today appear in the Soviet Union, and it’s mesmerized Russians ever since.

The text itself is not easy to pin down. Storylines set in 1930s Moscow zigzag with a thinly veiled retelling of Christ’s persecution in ancient Jerusalem, and the book’s final pages refuse to yield answers or a definitive interpretation.

The main narrative centers on the love story between the unnamed Master, a Russian playwright, and Margarita, a ravishing and unfulfilled wife of a Soviet administrator. They meet shortly after the Master’s latest novel, about Pontius Pilate, is rejected for publication for political reasons. Simultaneously, Moscow is visited by Satan, in the guise of Professor Woland, and his colorful retinue of thugs who wreak havoc on the city and the cultural establishment responsible for the Master’s ostracization.

The second narrative involves the characters in the Master’s novel: Yeshua Ha-Notsri, a fictional Jewish preacher who shares much in common with Jesus of Nazareth, is hauled before the Roman administrator Pontius Pilate in a city very much like Jerusalem, accused of inciting public unrest and plotting to overthrow the emperor. Pilate is profoundly conflicted about putting the innocent man to death, more so than the Master’s colleagues in Moscow are about his banishment.

Filmmakers have long struggled to adapt the phantasmagoric tale. Great directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Roman Polansky, Federico Fellini, and Terry Gilliam threw in the towel. The Russian producers of Lockshin’s adaptation had owned the novel’s rights for years and had already failed once—at the script stage—to get the project off the ground. Lockshin initially hesitated to pitch a script but then reconsidered—not least, he has said, because of its relevance in Putin’s Russia.

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Lockshin took a roundabout route to working as a filmmaker in Russia. Born in the early 1980s in the United States, he was the grandchild of Soviet Jews who fled their shtetl in Ukraine on grounds of antisemitism in imperial Russia. His father, Arnold, belonged to the U.S. Communist Party and was known in his circles as “a rigid dogmatist.” The family of five applied to the Soviet Union for political asylum in 1986 upon Arnold’s firing from a cancer and research laboratory, ostensibly for subpar performance. The children were schooled in Russian, though they moved within an international community, and Lockshin went on to study at Moscow State University.

Living across Europe, but mostly in London and Berlin, Lockshin’s film career began with the production of Russian commercials for brands including Anheuser Busch, Nike, Bacardi, and McDonald’s. His directorial debut, the 2020 film Silver Skates (the first Russian film to be acquired as a “Netflix Original,” available on U.S. Netflix), is an apolitical romantic adventure set in snowy, turn-of-the-20th-century Saint Petersburg.

Defying expectations, Lockshin’s Master and Margarita succeeds in rendering the notoriously twisted plot intelligible, aided by pitch-perfect production design, sumptuous costumes, and an international cast. He makes the story work on screen by interspersing yet another narrative—namely, the Master’s rewriting of his novel in a psychiatric ward after the events of Bulgakov’s book—through the screenplay, which he cowrote with Roman Kantor.

This Master and Margarita begins with a scene not in the book: The Master is locked up in a sanatorium telling his story to a fellow prisoner-patient. He relates how a spineless literary organization killed off his play about Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Nozri; in a flashback, Moscow’s literati—even his friend, the chairman of the writers’ union—caved to the powers that be and ravaged the play as insufficiently class conscious, deemed it unworthy of the Soviet stage, and tossed the Master out of the Moscow writers’ club.

The Master’s fortunes pick up, as in Bulgakov’s novel, when he meets the femme fatale Margarita, a true-hearted lover of art and artistic freedom, and Woland, played wonderfully by the German actor August Diehl (the Gestapo major in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds). The mysterious Woland approaches the Master and suggests that he reckon with the hypocritical Soviet cultural elite by writing a novel about the devil visiting Moscow. Margarita loves this idea and visits the Master every morning as the manuscript’s pages stack up.

Meanwhile, Woland and his sinister entourage, including the human-sized talking cat, Behemoth, turn Moscow upside down. The wild scene of Woland et al. performing a black magic show on a Moscow stage is one of Russian literature’s most flamboyant and hilarious moments—and Lockshin does it justice.

But the culture police catch up with the Master, who throws the manuscript into his oven as the authorities storm into his apartment, which later prompts the legendary one-liner from Woland: “Manuscripts don’t burn.” When Margarita can’t find her beloved Master anywhere, she throws in her lot with the devil. In another iconic scene, Margarita—after zooming stark naked across night-time Moscow on a broom—hosts Woland’s demonic grand ball, where she welcomes notorious evildoers from throughout history lining up to pay homage to the devil. Lockshin finishes the story with bombastic dual endings where Bulgakov’s petered out: The manuscript doesn’t burn, but Moscow does.

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Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Lockshin had already relocated to Los Angeles, where he had planned to edit the film. But the invasion and Lockshin’s anti-regime comments forced his team to pause the project for a year. Universal Pictures, like other foreign distributors, pulled out of Russia, muddling prospects for distribution. Yet the Russian producers managed to complete it without compromising content. When it was finally released in Russia in 2024, however, Lockshin’s name was nowhere on it.

Immediately upon its opening, Russian audiences flocked to see it while state-loyal critics lambasted both the film and Lockshin, whom they reviled as a traitor and terrorist. The imbroglio even reach the State Duma, which proposed banning the film as “a representation of Satanism on the screen” and questioned how the Ministry of Culture had allowed it to get so far.

The film’s unlikely journey to the screen in Russia and popular reception might well tell us more about the mood in Russia than the state’s minders want the world to know: Namely, that ordinary Russians resent the truncation of their freedoms. Moscow regularly announces new restrictions that impinge on basic democratic rights—for example, it recently proscribed access to foreign apps. Since expressions of discontent are criminalized, perhaps the film’s overwhelming reception is a sign that Russians are less apathetic than many outsiders assume.

And yet another topsy-turvy twist: While it can be viewed in illiberal Russia, the film may never make it to U.S. or Ukrainian or Polish cinemas. In the United States, a court case is underway between current sales agent Luminosity Pictures and U.S. producers Svetlana Migunova-Dali and Grace Loh, who are planning their own English-language adaptation of the book. The dispute is over legitimate ownership of the rights to the novel, with Luminosity alleging that the latter are seeking to block the Russian film’s U.S. release.

Meanwhile, this blistering takedown of Putinism will almost certainly not play in the territory of free Ukraine. Though Bulgakov’s family house in Kyiv on the steep incline of Andriivskyi Descent is a much-visited museum, Ukrainians today reject the celebrated writer as one of their own. They flagellate him as a Russian nationalist who looked down on Ukrainians and their language. In 2014, after Russia’s initial incursion, the Ukrainian government banned a Russian-made miniseries of Bulgakov’s The White Guard, labeling it “Russian propaganda.” Amid the culture war raging today in Ukraine, anything smacking of Russia is verboten, while Ukrainians strive to discover and publicize literary achievements written in Ukrainian.

Last year, an Expert Commission of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance concluded that Bulgakov is “a symbol of Russian imperial policy.” The commission found him to be an “ardent Ukrainophobe” who “despite years of living in Kyiv, despised Ukrainians and their culture, hated the Ukrainian aspiration for independence, and spoke negatively about the formation of the Ukrainian state and its leaders.” It even claimed that “[o]f all the Russian writers of that time, he is the closest to the current ideologues of Putinism and the Kremlinʼs justification of ethnocide in Ukraine.” The Kyiv City Council decided to dismantle a monument to Bulgakov last month.

Although this is overblown, Bulgakov’s Russianness—not to mention Russians’ love of the novel—may explain the Putin regime’s willingness to tolerate the film in the first place. Surely, nothing can come between a great Russian writer and Putin’s greater Russian project. The Bulgakovs’ house on Kyiv’s Andriivskyi Descent is further evidence to Russian nationalists that the country of Ukraine doesn’t exist—any more than tough-talking cats who wield six-shooters.