"In Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, the Devil comes to Moscow. What follows is a fearful spiral of denunciation, disappearance and death, at once arbitrary and spiteful, calculated and yet deranged. No work better captures the loathsome quality of the Terror; no scene gets closer to illuminating the surreal atmosphere of the show trials than Nikanor Bosoy's nightmare of being exposed as a foreign currency dealer while sitting in the audience of a variety show in a Moscow theatre. For not every act in the drama required Stalin's instigation; his role was to create an environment in which ordinary men and women - even members of the same family - would denounce one another; in which today's torturer could be tomorrow's victim; in which today's camp commandant could spend the night in the punishment cells."
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Fantasy authorsScience fiction authorsNovelists from RussiaShort story writers from RussiaPlaywrights from Russia
Original Language: English
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Sources
Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 210-211
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bulgakov
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Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov (15 May [O.S. 3 May] 1891 – 10 March 1940) was a Russian-language novelist and playwright of the first half of the 20th century.
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