“We pitched it as a movie about a writer who is censored… but censorship was not anywhere near where it is today. It’s hard to imagine that just three years ago, we were in a very different world.” The director of The Master and Margarita describes how the Kremlin-funded film came under attack for being anti-regime – and went on to become a box-office hit in Russia.
They loved him until they didn’t. In 2020, Michael Lockshin, an American director who spent most of his childhood in Moscow, was so trusted by Russia’s film industry that the state cinema fund contributed 40 per cent of the production money for his film The Master and Margarita, based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic Stalin-era novel. If Lockshin were to set foot in Russia today, he might be arrested under recent laws that make it a crime to criticise that country’s invasion of Ukraine. “They’ve called me a criminal, they’ve called me a terrorist on state TV,” Lockshin tells the BBC, about the pro-Putin commentators who have attacked him and his film.
The trouble began soon after the invasion took place in February 2022. Lockshin, who was living in Los Angeles and editing the film, posted on social media in support of Ukraine. When the film finally opened in Russia just a few months ago – after a two-year struggle to get it finished and released, and with the director’s name taken off any promotional material – the attacks by influential supporters of the Kremlin began.
Mars Media The Master and Margarita is the most-read Russian novel of the 20th Century (Credit: Mars Media)Mars Media
The Master and Margarita is the most-read Russian novel of the 20th Century (Credit: Mars Media)
A large Telegram channel called him a Russiaphobe, and a right-wing group named Call of the People said he should be criminally charged with promoting falsehoods. The television presenter Vladimir Solovyov asked on his show, “How could this unpatriotic film have been authorised?” Another television presenter, Tigran Keosayan, who is married to the head of Russian state television, said there should be an investigation into how the film was produced.
As the Russian producer Ivan Filippov previously told the BBC, “Never in the history of Russian distribution has any film caused such a propaganda reaction.” Bulgakov’s novel about a writer fighting state oppression in the 1930s now seems like a forecast of Lockshin’s own struggle to get his work out in the world. On screen and off, the film Master and Margarita starkly reflects the fraught situation of artists in Stalin’s era and in Russia today.
Mars Media The film’s themes of Stalinist censorship were mirrored in present-day reality with the response to the film from government supporters in Russia (Credit: Mars Media)Mars Media
The film’s themes of Stalinist censorship were mirrored in present-day reality with the response to the film from government supporters in Russia (Credit: Mars Media)
Lockshin was five years old in 1986 when his family moved to what was then the Soviet Union. His father said he was being harassed by the FBI because of his communist sympathies, and the family’s arrival made it a cause celebre in Moscow. After going to university in Moscow, Lockshin began splitting his time between the US and Russia, and moved to Los Angeles in 2021. His first feature, Silver Skates (2020), based on the children’s story Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, was successful in Russia and the first Russian language original for Netflix.
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