In another world, The Master and Margarita director Michael Lockshin would be spending evenings in a tuxedo strolling the red carpet along with the actors from his new film. He’d spend his days smiling for photographers, giving Champagne toasts, and taking limo rides to media appearances. But in our world, the 43-year-old filmmaker is unable to promote his blockbuster, a triumphant success in the only country where it is currently being shown: Russia. “My name wasn’t even on the poster or any of the marketing materials for the release in Russia,” the director with a salt-and-pepper mustache tells me from his Los Angeles home. That would have been too dangerous.

Lockshin’s adaptation of the acclaimed Russian novel by Mikhail Bulgakov was an enormous feat—with a reported cost of $17 million, a plethora of special effects, a storyline that’s a full-throated critique of authoritarianism, and a message the filmmaker sums up as: “How do you remain free as a writer in the face of censorship?” It’s a subject that was difficult to tackle in Russia even before the “special military operation” in Ukraine, to borrow the language of Vladimir Putin’s regime, began in 2022. It is an even more daring movie now as dissident artists, authors, and journalists are being thrown in jail, banned, and in some cases murdered.

Lockshin’s film was released on January 25. To date, more than five million Russians have seen The Master and Margarita in theaters, making it one of the best-performing films of the year. Audience reactions have been ecstatic: Finally, they’re able to see a film critical of the regime. They have discovered the story of a writer on trial for the plays he has created, ostracized by his peers. They have laughed at scenes that parody propaganda and others in which bureaucrats outdo each other in their stupidity.

For the last two years in Russia, culture has been under wraps, with cinemas showing only benignly innocuous films approved by official authorities. Moscow’s cinemas are now breathing a sigh of relief. Some screenings of the film even ended with rounds of enthusiastic applause. Is the Kremlin listening?

Putin’s propaganda machine went into overdrive the day after the film’s theatrical release. First, star television presenter Tigran Keosayan blasted Lockshin’s “anti-Russian” stance and urged authorities to launch an investigation into the film’s production. Vladimir Solovyov, considered one of Russia’s main propogandists, then asked on his program—one of Russian’s most viewed television shows, “How could this unpatriotic film have been authorized? Is this a special operation?”

Readovka, a pro-Kremlin Telegram channel with over two million viewers, took aim at the filmmaker, describing him as a “notorious Russophobe” guilty of having expressed his opposition to the Ukraine war on TV networks. Finally, Sputnik radio host Trofim Tatarenkov compared Lockshin to the “enemies of the people” who would have been assassinated in Stalin’s time.

From Los Angeles, the filmmaker describes navigating his work’s reception as if he’s a sailor watching a tempest through a telescope. But the sun is shining in California, far from the storm raging in Moscow. Nevertheless, he avoids some of the questions I ask about the actors who remain in Russia. “Everyone’s scared over there,” he says.

Listening to him talk about his childhood divided between the United States and Russia, the modest beginnings of his career, and his Hollywood ambitions, I wonder whether he’s living a filmmaker’s dream, a nightmare, or both at the same time. “I’m very proud of this film, of course,” he says, as if there were any doubt about that. As the interview progresses, he asks me to reread some of his quotes. (In light of death threats and Lockshin’s concern with protecting colleagues who are still in Russia, Vanity Fair chose to comply with this request). How could I refuse when he tells me that he’s threatened anew every time an article is published?

In November 2019, Lockshin was approached by three men. Two of them are stalwarts of Russian cinema: Ruben Dishdishyan, a businessman with an undeniable flair, and Igor Tolstunov, a notable producer of Russian films since the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the past three years, they told the filmmaker, they’d been hoping to produce a grand adaptation of The Master and Margarita, for which they had acquired the film rights. A team formed around a previous director had fallen apart, and they were looking to relaunch the project.

Lockshin’s talents as a director had long been confined to commercials. (He once convinced David Duchovny to do one for a brand of Russian beer.) When they met, however, the director was on the verge of success: He was putting the finishing touches on Silver Skates, the first Netflix original film produced for the Russian market, a romantic and social comedy set in the St. Petersburg of Nicolas II. “It was a big event in Russia,” the director says.

As the producers tried to convince Lockshin, he remained skeptical. “Bulgakov’s novel is impossible to adapt,” he says, remembering the 1972 version by Yugoslav director Aleksandar Petrović—not exactly a remarkable contribution to cinema.

Written in the 1930s, The Master and Margarita is a complex novel with at least three parallel narratives. The first is a love story between “The Master,” a Moscow writer, and Margarita, his muse. The second focuses on Professor Woland, an incarnation of the devil who sows chaos in Moscow at the start of the Stalinist era. Lastly, Bulgakov devotes several chapters to a fictitious book written by The Master that propels the reader back to ancient Judea and features Pontius Pilate as its subject.

Realistic, fantastical, and religious themes meet. The story is set in different eras and locations, a Faustian theme gives way to tales from the Bible, and romanticism sits alongside satire. It adds up to a nightmarish challenge for any filmmaker. “It’s a philosophical tale, full of allegories and mise en abyme,” Lockshin says. “You can’t simply reduce this book to its plot.”

The filmmaker was about to decline the offer and leave the project to others when his screenwriter friend Roman Kantor asked him to reconsider. The two had worked together for Netflix, and Kantor said he was ready to adapt Bulgakov’s novel. They both reread the book, scribbled down notes, spent a few sleepless nights writing, and then got back in touch with the rights holders: “We have an idea, but if we go ahead with it, a lot of the book’s fans may be critical,” they warned.

Their script draws heavily on the life of Mikhail Bulgakov, and the character of The Master has long been seen as modeled on the author’s own life. Born in Kiev in 1891, he was the son of a professor of religious history and would become a writer in Moscow in the 1920s, after abandoning his medical studies. He then had the bitter experience of being censored. In 1926, the Moscow Art Theatre staged The Days of the Turbins, adapted from Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard. The play was initially acclaimed, but its author’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for communism would soon be criticized by Soviet authorities. Bulgakov was too sympathetic in his portrayal of Russian’s White movement, they argued. His next two plays were also criticized by the authorities.

Bulgakov’s back was against the wall, but he still had a card to play: Joseph Stalin loved The Days of the Turbins. In 1929, the novelist wrote a letter to the Soviet leader: “The literary press was determined to show that my works had no place in the Soviet world. I would add that they were right. It’s true, I admit it. It’s my duty to fight censorship, wherever it may be and whatever regime imposes it.” He added: “If you think I should live in the Soviet Union, I demand the freedom to present my plays.”

Stalin did not grant this request, but he did appoint Bulgakov to a position as a literary consultant at the Moscow Art Theatre. The Master and Margarita was written during this period, in secret. After the author’s death in 1940, his wife Yelena Sergeevna completed the novel. An early censored version was published in a Moscow magazine in 1967, once the country had embarked on its path of de-Stalinization. “Bulgakov’s novel would provide a form of revenge on the censors,” says Lockshin, fascinated by the correlations between the author’s life and his work.

Lockshin and Kantor’s screenplay was written in 2020. It depicts a protagonist who, like Bulgakov, is excluded from the authors union, and whose plays are censored by the authorities. Now an outsider, the author secretly sets about writing a play about Pontius Pilate, with the help of his mistress, Margarita. The mad romance between the writer and his muse and the adventures of Woland and Behemoth, his devilish cat—a very talkative Maine coon—develop around the main plot.

The three producers then embarked on a tour to finance their monumental project, raising millions private funds—but only enough to cover 60% of the project, Lockshin says. In the end, the Cinema Foundation of Russia granted them the rest—almost $7 million in public subsidies. “It was a considerable sum,” says Lockshin, “but it wasn’t surprising. Every Russian has read The Master and Margarita, and a sweeping adaptation has been eagerly awaited by the public.”

The film would be shot partly in St. Petersburg during the first four months of 2021. Yevgeniy Tsyganov, a star who frequently appears on the Moscow stage, would play the role of The Master. Yulia Snigir, who appeared in A Good Day to Die Hard (the final film in the Die Hard franchise), was chosen to play Margarita. Professor Woland would be played by a star familiar to many viewers beyond Russia: German actor August Diehl, who played Major Dieter Hellstrom in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. There was good news on the distribution front as well, with a deal signed with Universal Pictures for a theatrical release in 2023.

On February 24, 2022, Lockshin was in Moscow working on the postproduction of the film when Russia invaded Ukraine. He soon realized that nothing would go according to the original plan. Within weeks, all the international players in the film industry were deserting the country. Netflix, which had only recently begun to operate in Russia, chose to leave, and Universal Pictures abandoned its plans to distribute the film. (It currently has no US distributor.) “I wasn’t sure it would ever be released,” Lockshin says.

The first images of the war that he saw were the horrors committed in the suburbs of Kyiv, where the Russian army was massacring residents. He tells me that he didn’t hesitate for a second to oppose the war. In the early hours of the conflict, he condemned the invasion on social media. Then, in a post shared on social media, he compared Putin’s Russia to Nazi Germany. “I’m not an online activist,” he shares. “But I couldn’t stay silent for fear of being censored while I was making a film about Bulgakov.”

He has his reasons. The grandson of Ukrainian Russians, Lockshin was born in the United States in 1980. The Cold War was part of his daily life from an early age. His father, Arnold Lockshin, moved his family to Houston where he worked as a cancer researcher. In 1986, Michael was five years old when he disappeared with his parents, older brother, and older sister. They reappeared two days later in Moscow, about 5,900 miles to the east, where his father—who didn’t speak a word of Russian—applied for asylum.

Arnold Lockshin, a communist sympathizer, had long claimed that he had been harassed at work by the FBI, though he didn’t have any proof. In Russia, he became a star for the state’s propaganda machine: At a time when many academics were fleeing the country for the West, here was an American scientist who chose instead to make the USSR his home. It was a godsend for Gorbachev.

The family found an apartment in Moscow, and the elder Lockshin landed a good job. He and his wife, Lauren, held a series of press conferences and made several television appearances. In the late 1980s, the Lockshins even wrote a book recounting their unusual story, titled Silent Terror: One Family’s History of Political Persecution in the United States. On the cover, nine-year-old Michael poses in a blue shirt with his siblings and parents.

Lockshin says he first read The Master and Margarita in high school. “Bulgakov became my favorite author,” he says. “At the time, I especially appreciated the satirical tone of the scenes with Woland in Moscow and was less drawn to the biblical sections with Pontius Pilate.” Ten years later, he was studying psychology in London and working at a production company when he read the book for a second time. “Suddenly, the scenes in Judea became my favorites. Maybe I had more distance to understand the philosophy of the book,” he says.

Since then, it’s as if he has stepped into Bulgakov’s novel. The war in Ukraine has plunged Russian artists into darkness. On March 4, 2022, Putin signed a law imposing jail terms for spreading intentionally “fake” news about the military. Months later, he signed another law that broadened the definition of “foreign agent.” Nearly 130 journalists were targeted, and independent publishers closed one after the other. Novels by Dmitry Bykov and Boris Akunin, two authors hostile to Putin, were banned from bookstores. Opponents such as Alexey Navalny are dying in highly suspicious circumstances.

“It’s not a return to the 1970s—it’s a return to Stalinist repression,” says two-time Oscar-nominated Ukrainian producer Alexander Rodnyansky. Prosecuted by a Russian court in absentia for “spreading false information,” this standard-bearer of the Russian New Wave now lives in exile in the United States. “The way The Master is persecuted in the film is not fiction. It’s a documentary about Russia today.”

Several scenes from The Master and Margarita are disturbingly similar to real events. In 2023, Russian authorities arrested and detained a theater director and a playwright on charges of “justifying terrorism,” just like The Master in Bulgakov’s novel. The satanic ball scene has parallels to a scandalous party in Moscow where a celebrity was arrested in December 2023. Another guest, pop star Philipp Kirkorov, apologized for his attendence, and later performed for wounded Russian soldiers in the Donbass region.

Why, then, did the Ministry of Culture even authorize the film’s theatrical release? “Just a few months before it would open in theaters, I didn’t know if it would happen,” says Lockshin. “I thought it might not, but I hoped it would.” He mentions lobbying efforts by his very well-connected producers: Distribution is being handled by Atmosfera Kino, a company founded in 2022 by Ruben Dishdishyan (a producer of The Master and Margarita) and the former head of Universal Pictures in Russia. Rodnyansky also believes that the complexity of the movie worked in its favor: “Intelligence officials had no idea that such a complicated feature-length film, lasting almost three hours, would be so popular.”

Two weeks after the film’s release, despite the hype, the authorities chose not to suspend screenings. “Withdrawing the film would have caused too much unrest,” Rodnyansky says.

For Russian critic Anton Dolin, who is in exile in Latvia, the film’s release has been a miracle. His explanation shares some of Bulgakov’s absurdist humor: “It’s likely that the Ministry of Culture officials responsible for authorizing or prohibiting it didn’t understand the film. They saw it as a criticism of Stalin, when they were the ones actually being mocked.” In Russia, no one will ever read The Master and Margarita in the same way again.

This story first appeared on Vanity Fair France. It was translated by John Newton.