Titans of History

However in 1980, Indira won a landslide election and returned to power until her assassination by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984. As prime minister, she was succeeded by her diffident and gentle eldest son, Rajiv, a pilot (Sanjay had been killed in a flying accident in 1980), who governed until 1989 when his corruption-tainted government lost the elections. He was assassinated by Tamil Tigers in 1991 but his Italian-born widow Sonia assumed leadership of the Congress Party, which won the election of 2004. Refusing to become premier herself, she appointed Manoman Singh as PM but remained the power behind the scenes. Her son Rahul Gandhi became general secretary of the party: the dynasty remains ascendant.

BULGAKOV

1891–1940

There is no such thing as a writer who falls silent. If he falls silent it means he was never a true writer.

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov, the Soviet writer who was sometimes favored but often banned during his lifetime, left as his legacy one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. The Master and Margarita is a madcap, searing satire of Soviet Russia, defying tyranny and despotism, and a celebration of the ability of the human spirit to triumph over dictatorship.

The plot of The Master and Margarita, which took Bulgakov over a decade to write, is complex and fantastical. In one strand Bulgakov tells how the Devil (Voland, based on Stalin) and his henchmen, including a giant gun-toting cat, wreak havoc in 1930s Moscow, while in another, set in Jerusalem in AD 33, Bulgakov explores Pontius Pilate’s role in the crucifixion of Christ. Meanwhile the Master, a writer persecuted by the Soviet authorities for his novel about this very subject, has retreated to a lunatic asylum, which seemingly offers a saner refuge than the outside world. His mistress, Margarita, refuses to despair, but dances with the Devil to save the Master.

Bulgakov was well aware that his masterpiece could never be published in his lifetime. As well as exploring the complex interplay between good and evil, courage and cowardice, innocence and guilt, the novel champions the freedom of the spirit in an unfree world. Demonstrating the inability of those in power to legislate for the souls of the people they control, Bulgakov’s work fundamentally challenged Stalinist Russia.

The Master and Margarita was first published after Stalin’s death, in magazine installments in 1967. Despite being heavily censored, it was an instant success. Its continued success is living evidence of its own premise that art will triumph over tyranny. In the 1960s Mick Jagger based the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil” on the book.

Born in Kiev, the son of a professor, Bulgakov qualified as a physician in 1916 and served as a field doctor with the White Army during the Russian Civil War. Bulgakov was one of a handful of writers including Chekhov, Conan Doyle and Somerset Maugham, to practice medicine, an ideal education in the art of observation. His medical tales, Stories of a Country Doctor, are his best shorter pieces. His refusal to flee his homeland, or to become a mouthpiece for communist propaganda, rendered him, in his own words, “the one and only literary wolf” in the Soviet Union. In his first ten years as a writer, hostile notices outweighed the good by 298 to 3. His plays—even the less controversial adaptations and the historical works that he thought might be allowed to pass unnoticed—were stifled. He himself burned an early draft of The Master and Margarita, temporarily overwhelmed by the futility of writing the unpublishable. In a letter to the Soviet government in 1930, requesting permission to emigrate, Bulgakov outlined the fate he was facing as a banned writer: “persecution, desperation and death.” His contemporaries believed that his death in 1940, from inherited kidney disease, was as much attributable to his treatment by Stalin

He had risen to prominence in post-Revolutionary Russia as a journalist and a playwright for the Moscow Arts Theater. His smash hit Days of the Turbins, an adaptation of his superb Civil War novel The White Guard, was premiered in 1926. Based on Bulgakov’s own happy upbringing in a large and loving upper-middle-class family, Days of the Turbins was the first play since the Revolution to present a sympathetic portrayal of the counter-revolutionary Whites. Under duress, Bulgakov had changed the play’s title and provided an ending loosely sympathetic to the communist cause. It was enough to convince Stalin, who, enjoying its portrayal of family life in the Civil War, interpreted the play as a demonstration of the overwhelming strength of Bolshevism. It became Stalin’s favorite play; he saw it fifteen times.