The Devil's Ball
On Bulgakov in the age of Trump
A few days after the 2016 presidential election I flew to Moscow. I’d been invited to give a reading at Spaso House, the ornate Neoclassical mansion that has served as the official residence of the US ambassador since the 1930s.
Spaso House was originally acquired by William Bullitt, the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bullitt was known for throwing debauched blowouts that were part frat kegger, part Jumanji. He used the Moscow Zoo as a party supply store. Guests would get wild animals drunk just to see what happened. At one party, three trained seals “went berserk in the ballroom,” according to the US Embassy’s own website. For another rager Bullitt sensibly opted for a barnyard theme. There were goats, roosters, a baby bear. Actual birch trees were brought into the house’s renowned chandelier room. Someone forgot to latch the makeshift aviary and hundreds of birds escaped, flying around the ceilings, depositing guano on the crème de la crème of Soviet society. The baby bear, drunk on champagne, barfed on a Red Army general.
So I wasn’t sure what awaited me as I made my way to Spaso House on that freezing evening in November 2016.
To enter Spaso House, you had to go through two layers of security: first Russian, then American. If you had an American passport, the Russian officers let you through to the next layer of security without a word. If, however, you had a Russian passport, the officers would say your name aloud before letting you pass. The presumption was that these officers had voice-activated microphones in their coats to record the names of any Russian citizens who visited US Embassy property, even those who’d just come to hear an artsy-fartsy novelist read.
As I entered the chandelier room, I couldn’t help looking to the ceiling in hopes of seeing a finch. I’d been told to read from my work for a full hour. This struck me as a terrible idea. Listening to an author drone on uninterrupted for a entire hour will make book burners of the most devoted readers. I didn’t want to cause a diplomatic incident. Instead, I combined passages of The Tsar of Love and Techno with a talk on the manipulation of history in political propaganda, a subject the recent election had made increasingly salient.
I commented to my wonderfully blunt handler that I hadn’t expected so many people to attend.
“Oh, they’re not here for you,” she assured me. She explained that most of the attendees worked at various European embassies. They had come because my reading happened to be the first public event on the US Ambassador’s schedule since the election. They’d come seeking reassurance that Trump would not abandon them to Putin.
One of the guests at the 1935 party that transformed Spaso House into a menagerie of loose farm animals was the writer Mikhail Bulgakov. This party made such an impression on him that he transformed it in his novel The Master and Margarita to a great ball thrown by the Devil himself.
The Master and Margarita defies summarization; I pity the poor soul who had to write its jacket copy. In brief, the Devil and a troupe of lesser demons—including a giant talking cat—visit 1930s Moscow. Madness and mayhem ensue. It’s one of the most influential 20th-century Russian novels, inspiring everything from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” A search of the novel on JSTOR yields over ten thousand articles, chapters, and books written about it. One reseacher even analyzed the sweat on the original manuscript to determine if Bulgakov was on drugs. To the surprise of no one who has read the novel, he was.
The text The Master and Margarita is in closest conversation with is Goethe’s Faust, lines from which form the novel’s epigraph. The legend of Faust—and of devil’s bargains more generally—weave throughout Russian fiction. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that a society governed by autocracy would produce an impressive literature of Faustian bargains. And it certainly isn’t surprising that Faustian bargains would interest a novelist writing at the height of Stalin’s purges.
The climax of the novel is the Devil’s ball based on the party Bulgakov attended at Spaso House. In the famous scene, Margarita stands on the landing of a marble staircase to welcome guests as they emerge from Hell. When I was at Spaso House, I noticed several guests slip off to take photos of this staircase. Then they returned to the chandelier room, where US embassy officials told them that America would never abandon its commitments to Europe.
Bulgakov has been on my mind over the last few days as I’ve watched the Trump administration surpass the worst fears of the diplomats who came to Spaso House on that cold evening in November 2016 seeking reassurance.
In the last week, Trump has blamed Ukraine for the Russian invasion, called Zelenskyy a dictator, and all but offered Eastern Europe to Putin. Marco Rubio has begun negotiating an end to the Russian war in Ukraine without Ukrainian involvement. The treasury secretary tried to extort Zelenskyy into signing over half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals without offering any security guarantees. In Munich last weekend, Pete Hegseth seemed to read from cue cards issued by the Kremlin.
You’d think the Republican politicians who’ve built their entire political identities around cosplaying Ronald Reagan might object to this betrayal of their values. You’d think they would not meekly sit by while this administration feeds Ukraine to the wolves. Alas: Trump’s Republican Party has evolved from Reagan’s the way chickens evolved from dinosaurs. In their acquiescence, we see why the Faustian legend Bulgakov drew from is endlessly adaptable, as relevant to 2025 Washington as it was to 1930s Moscow or 16th-century Germany.
If you’re interested in learning more about the inspiration behind Bulgakov’s masterpiece, I highly recommend Moscow 1937 by Karl Schlögel. In it, Schlögel describes The Master and Margarita as “a story of the confusions and dissolution of everything stable and solid.” Like the novel they describe, Schlögel’s words couldn’t be timelier.
Thank you for connecting so many dots for me over stretches of history of which I have only a nodding acquaintance. Who knew Moscow in the 1930’s could be such a rollicking spot?!