The first five-year plan

The first five-year plan, a period of forced collectivization and rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union, forms the historical backdrop against which Mikhail Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita. It was a time of immense suffering for the Russian people, marked by the decimation of the peasantry, the expansion of the Gulag system, and the liquidation of the intelligentsia, creating the atmosphere of terror and oppression that the novel satirizes and transcends.

Historical Context and the Novel's Genesis

The first five-year plan was a period of immense suffering for the Russian people, decimating the peasantry and destroying agriculture. It coincided with the expansion of the system of 'corrective labour camps', the penetration of the secret police into all areas of life, and vast party purges and Moscow 'show trials'. Bulgakov began work on the first version of his novel early in 1929, or possibly at the end of 1928, and the novel accompanied him through this period of greatest suffering for his people. The circumstances of the era are everywhere present in The Master and Margarita, which was in part Bulgakov's challenge to the rule of terror in literature.

The Imposed Normality of Terror

The reality of the world under Stalin's terror, as depicted in the novel, is an imposed normality that is itself a form of terror. The citizens have adjusted to it and learned to play along. The mechanism of this forced adjustment is revealed in the chapter recounting 'Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream', in which prison, denunciation and betrayal become yet another theatre with a kindly and helpful master of ceremonies. Berlioz, the comparatist, is the spokesman for this 'normal' state of affairs, which is what makes his conversation with Woland so interesting. In it he is confronted with another reality which he cannot recognize. He becomes 'unexpectedly mortal'.

The World of Woland

Woland's reality is the world of imposed terror, and its nature is made chillingly clear in the brief scene when he and Margarita contemplate his special globe. Woland shows her a war, where a house is destroyed and a child lies dead in a pool of blood. When Margarita asks which side his assistant Abaddon is on, Woland replies that he is of a rare impartiality and sympathizes equally with both sides of the fight, so the results are always the same for both sides. This reality belongs to Woland, and those who dispute his claim to the power of this world are absent or all but absent from the novel. Their names are Caesar and Stalin. Though absent in person, they are omnipresent, and their imposed will has become the measure of normality and self-evidence.

Thematic Significance

The first five-year plan, as a historical period, is not merely a setting but a condition that the novel's form and content actively resist. The Master and Margarita breathes an air of artistic and spiritual freedom which had become rare indeed, not only in Soviet Russia. The novel's formal originality, its devastating satire of Soviet life, and its 'theatrical' rendering of the Great Terror of the thirties are all direct responses to the crushing reality of the era. The aphorism 'Manuscripts don't burn' expresses an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, and the free word over terror and oppression, a trust forged in the crucible of the first five-year plan and its aftermath.