Collaborators

The story takes place in Moscow in the years 1938 to 1940 and the drama centers around the apartment of Mikhail Bulgakov and his wife Yelena.
Bulgakov has just finished his play The Life of Monsieur de Molière which his friends acclaim a masterpiece. The night after the premiere, he is visited by two secret policemen from the NKVD. They tell him the play is banned and will never be shown again unless he cooperates with them in writing a "hack" play on the life of the young Joseph Stalin. At first Bulgakov resists their bullying and refuses to cooperate even though this could endanger his life. Their terrorizing of Bulgakov intensifies until he pretends to start work, but sits at the typewriter unable to put words to paper. Then one night he receives a phone call and a mystery voice offers him help if he goes to a certain metro station and enters a door hidden in the tunnel. Bulgakov follows the instructions and finds himself alone in a room beneath the Kremlin with Joseph Stalin himself. Stalin says he has always admired Bulgakov's work and offers his assistance in the play. Stalin sits at the typewriter and produces scenes which delight the NKVD with their depiction of Stalin as an heroic and glorious leader fighting Czarist oppression. While Stalin types Bulgakov relieves Stalin of the burden of some of his state papers. Inadvertantly Bulgakov becomes involved in issuing the orders which bring about the Great Purge of Stalinist Russia. The play is finished but the monster of the purges consumes his friends lives one by one. The strain on Bulgakov leads to an intensification of his inherited disease , nephrosclerosis, and his eventual death.