City of the Devil: Bulgakovian Moscow and the Search for the Stalinist Subject

Abstract

This article considers the question of the Stalinist subject, i.e. the way the self was constructed under the Stalinist regime, by means of a close reading of Bulgakov's satiric novel The Master and Margarita . Recent work on Stalinist subjectivity has drawn on Foucault to argue for a Stalinist subject that has fully internalised the system's ideology, thus, in effect, proposing a radical Sonderweg for the Soviet self if compared to the western, liberal paradigm. The article critically engages with the philosophical assumptions that underpin such an analysis and proposes an alternative reading of the Soviet self as hyper-liberal, hence as closely related to the western self of modernity. To do so, the article analyses Bulgakov's novel in the light of Thomas Hobbes's and Slavoj Zizek's respective visions of the subject. The Stalinist system of totalitarian terror itself is shown to be remarkably stable because it manages to utilise the self-supervision of its subjects, and because the individuals' strategies for survival and success played on Stalinist terms amount to a daily affirmation of the system. In light of its dismissal of the Sonderweg theory, the article concludes by examining the differences between liberal democracies and totalitarian regimes.