In the story “To a Secret Friend” Mikhail Bulgakov called 1929 “the year of catastrophe”. All his productions were removed from the repertoire, the new play “The Flight” was banned. Mikhail Afanasyevich could no longer earn by writing, and the Bulgakovs had to sell off their belongings.
On March 28, 1930, Bulgakov, driven to despair, wrote a “Letter to the Government of the USSR”. He asked for permission to go abroad because in the USSR he was deprived of the opportunity to write and was devoted to destruction.
“However, if what I have written is still unconvincing and I am condemned to lifelong silence in the USSR, I ask the Soviet Government to give me a job in my specialty and send me to the theater to work as a full-time director, ” Bulgakov added to this request.
Mikhail Afanasyevich dictated this letter to his future wife and then secret lover Yelena Shilovskaya, she typed it on a typewriter and made several copies. Bulgakov sent the letter to several high-ranking addressees, including the leader of the USSR, Joseph Stalin.
Three weeks later, on April 18, 1930, Bulgakov had a telephone conversation with Stalin in the apartment on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya. The details of the conversation were recounted in their memoirs by Lyubov Belozerskaya, the writer’s wife at the time, who witnessed the conversation, and Yelena Shilovskaya — in the words of Mikhail Afanasyevich.
