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Burnt by the Sun
Утомлённые солнцем
1994 · Film · 135 min
Directed by Nikita Mikhalkov
Russia, 1936: revolutionary hero Colonel Kotov is spending an idyllic summer in his dacha with his young wife and six-year-old daughter Nadia and other assorted family and friends. Things change dramatically with the unheralded arrival of Cousin Dmitri from Moscow, who charms the women and little Nadia with his games and pianistic bravura. But Kotov isn't fooled: this is the time of Stalin's repression, with telephone calls in the middle of the night spelling doom - and he knows that Dmitri isn't paying a social call...
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Also see Burnt by the Sun.
Excellent movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_by_the_Sun
Old Polish tango in Polish and Hebrew.[0]
Russian version[1] of Polish tango Ostatnie Niedziela imortalized in a film chronicling the purges of 1930's Soviet Union.[2]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEL0RL_bBkw
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8sRJ-zAMFk
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111579/
The closest modern day equivalent to living in Stalinist Russia in the 30s is North Korea. At the slightest suspicion that one was somehow demonstrating disloyalty to the Soviet state one could be hauled away to be tortured and executed or sent to the Siberian Gulag to be slowly worked to death.
Bulgakov's writings, if discovered, would have lead to him being executed. To people who lived in the system, their was an unacknowledged understanding that something bad was happening as people would mysteriously disappear on a regular basis. The movie "The Inner Circle" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103838/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl ) and "Burnt By The Sun" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111579/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 ) are good depictions of what life was like during those times. It makes the high anxiety and paranoia of most characters in M & M much more understandable.
I think that remained true at least until the early twentieth century. My high-school Russian teacher said this was because wealthy Russian families often employed French nannies, who taught some French to the children.
You can see this in the film Burnt by the Sun, which is fictional, but perhaps historically accurate in this respect. It's set in 1930's Russia. A respected Soviet military officer is eating by himself while his wife's upper-class family converses in the other room. The maid asks why, and he responds, "I can't speak French." The purpose of this scene is clear: the inability of high-status Russians to speak French is a sign of broader social change.