QUOTE : Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a bitter satire of Soviet life at the height of Stalin’s purges, captured the surreal experience of living in the embrace of totalitarianism. Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious. Existence is a dark carnival of opportunism, unchecked state power, hedonism, and terror. Omnipotent secret police, wholesale spying and surveillance, show trials, censorship, mass arrests, summary executions, and disappearances, along with famines, gulags, and a state system of propaganda unplugged from daily reality, give to all totalitarian systems a dreamlike quality.