Donald Trump is obviously no satan, despite the fact that his son-in-law and special advisor Jared Kushner owns an office tower in New York City known as 666 Fifth Avenue. However, now that Russian collusion has become “in vogue” (to use Donald Trump Jr.’s expression), it may be interesting to look at the Trump phenomenon through the eyes of post-Soviet Russia’s best-loved writer, Ukrainian-born and educated Mikhail Bulgakov, wIth the help of Bulgakov’s most popular novel, The Master and Margarita.

Indeed, If you’re preparing to spend any time in the company of Russian speakers, Bulgakov’s novel should be at the very top of your reading list. Completed in 1940, it didn’t see the light of day in the Soviet Union until 1966, when it was serialized – heavily censored – in a small-circulation literary journal, instantly becoming a samizdat sensation. When it finally became widely available during Gorbachev’s perestroika, it turned into an enduring symbol of post-communist Russia. Quotations and catch-phrases have entered everyday speech almost in the same way Shakespeare has been appropriated in English; the Moscow neighborhood around the Patriarch’s Ponds park, where Bulgakov lived in the final years and where the novel begins, is chock-a-block with references to its characters.

The Master and Margarita can be described as magic realism avant le lettre. It consists of three interlocking themes: a tragic love affair between the two main characters, a writer and an unhappily married woman; a historical “novel with the novel” about Pontius Pilate and Jesus, and a visit to contemporary Moscow by the devil, a delightful romp which brutally satirizes Soviet reality and brings the first two themes together.

The devil appears in the guise of a foreigner, a professor of black magic named Woland. He travels with a small coterie of merry pranksters and evil assassins. The pranksters play tricks on the Muscovites to reveal their greed, vanity, depravity and general stupidity. Everyone who comes into contact with them suffers. Some of their pranks are innocent enough, others are quite cruel, resulting in death, arrests and mental illness. Still, those who suffer abuse at their hands richly deserve whatever they get, and Woland’s visit to Moscow is like a breath of fresh air in a dreary Soviet reality. His departure takes place during a tremendous thunderstorm which literally cleanses the city.

Some literary critics see Mephistophelian Woland as an allegorical representation of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and claim to recognize the two pranksters in his entourage as Stalin’s real-life henchmen Vyachaslov Molotov, Lavrentiy Beria or even Nikita Khrushchev, and the two assassins as feared NKVD chiefs Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov. Like Woland, Stalin was all-powerful in Russia and like Woland his power was dark and evil in nature.

There is more to Bulgakov’s vision of Woland as Stalin. Bulgakov’s other great novel, The White Guard, is set in Kyiv during the Russian Civil War – a period also known as the Ukrainian-Soviet War, when the city kept changing hands between the Ukrainian nationalist government, the Germans, Semyon Petlura and the Reds. It focuses on a middle-class family with White sympathies battered by the evil winds of the time – but it also reveals the author’s strong right-wing convictions, the kind of proto-fascist ideology that was popular among elements of the White Movement. The play based on the novel, The Days of the Turbins, was Stalin’s favorite, which he attended fifteen times when it was staged by the Moscow Art Theater in the late 1920s – precisely the time when he was abandoning early bolshevism and establishing his own version of fascism in the Soviet Union.

Thus, in Bulgakov’s interpretation, Stalin and Woland were both doing the necessary dirty work. Stalin’s purges, which during the 1930s liquidated the old-guard Bolsheviks, would have been seen by Bulgakov, who hated communists, as a retribution and a kind of sardonic, Satanic justice.

Which brings us to the real-life American president.

Much like Bulgakov’s devil, Trump is surrounded by a colorful cast of buffoonish and/or evil characters. Like the devil, everyone who has dealings with Trump invariably comes to grief, including his business associates, partners investors and lenders. Even members of his own family.

Like Woland, Trump can be very funny, usually unintentionally, but at times displaying a nasty kind of sense of humor. His Trump University swindle, in which he played on the greed and stupidity of his hapless students, could have come directly from the pages of The Master and Margarita.

Trump’s sojourn in America’s capital may prove to be almost as brief as the Devil’s week-long visit to Moscow, but in his few short months at the White House The Donald has played a variety of pranks on a variety of people. Note, for example, the brilliant way he exposed Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, first hurling nasty personal insults at them and then making them lick his boots. An even greater humiliation was inflicted on Mitt Romney when the 2012 Republican presidential candidate eagerly reached for the secretary of state position when Trump dangled it before him.

Now it is the turn of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to come in for a bit of retribution. Trump has turned on him, but in a move worth of Stalin he did so indirectly, criticizing him in the press but letting him stay on. Like so many Stalin’s victims, Sessions has now been hung out to dry, not quite knowing what to do next.

More important, Trump is going through American institutions one by one, systematically exposing their rotten core. He is attacking the media, which in a large measure created him, with “fake news” tweets. He is exposing the Republicans in Congress, making them lay bare the cartoonishly evil face of their party, as well as the Democrats who cling to impotent old leaders unable to confront the Trump phenomenon.

The U.S. military, the one institution Americans still claim to respect, has been dragged through the mud as well. Active duty personnel voted for a draft dodger who repeatedly insulted military heroes by an overwhelming 3-1 margin. The cancer diagnosis for Senator John McCain will make sure that Trump’s attacks on him for being captured in Vietnam will not be forgotten, reminding American soldiers of the stain on their honor for voting for this commander-in-chief.

Since the election, high-ranking officers in the Trump administration have become Trump’s surrogates, going on record to defend the indefensible, including possibly treasonous collusion with a hostile power.

Trump has trolled his own cabinet, putting an enemy of planet Earth in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency and a person who makes a $2 trillion counting error in charge of the federal budget. Two of Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination are now heading departments they know nothing about, while his education secretary has no experience with public education.

But maybe it is all for the better. In Bulgakov’s novel, a few people mend their ways after their foibles have been exposed by the devil. It seems likely that Trump’s tenor in Washington will end with a political storm to end all storms, the way Woland visit to Moscow ended with a giant cleansing tempest. Perhaps out of the Trump debacle the United States could rebuild itself as a more generous, peace-loving and smarter nation, and rediscover a sense of community.

Encouragingly, since Trump’s election the media has started to do its job and the Democrats have begun building up resistance on a grassroots level. Even some Republicans are developing a modicum of decency and shame.

In fact, the epigraph to The Master and Margarita is Mephistopheles’ words from Goethe’s Faust: “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”