The Los Angeles Times has published a very interesting – and at times incendiary – interview with the 93-year-old theater director Yuri Lyubimov, famous for his adaptation of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and other visionary Russian classics.

You used to have endless problems with Soviet bureaucrats before. Is it easier with Russian bureaucracy?

They sometimes congratulate me. Sometimes hang awards on me. Recently they called me from the president’s office and said they would invite me [to the Kremlin]. Here comes to mind a similar episode with Alexander Isayevich [Solzhenitsyn] whom Reagan invited to dinner when he already lived in exile. This is what he said in response, “With pleasure, but only when we can talk one on one; as for dinner I prefer to have it at home.”

When I meet with them they usually exclaim, “Oh, you were the gulp of freedom!” And then they say, “Sit down please,” which sounds quite more sinister to me. [In Russian “to sit” has a connotation “to be in prison.”]