I had friends in several different fields back in the day, none of them comsymp types, who knew something about the world of samizdat in the USSR. I don’t claim to know much about it, just enough to know that it is a fascinating tangle for those with the time and inclination to dive into it. There was an intellectual counterculture, mostly pre-political, that became the refuge of the honest people, and the creative people. Was M&M published abroad before it was published in Russia?
It’s always interesting when the truth tellers are forced underground — as in so many domains in the U.S. today. Appalling but interesting.
From Wikipedia’s extensive article (32 pages): Bulgakov died in 1940. His widow Elena published a censored version of the manuscript in the journal “Moskva” in 1966/1967. The missing parts were circulated as samizdat.
A manuscript with the missing parts made its way out of the USSR, and was published by the YMCA Press in Paris in 1967.
Another “complete” version published in Frankfurt in 1969.
In 1973 the Soviet journal “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura” published a complete version based on the 1940 manuscript.