In November 1924, M. Bulgakov and L. Belozerskaya moved to a new flat. The writer lived on the second floor at 9 Obukhov Lane (today – Chisty Lane) until about June 1926. On 7th May 1926, OGPU agents searched the flat, confiscating the manuscript of Heart of a Dog and Bulgakov’s diaries. The outhouse in which Bulgakov lived no longer stands.

Bulgakov managed to achieve a lot here – he began to sketch out the play The White Guard (the future Days of the Turbins), wrote Zoyka’s Apartment for the Vakhtangov Theatre, and the short novel Heart of a Dog, and he began to publish, A Young Doctor’s Notebook. In 1925, his connections with the Prechistentsy circle took root, with his friends Nikolay Lyamin, the witty conversationalist Sergey Zayaitsky and others. The flat was searched by OGPU Order No. 2287 on Case No. 45. L. Belozorskaya remembered how he immediately said, ‘Well, Lyubasha, if your armchairs shoot, it’s not my fault. (I bought the armchairs at an unclaimed furniture store for 3 rubles 50kop. apiece). And we both fell about laughing. Perhaps nervously.’ For a few years in a row, Bulgakov wrote letters to higher authorities (to the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in June 1926, and to others) and tried to have his two copies of Heart of a Dog and his diaries returned. He asked Gorky for help and corresponded with E. Peshkova. According to E. Bulgakova, his manuscripts were only returned to him in 1929. Different versions of events exist as regards his diaries – according to one version, Bulgakov himself destroyed the diaries as soon as the OGPU returned them (only a few now-published pages were saved), according to another version, the diaries were not returned to the writer and only a few pages miraculously survived the search. From that time on, Bulgakov stopped keeping diaries.