Is the Master like Jesus? Is Margarita his "Matthew"? Is Woland like Pilate, or rather, an inversion of Pilate? You don't have to see a 100% correspondence, but whenever there is a dual novel, there is a tendency to compare characters in each. After all, the two stories are together for a reason.

Pilate certainly talks in language similar to Stalin's at times, though he seems to be less of an absolute evil than Stalin. On the other hand, for Bulgakov, Stalin was definitely a figure who "wished evil but ended up doing good", at least from Bulgakov's perspective. His enemies frequently ended up repressed, arrested, interred in Gulags or shot. And yet no one touched him. When he was at risk of having nothing, Stalin called him on the phone and appointed him as director of the Moscow Academic Artistic Theatre and gave him a job that allowed him to survive.

So perhaps Stalin is present after all, in the figure of Woland?