Russian Orthodox arrested for attempts to block film on Tsar's affair with a ballerina

Russian police have arrested several Orthodox extremists for arson attacks and death threats over a forthcoming film about Tsar Nicholas II's affair with a ballerina.

 

"We've opened a criminal case on charges of coercion", the Interior Ministry spokeswoman, Irina Volk, told Russia's Interfax newsagency on Monday. "Attempts have been made to force managers of a commercial screening organisation to refuse to show this film under threats of violence against the audience and damage and harm to cinema owners". 

 

The official was explaining the arrest of Alexander Kalinin, leader of Christian State-Holy Rus, for seeking to prevent the screening of "Matilda", by the award-winning director Alexei Uchitel, which is based on memoirs by the Polish-Russian Matilda Krzesinska (1872-1971). 

 

The TASS news agency said Kalinin and others were suspected of arson attacks on several cinemas, as well as on offices linked to Uchitel's company, in a bid to prevent the 26 October general release of the film, which contains graphic portrayals of the Tsar's youthful affair with Krzesinska, who later married his cousin, Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich Romanov.  

 

Although Russia's Culture Ministry approved the film in July, opponents say it besmirches the memory of Nicholas II, who was murdered with his wife and children at Yekaterinburg in July 1918 after abdicating. The Tsar and his family were reinterred in St Petersburg's Sts Peter and Paul cathedral in 1998 following their exhumation, and declared saints, or passion-bearers, by the Moscow Patriarchate in 2000. 

 

Russia's largest cinema chain, Cinema Park and Formula Kino, said in early September it was pulling out of screening the film in 28 cities to "protect cinema-goers from risk", after Christian State-Holy Rus warned in an open letter of civil war, and said its members were ready to sacrifice their lives "for the true Orthodox Christian faith". A State Duma MP linked to President Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, Natalya Poklonskaya, has also demanded its banning as an offence to Orthodox Christians. 

 

Besides marking the centenary in the 1917 revolution in early November, Russian Orthodox leaders are to commemorate the December 1917 church council which restored the Moscow Patriarchate and the beginning of the church's Soviet-era persecution.