Mikhail Khodorkovsky comments on the scandal surrounding Alexey Uchitel’s controversial new film “Matilda” which dramatises the affair between Tsar Nicholas II and the ballerina Matilda Kseshenskaya.  

Alexander Kalinin, the leader of the marginal Russian Orthodox sect “Christian State of Holy Russia” has been arrested for taking up arms against Alexey Uchitel’s new film “Matilda”.  Who is he? A fanatic? A paid agent? Or someone else? Who coordinated this whole “project”?

Someone provided the money for the film to begin with, then provoked a scandal out of the situation, and is now heroically defending society from the “bad guys”.  Meanwhile, however, people have mistakenly turned their ire on Duma deputy and well-known Orthodox-Monarchist Natalia Poklonskaya.

There are 450 deputies who sit in the Duma, many of whom hold the most peculiar views, but at least Poklonskaya came out and said what she thought publicly.  This unfortunate young woman has been made into a scapegoat — I hope only in the ideological sense.

She has the right to her opinion, regardless of how outlandish it might seem to most people.  A true advocate of human rights will express their disagreement with someone’s opinion, but will not seek to harass and shut down the person that expressed it.

We have to look deeper and see who is behind the fairytale story of the young woman and the bearded maniac.  We must identify the much shadier faces who lurk in the shadows behind the scenes and seek to provoke a civil conflict in order to gain the credit for pacifying it.

See what all of this looks like (from the speeches of Poklonskaya’s supporters, to Navalny’s regional campaign rallies) from the point of view of one very suspicious person in the Kremlin who is setting himself up to be the saviour of hope and all things good.

Think who, hiding in the shadows, is trying to manipulate the increasingly dependent figure of the president, and under whose dominion lies the entirety of the state machine?  The Kremlin is not just one person, it is a group of around 100 people who surround Vladimir Putin.  This is not the state, neither is it society; it is a criminal organisation.

Our task is to call them by their real names and begin to pursue them with legal methods.  This way the people around them can understand that their superiors are criminals and will know not to have anything to do with them unless they are put under extreme pressure.

That’s our task, and that’s what we’re going to do.