Kadyrov's letter, which was published in Komsomolskaya Pravda, describes the film as "a premeditated insult to the feelings of [religious] believers that "insults the sacred ... [and] the history of the peoples of Russia."

"In order to live with honor, we must remember our history and take pride in and revere those who fought for us," Kadyrov wrote. "We, the heirs of conquerors, must not only honor the memory of the defenders of the Motherland, but also raise the young generation in the spirit of respect for their history. I ask you to exclude the Chechen Republic from the distribution area of the film Matilda."

The deputy head of the nearby Daghestan region, Anatoly Karibov, filed a nearly identical appeal with the Culture Ministry on August 9.

The Russian Culture Ministry has cleared for release a film highlighting the romantic youth of Tsar Nicholas II, despite requests by Orthodox activists and other conservatives to ban the film.

The ministry on August 10 said it had issued a screening certificate for the film, titled Matilda, which depicts Nicholas II's relationship with half-Polish teen dancer Matilda Kshesinskaya.

In making the announcement, Vyacheslav Telnov, chief of the ministry's film department, said it found Matilda in full compliance with legal norms.

Only the trailer from the film Matilda, by director Aleksei Uchitel, is available, but that has been enough for the nongovernmental Tsar's Cross organization to denounce it as pornographic and unpatriotic.

"Against a general background of degradation, this film is just another attempt to insult something that is holy for the Russian people," the organization's leader, Nikolai Mishustin, wrote on social media on November 3.
[...]

The attacks on the film Matilda come against a background of growing concern about the influence of social and religious conservatives on the country's cultural life.

Late last month, theater director Konstantin Raikin gave a speech in which he lamented "attacks on art," mentioning the closure of an exhibition of photographs by American Jock Sturges, the cancelation of a production of Jesus Christ Superstar in Omsk, the 2015 closing of a production of the German opera Tannhauser in Novosibirsk, and others.

Noting that one protester at the controversial Sturges exhibition urinated on one of the photographs, Raikin questioned whether the protesters can really be considered defenders of morality.

Raikin said the protests against such cultural events were illegal and "paid for," implying that the government or the church could be inciting them.

He accused the government of trying to set itself up as the sole arbiter of morality and called on the cultural community to unite to prevent a return to "Stalinist times" in culture.

Writing in Kommersant on October 27, filmmaker Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose film Leviathan was shortlisted for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2014, said "only a liar or an ignoramus" could deny the existence of censorship in Russia.

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