Anna Arutunyan

Special for USA TODAY

MOSCOW — The Russian government often suppresses dissident artists, but now it finds itself on the side of protecting a controversial film opening Thursday about the country's last czar that religious hard-liners want banned.

Christians and groups sympathetic to the country's czarist rule are outraged over Mathilda, which details a pre-marital affair that future Czar Nicholas II had with ballet dancer Mathilde Kschessinskaya.

The affair involving Nicholas — who abdicated during the Russian Revolution in 1917 and was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918 — is backed up by letters and historical accounts. But that doesn't satisfy opponents who plan to continue their protests after the scheduled premiere.

“We believe that this film is the result of betrayal by a part of the Russian elite who, just as they did in 1917 with the overthrow of Czar Nicholas II, are now preparing the overthrow of President (Vladimir) Putin,” Andrei Kormukhin, the head of a fundamentalist Orthodox Christian organization, told USA TODAY.

Kormukhin, who noted that Nicholas was later made a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church, called the film an assault on Russia's government, the church and the country's heritage.

"The film, by presenting a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church, Nicholas II, as a fornicator, and the czarina, Alexandra, as a witch, aims to desacralize the Russian Orthodox Church and to desacralize state power in Russia.”

Russia’s biggest cinema chain, Formula Kino, said it will reverse an earlier decision not to screen the film, citing efforts by Russian law enforcement to ensure security.

The Union of Orthodox Banner Bearers, another group that has protested the film, said it forces believers to relive the trauma of what happened 100 years ago and wants the film director to repent.

“The church … considers him a saint, a martyr. And then some filmmaker appears and starts with his fantasies about some love affair,” Leonid Simonovich-Nikshich, head of the union, told USA TODAY.

“We, as representatives of the church, as representatives of a monarchist movement, are categorically against all this," he said, "because we feel that today ... the same kind of ritual killing is taking place as it did" when Nicholas was executed.

Natalia Poklonskaya, a conservative deputy of Putin’s ruling United Russia party, launched the campaign against the film a year ago, calling for the film's director, Golden Globe-nominated Alexei Uchitel, to be persecuted for “intruding” into the private life of the czar and insulting religious feelings.

Putin's push for national pride and increasing support for the Orthodox Church helped stoke opposition to the film. Prominent church leaders have criticized the film, and an online petition against it garnered more than 24,000 signatures.

Protests and threats have prompted some theaters to refuse to screen the film. Opponents have thrown Molotov cocktails into Uchitel’s studio in St. Petersburg and set fire to a movie theater in Yekaterinburg, a large city about 1,000 miles east of Moscow.

Cinemas have received threatening notes warning they will “burn for Mathilda.” Earlier this month, the film’s lead actor, Lars Eidinger, canceled plans to attend the premiere in Russia, fearing for his life.

Yet as the backlash against Mathilda grew more heated, the Kremlin distanced itself from it. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has condemned the violence, and last month police arrested Alexander Kalinin, the head of an extremist religious group after it threatened to burn down cinemas screening the film.

Last week, Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office said after examining 43 complaints filed by party deputy Poklonskaya that it had found no violations in the filmmaker’s actions.

The government's defense of the film surprised the director and his supporters, given its persecution of dissident artists in recent years. Theater producer Kirill Serebrennikov, known for plays and films that criticize the government’s close relations with the church, was placed under house arrest in August on fraud charges.

Other lawmakers defended Uchitel, and the Interior Ministry promised to provide security for cinemas screening the film. “I am very glad that this happened,” Uchitel told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper last week. “Now we can be certain that the screenings will go well.” He was unavailable to speak to USA TODAY.

Christian fundamentalist Kormukhin complained that “we applied for permits for four demonstrations and six pickets, and all of them were denied” by the government. “(Putin opposition leader Alexei) Navalny, who the West cares so much about, gets to hold rallies in Moscow, but Russian Orthodox Christians don’t.”

While Navalny’s rallies have occasionally been permitted, he was released from jail Sunday after serving a 20-day sentence for holding unauthorized demonstrations.

Alexei Chesnakov, a former Kremlin official who now heads the think tank Center for Current Policy, said Putin's government is using the controversy as a test ahead of next year's presidential election of how far it should go in being tolerant of free expression. Currently the government appears to be caught between liberals' complaints of excessive repression and conservatives' laments that the Kremlin is too permissive.

“The government is interested in having these discussions about conservative or liberal values happen,” Chesnakov said. "It’s currently finding itself in a very narrow corridor, and any movement toward harsher (repression) or liberalization narrows the corridor further. That’s the problem.”