Knowing the opera's synopsis, we know it was written about a tsar who had absolute power. It's a story about absolute power and how illusory it is. To gain power, the Tsar needs to kill. And he has to kill to keep power. The price the Tsar pays for that is his own death.
... This is the fate of anyone who tries to seize power this way. So it's a story about how power is illusory and what price is paid by those who seize it.
... In Russia we see a regime because there is no democracy. There are artists who have built their careers on the fact that they have supported the regime, worked for the regime, promoted the regime, defended the regime, and have been given so many medals for it that they can't fit on their chests, so much money that they can't spend it. They can use it to buy an island and a palace in Venice.
... It's similar to the Mafia - everyone works for the godfather and the godfather hands out rewards.
... How can we not understand Ukrainians fighting for their survival when someone tells them that they have no right to exist, or even that they do not exist? No one has the right to tell a country, a nation, that it has no right to exist. By the way, the Russians are very angry that the Ukrainians recognise a foreign language, Russian, on their territory and so it is right.
Lidovky.cz: What about Ukrainian in Russia?
Russians do not recognize Georgian, Armenian, Lithuanian and many other national languages on their territory. They all have to speak Russian. Sorry, this empire is finished, but they don't know it yet. In Yeltsin's cabinet, the deputy prime minister was Boris Nemtsov, a representative of the young generation, very intelligent. After Yeltsin resigned and Putin became president, Nemtsov was no longer in the government, he became an opposition politician and had many objections to Putin - and was killed. Like many others. Earlier in an interview he had described his meeting with Margaret Thatcher, whom he had come to see when she was celebrating her 80th birthday. It was then that the former British Prime Minister described to him the biggest difference between Britain and Russia: We have understood and accepted that we are no longer an empire, Russia has not.
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