Putin’s Orthodox: Skulls and Penthouses

If you, dear viewer, live

well and righteously, then after death

your skull will darken and begin to give off a fragrance, and you

have probably thought by now, of course: come on, Navalny,

have you completely lost it? Nothing of the sort. I'm just

telling you the main idea of a film that

is being shown in Switzerland and

France with your money. Digging through government procurement records, we

found an astonishing contract for services

for holding an event. I owe my millions

to their labor. The cost was

almost 10 million rubles (about $150,000 at the time).

The client: the Ministry of Culture, of course.

Naturally, we got interested. We read the stated purpose

of the event: to create conditions for

the revival of spirituality and to highlight the theme

of philanthropy. Great. And then the venue:

the Swiss Confederation. So

they took our money in order to

revive our spirituality, but they’re going to spend it

in Switzerland.

It turned out that in 2016 a certain

little-known film company, Rus Telefilm,

made a film titled

**Innokenty Sibiryakov: Help Me, I Am Terribly Rich**.

In Moscow, at the congress

and exhibition center Sokolniki,

as part of the 12th International Orthodox

festival Artos, there was a screening of the film

**Help Me, I Am Terribly Rich**. It’s a film

about a Russian philanthropist who lived in the late 19th

and early 20th centuries.

Sibiryakov is a popular figure among the entire

Putin-aligned Orthodox circle, and

Putin himself

likes to quote him in a moralizing way. One of his

best-known sayings is: Sibiryakov

once said, 'My millions

are the result of other people’s labor, and I feel

I am in the wrong for having appropriated their work.'

An outstanding man, truly,

and he really did a lot. Fine then—so what about

the film itself? You can watch it on

YouTube, but I’m not afraid of spoilers, and

I’m going to tell you now about the best

moments.

Since you financed screenings of

this masterpiece in different countries around the world,

the film looks like a low-budget

mix of documentary and fictional

cinema.

The screenwriter and director at the same time is

Alexander Karpov.

You may know him—or, more likely, not know him—

from his screen roles as a robber in

the TV series *Glukhar* (a Russian police drama),

or as an investigator in the series *Beshenaya*.

Most of the film consists of

the main character

sitting like this and periodically breaking into

passionate monologues about Orthodoxy and

how hard it is for him to be rich. 'You know,

my fortune always seemed to me to be my

scourge. All meetings, all his dealings at that

time were poisoned by money.

The constant arguments among students about

whether science or religion should take precedence wearied

him. Holy Scripture was then being subjected

to attacks and criticism. These new Western

currents in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century

had a suffocating effect on Innokenty, a deeply

Orthodox man.' The plot is practically nonexistent.

We are shown

a trial of the philanthropist Sibiryakov, and then he

goes to Mount Athos, and a few years later

he leaves together with Father David for...

The climax of the picture is the death of the main

character,

whose skull the monks place in a special

spot. And after that, listen for yourselves: 'The color

of the relics speaks to the action of grace. The

darker the bone, the closer the monk was to God,

tradition says. Of the one and a half thousand skulls

collected in the ossuary of St. Andrew’s Skete (a monastic settlement on Mount Athos),

only three stand out in particular: they have a

honey color and give off a fragrance.

One of these three skulls belongs to the schema-monk

Innokenty. By the way, the fragrance

was not the end of it. In one interview,

the film’s producer claimed that in

real life the skull also exudes myrrh.

'The skull of Innokenty Sibiryakov, which has

a honey color, is kept in a separate

reliquary case.

It is specially venerated, yes, because there is

an Athonite custom: after a monk’s

death, his relics are exhumed.

If they exude myrrh, if they give off a fragrance,

if they have a honey color, he

is considered, well, to be somewhat more

close to the Lord God. And in general,

there are more miracles there than in *Game of Thrones*.

[music]

For example, the actor who played Sibiryakov

entered into a spiritual connection with his

character, and the latter sent him grace.

'We were worried about how we would get there.

I sat down on a little stone and said, Innokenty

Mikhailych, please help us. Thirty

seconds later, down comes [help] from the mountain. What is that?

So I think we were working under the protection

precisely thanks to Innokenty Mikhailych, and

that is, it had already been

approved somewhere up above.' I spent a long time trying

to remember what this reminded me of, and

then I remembered: 'And Vladimir Vladimirovich personally got

behind the wheel, and right at the exit, on the right, there stood

an Athonite mouflon (wild sheep), and as soon as he appeared

and the president started moving, right in front of

him this mouflon, for some reason, suddenly

jumped onto the road and ran strictly

down the middle in front of the president. I’m telling you,

there had never been anything like that on Athos before:

for a mouflon to run

in front of any

vehicle and, conditionally speaking, not let it

drive away. That had never happened before.'

I hope this cameo is from the same

to look at Putin's very own little donkey, me

who am I, you see, the president, but actually

generally speaking, everyone has the right to make whatever

films they want

whether about turtles or whatever else

and it would be none of our business if, in the credits,

there had not appeared, quite interestingly,

that the rights to this film belong to none other than

K.V. Goloshchapov.

Konstantin Veniaminovich Goloshchapov.

He is a key figure in Putin's Russia

and one who has undeservedly received too little attention. He is

one of Putin's oldest friends from

St. Petersburg, from the same circle as all those

Rotenbergs, Timchenkos, and the rest

who now own the country. In that very judo section

where Putin and the Rotenbergs met,

there was also the masseur, Mr. Goloshchapov. He gave

Putin massages, and now he too has become

a billionaire.

Journalists call him exactly that: Putin's

masseur. The origin of his wealth is highly

murky. He had a stake in the Rossiya bank,

there were some companies,

naturally existing thanks to gas

contracts.

Back in 2013, we filmed him. Yes, the guy

lives near Lenin's place, next door to the former head of

Russian Railways and member of the Ozero dacha cooperative

Vladimir Yakunin. The media also wrote about his other

assets, for example a villa in Croatia worth

40 million euros. And in Croatia, incidentally,

he also obtained citizenship. There is also

a hotel in Italy, enormous apartments in

Russia,

and lots of other things like that. But of course

Kostya Goloshchapov doesn't want to be just Putin's

masseur who got rich on gas contracts, so

he became an Orthodox Christian, one of the

founders of the Russian Athos Society

where, besides him, sit similarly

God-fearing people living righteous lives:

Prosecutor General Chaika, a thief,

whose family robs the entire country, and whose

closest subordinates share business interests

with a gang of murderers;

the Tsapok gang; former St. Petersburg governor

Poltavchenko, who earned the nickname

"the boorish governor";

[applause]

the current acting

governor of St. Petersburg, Beglov, a thief and a liar,

and a fraud who even stole

his own PhD dissertation;

Dmitry Medvedev, a corrupt thief on whom

there is simply nowhere left to stamp another brand;

and so on. Goloshchapov builds churches, he

brings relics to Russia, he sends

officials to Mount Athos, and of course he is friends

with Patriarch Kirill. So, as you can see,

he has a great deal of stolen money, and he

presents himself as such a philanthropist. More than that,

various priests endorsing

this film rather transparently hint that

our masseur Goloshchapov

is in fact a modern-day

Sibiryakov. In other words, the guy made a film about himself

and the Ministry of Culture, where

another great Orthodox believer sits,

Minister Medinsky, is promoting it. Now

let's think: will the skulls of Minister Medinsky and

masseur Goloshchapov one day give off fragrance and stream myrrh

(a reference to miracle-working relics)? Unlikely. Well,

if you gentlemen are so into Orthodoxy,

then indulge in it with your own money. Make your film,

put it on YouTube—there is already a free film there

about this Orthodox philanthropist. All the believers

in Russia can watch it. But no, here we go again:

state procurement and administrative

pressure.

Unfortunate St. Petersburg students are being herded

into screenings of this movie. A state

museum complex buys

the organization of screenings of this film,

which is already on YouTube, plus a photo exhibition about it,

for 200,000 rubles (about $2,200). As if a provincial museum

had absolutely nothing better to spend 200,000 rubles on.

Minister Medinsky allocates from

the state budget 5.5 million rubles

for screenings of this film across Russia,

another 5.5 million rubles

for screenings of this film in Paris. The reaction

of the French was entirely predictable:

they came up and said, "They usually bring us

films with enormous

budgets, trailers, comedies and tragedies, but

so rarely do they bring us a film about

a human судьба (human destiny)." And nearly 10 million rubles

for screenings in Switzerland.

And on top of that, they write a foreword:

"It is heartening that more and more filmmakers

are striving to create

meaningful films that call for moral

and spiritual development,

while turning to stories from the past."

Why am I so outraged by this

small episode? I mean, it seems like

they spent 15 million rubles (about $165,000)—peanuts on the scale of

the

overall corruption in Russia. Because

these hypocrites lecture us about Orthodoxy,

morality, spiritual development. Both are

multimillionaires, yet they want everything paid for

with our money. You know what, our Orthodox

Minister Medinsky,

please explain to me and to the viewers

of this video this document: last year, you

were not helping the poor,

or acting as an Orthodox philanthropist.

You bought a 300-square-meter penthouse (about 3,230 sq ft) in one of

Moscow's most elite residential complexes and

registered it in your wife's name. One like that costs no

less than 200 million rubles (about $2.2 million), and that's without

finishing or furniture.

It is two levels, on the 12th and 13th floors, and on top

there is also a huge terrace with a stunning

panoramic view of Moscow. It also has

a gym and a library.

on the first level, there are bedrooms and a seventy-

square-meter living room with ceilings the height of

two stories—8 meters (about 26 feet). Even considering that

the Medinsky family

declares some absolutely

inexplicable gigantic annual income, they

would have had to save every last

kopeck of their income since 2013 just to

be able to buy just one apartment

without renovations, without furniture, maybe.

So, our dear Medinsky, is that why

films made with support from your

Cinema Fund

are so monstrous—because you

steal during the production of this trash and

buy yourselves

penthouses? I urge you: go and don't

believe the reviews,

don't believe what the jaded

liberal critics, bloated with their own self-importance,

and other journalists write—go

see for yourselves with an open heart. I am sure that in

the whole world, even in the richest country,

there is not a single other culture minister

with real estate like this.

And if the two of you—Goloshchapov and Medinsky—can

afford such luxury, houses and

apartments worth hundreds of millions,

then finance the promotion

of your own films about spirituality and turtles yourselves.

Why should you multimillionaires

necessarily take even a single kopeck out of the pocket

of a person who has spent his whole life living in

a one-room apartment with a family of five? By the way,

John of Siberia lived in

a tiny rented apartment in

St. Petersburg,

and then in a cell on Mount Athos (the Orthodox monastic center in Greece). If you made a film about him as a moral lesson,

well then,

please follow his example yourselves.

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell

what you have and give to the poor, and you will have

treasure in heaven; and come, follow

Me.” The tender for organizing the screening

of films in Switzerland—the very one

with which we began this video—

will end on May 28, next week. I

demand that it be canceled. I demand that

the screening of the film in Switzerland,

if someone wants it so badly, be paid for personally

out of their own funds by Minister Medinsky and

the masseur Goloshchapov. I demand that you

leave us alone with your moralizing and

your films. You are neither patrons nor benefactors,

but thieves and squanderers, spending other people's money

on your own hobbies.

You are surrounding yourselves with foreign and Russian

elite real estate, personal museums,

and consuming such an amount

of blatant luxury that, honestly,

it is shameful to look at you. Please

think about that the next time

you pray on Mount Athos. Subscribe

to our channel.

They tell the truth here.