AMSTERDAM — A tsar, who rose to the throne through the murder of a young heir, is asked to stay in power by an impoverished populace for the sake of their nation’s stability.

Yet haunted by the ghosts of his past, he descends into paranoid madness as a pretender to the throne marches on Moscow.

Modest Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov,” the story of a late-16th-century boyar who ascended to the top of tsardom during the crisis following Ivan the Terrible’s death, offered a wellspring of material for the exiled director Kirill Serebrennikov to craft a towering allegory of modern Russia for the ages.

Based on Alexander Pushkin’s play of the same name, the opera explores themes that continue to resonate in present-day Russia: the corruption of power, complicity amid widespread injustice, fatalism among the masses, the futility of resisting tyranny, and the nature of life and death itself.

“In Putin’s Russia, people remain speechless out of self-preservation, or swear loyalty to the regime. The state literally buys loyalty, offering the poorest villagers money to go to war and kill neighbors — sums they never imagined before. There is no resistance. Those who protested are now imprisoned or exiled,” Serebrennikov said in an interview ahead of the opera’s premiere in Amsterdam.

“But what’s wrong with people who send loved ones to war for a paycheck? Why do the widows thank the state instead of cursing it? How did we get here — where complaints are about rusty rifles or bad food, not the killing of innocents?” he said.