Citizen K: Alex Gibney doc about the oligarch who took on Putin recycles too much before payoff
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Citizen K, prolific Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney’s latest film on the abuses of power, offers a solid, if not revelatory portrait of contemporary Russia through the story of exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky
The 56-year-old Khodorkovsky is an erstwhile political prisoner and now an exiled activist living in London. Running more than two hours, dense with the complexities of post-Soviet Russian power shifts, Citizen K is a study in corruption and oppression. It’s a tale leavened by heated thriller-movie editing and a Cold War worthy villain, the Russian president, President Vladimir Putin.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky: Russian billionaire one day, political prison and target the next.
Khodorkovsky has already been the already the subject of two previous documentaries, so he’s not exactly a discovery. The prolific Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room) acknowledges, in voice-over narration, that he came to the story because of curiosity about Vladimir Putin’s connections to the White House and Donald Trump. In reviewing the perfidy of Putin research, you’ll soon encounter Khodorkovsky, aka “The Man to Take on Putin” as a 2015 New Yorker headline put it.
Russia’s most high-profile critic in exile is a complicated figure: A one-time avaricious oligarch who helped turn Russia into a kleptocracy, jailed after a vengeful show trial, and now self-styled hero of the people.
“He wants to be Jesus Christ, but he has a past,” says Derk Sauer, the Dutch journalist who founded the English-language Moscow Times.
Both Putin and Khodorkovsky were allied, in different ways, with President Boris Yeltsin. Putin was an administrator, who was handpicked as Yeltsin’s successor. Khodorkovsky was one of the handful of oligarchs who had Yeltsin in their pocket, due to debts the government owed them. He gained his wealth in the late ‘80s and ‘90s - the period of what Gibney in voice-over calls “gangster capitalism” during the chaotic era of Soviet privatization.
His great coup was acquiring several Siberian oil fields at a fraction of their value and amalgamating them into a major oil company under the name Yukos. This made him the wealthiest man in Russia, worth an estimated at $16-billion.
Along the way, he made enemies from various sides. His company laid off and cut salaries to thousands of people in the process of streamlining the companies. A mayor who challenged Yukos for tax avoidance was shot dead in 1998 (a crime for which Khodorkovsky was charged seventeen years later).
But his downfall came the early 2000s, Khodorkovsky turned his attention away from making money toward philanthropy and democratic reform. The crisis came in a 2003 television program in which, at a nationally televised anti-corruption conference, he publicly challenged a visibly furious Vladimir Putin on government malfeasance. Khodorkovsky was subsequently arrested and after an absurd show trial sentenced to a decade in jail for tax fraud.
When released a decade later, after international pressure against Russia on human rights grounds, Khodorkovsky moved to London where he now runs the Open Russia organization, promoting fair elections and free media in his home country. (Despite being stripped of his billions, he’s still worth an estimated $500-million).
Gibney weaves archival material with contemporary interviews from various journalists – principally former BBC reporter, Martin Sixsmith (author of Putin’s Oil) and Dutch journalist Sauer. The material is well-presented, though sometimes feels second-hand or over-familiar (I’ve had enough of Vlad performing his off-key version Blueberry Hill at a 2010 charity event.).
It’s not really until the final subdued third of the film, during Khodorovsky’s London exile, that we get a sense of fresh material, and the current situation.
From his London home, Khodorkovsky uses what sway he still possesses to challenge Putin’s increasingly autocratic regime. But it’s questionable how effective his Open Russia project is. Though he says he sponsors political candidates across the country from afar, the organization’s website is blocked in Russia.
The film also notes the number of Putin enemies who have been assassinated or who died under suspicious circumstances in the United Kingdom. When see the protagonist strolling along with a knapsack through the London streets, or entering a tube station, you are aware of his vulnerability, even with Gibney’s camera crew following him.
In his manner, Khodorkovsky, whose background was in chemical engineering, comes across with the self-assured gamesmanship of a Silicon Valley tech savant. If he can predict politics with the skill he once predicted the markets, he’s worth listening to. His decade in prison, he says, taught him to think long-term: He predicts Putin’s regime ending soon but “for me, ‘soon’ means five or 10 years.”
Is he now someone who can be trusted?
“I am far from an ideal person,” he says, “but I am a person with ideals.”
Citizen K. Directed and written by Alex Gibney. With Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Putin, Derk Sauer and Martin Sixsmith. Citizen K can be seen at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema.