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Alex Gibney, an award-winning document maker at the Oscars, traces the rise and fall of the dissident oligarch in exile Mikhail Khodorkovsky in this burning portrait of Putin's Russia.
With a zealous journalistic diligence, the prolific filmmaker Alex Gibney details the curious case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Citizen K, providing a lucidly accessible account of the difficult transition of post-Soviet Russia from communism to a market economy that has become a Wild West of gangster capitalism. The short jump of Vladimir Putin's false democracy, with its fragile "electoral theater" and its 18-year-old grip on the Kremlin, is a scary edifying account. And while only the Mueller Inquiry and Russian electoral manipulation is referred to, anyone who is aware of Donald Trump's deference to Putin will feel uncomfortable watching this insidious saga.
Khodorkovsky is a charismatic subject with a still malicious glint in his eyes even after spending ten years in a Siberian prison, making it a wonderfully ambiguous antihero for documentary treatment. Once considered to be the richest man in Russia, it was the product of the chaos that reigned as a result of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost, when Boris Yeltsin's presidency would create an opportunity for him to simple seventh miserly businessman can grab 50% of business. the national economy. To do this, they exploited the public naivety against the value of the bonds issued by the states, which the oligarchs were able to buy cheaply and use as money in privatization projects.
By the time of Yeltsin's reelection campaign in 1996, the country was in an economic stalemate, the health of the outgoing president was failing and his government on the brink of collapse. But the oligarchs were so afraid of a return to communism driven by unhappy voters that they got a gain for the malleable Yeltsin using television, a media that one of them, Igor Malashenko, had recently escaped government control. The president concluded a deal with Faust by accepting loans from oligarchs that the state could never repay, thus allowing them to appropriate the most valuable assets of Russia.
Meanwhile, free enterprise activities had proved a game for which Khodorkovsky was talented. He had created Russia's first commercial bank and, under his most important contract, had taken control of a group of Siberian oilfields under the name Yukos. He rationalized inefficient local oil companies into a conglomerate to compete in the global market, even though workers rarely saw the benefits.
A cloud appeared on his empire when the mayor of a Siberian oil city, Vladimir Petukhov, who had stood up to Yukos for tax evasion, was shot on the occasion of Khodorkovsky's 35th birthday. While Chechen gangsters were initially blamed, the Russian government later referred to Khodorkovsky and his right-hand man Leonid Nevzlin as the architects of contract murder – a binding arrest warrant for Khodorkovsky to remain in exile in London. His vague assertion in the talks of today that he was too busy at the time to pay much attention to the killing of Petukhov does not inspire much confidence. . But then, neither an accusation brought by Putin and his associates.
At the time of the acquisition of Yukos, Putin had gone from being a minor official of the KGB to the administration of the city of St. Petersburg, settling in the Kremlin, where he quickly turned around. Positioned by the oligarchs to succeed Yeltsin, he projected the kind of tough guy the desperate country needed.
According to Khodorkovsky's assessment, Putin had the KGB's par excellence talent for convincing his relatives (liberals, moderates, conservatives) that he was an ally of the same opinion. But Putin began to clash with Khodorkovsky when he began publicly expressing divergent political views and hinting at state corruption. The balance changed and the new head of government, rash, began to regain power to the oligarchs to position his people in the sphere of influence, before taking it to Khodorkovsky. Arrested on charges of fraud, Khodorkovsky was subjected to a series of trial lawsuits and shipped to a Siberian prison for a decade, his assets were seized and resold through ghost corporations to him. State. New trumped-up charges were withheld from him once he was released, resulting in an even more far-fetched trial.
While there are many names, facts, and intriguing assertions to be equated here, Gibney and publisher Michael Palmer weave the dense narrative into a thrilling, gripping thriller with intriguing details, enhanced by the captivating score of Robert Logan and Ivor Guest.
The film suggests that, although the prison has taught compassion and humanity to Khodorkovsky, and that public perception has slowly evolved to consider him as a man of ideal, the power has made Putin more in addition authoritarian. The last sections are slightly less satisfying since the story has no end. It was crucial for Putin that Khodorkovsky leave the country once his final liberation. While the arrest warrant prevents him from returning, he continues to channel his offshore wealth to Open Russia, a human rights organization that campaigns for free and fair elections. The success has been marginal so far, but with the smile of a sneaky fox, Khodorkovsky reveals that he's playing a long game and that Putin's parody of democracy will collapse someday : "Maybe five years, maybe ten."
Production Companies: Passion Pictures, Jigsaw Productions, Storyteller Productions
Director-writer: Alex Gibney
Producers: John Battsek, Alex Gibney, P. J. Sandwijk, George Chignell, Erin Edeiken
Executive Producers: J.P. Bernbach, Michael Lesslie, Andrew Ruhemann, Stacey Offman, Richard Perello
Directors of Photography: Mark Garrett, Denis Sinyakov
Music: Robert Logan, guest of Ivor
Publisher: Michael Palmer
Sales: Kew Media
Venue: Venice Film Festival (out of competition)
126 minutes
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