Provided by Toronto International Film Festival
Directed by: Alex Gibney
Featuring: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Anton Drel, Maria Logan, Alexi Navainy, Tatyana Lysova, Leoid Nevzlin, Igor Malashenko
If there was a word to describe Alex Gibney’s “Citizen K,” it would be ‘intoxicating.’
Gibney’s documentary is the expose on Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled enemy of Russia, specifically an enemy of Vladimir Putin and former oligarch to come out of the remains of the Soviet Union.
“Citizen K” is as much an intense geopolitical history lesson as it is a prescient look at how enterprise, government and media intersect one another amidst a power struggle for the hearts and minds of a people torn over the orderly past and a dynamic, but unsure future.
Khodorkovsky is presented as a very humble individual and very much aware of his surroundings. What Khodorkovsky is not is another Edward Snowden. Gibney’s documentary focuses on Khodorkovsky’s rise to prominence having started several businesses in the late 1980s, as he purchases oil fields under the name Yukos, leading to its attempted privatization. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin’s election as president of the Russian republic in 1991 fueled by a wave of high expectations that free enterprise could give rise to democracy, Khodorkovsky is a man who understands economics and has greed in his genes, leading to his position in the oligarchy.
As a way of implicating Khodorkovsky, “Citizen K” focuses on the collapse of every day citizen lives in Russia as the way in which the oligarchs swept through the State’s primary means of control, threatening livelihoods. Within the context of their efforts, Gibney ties Putin’s rise to Prime Minister, a man who has a way of relating to every kind of ideology while turning his back on his supposed friends and supporters.
With Putin’s ascendance to the presidency, power dynamics shift and Khodorkovsky becomes a target, ultimately landing him in prison for embezzlement and tax evasion. The theatrics of the courtroom are more of a punchline than they should be, but it reinforces just how much of a threat the oligarchs became to Putin as they were either murdered or jailed.
In prison, Khodorkovsky realizes his ability to help people lies not in controlling something, but in rallying the people to see what a monster Putin really is as Putin controls not only the resources that the oligarchs had, but also the media.
In much the same way we are divided over our own leaders, “Citizen K” strives to show just how much power the Russian government has over its own people. It takes the world stage, namely the Sochi Olympic Games for the West to force Putin’s hand in to giving these dissenters amnesty.
Freed, Khodorkovsky lives in London where his Open Russia, an organization dedicated to democracy and human rights in Russia; early in the documentary, he shares that he feels like a guest in London, something that Gibney circles back to when he focuses on the beginnings of Khodorkovsky’s life in exile. The Russian media’s slant against Khodorkovsky and the fact that his early attempts to rally his compatriots is less than ideal because he could not be present in their efforts against Putin are early struggles in building his message.
Whether “Citizen K” paints an accurate picture that his philanthropy is genuine, the tides that changed Khodorkovsky’s fortunes, both financially and personally, Gibney’s documentary rivals a John LeCarre or Tom Clancy novel in its intrigue and timeliness.
3.5 out of 4 stars
