Citizen K (2019)
dir. Alex Gibney
Rated: N/A
image: ©2019 Greenwich Entertainment
The documentary Citizen K filters the last thirty years of revolutionary upheaval and the march toward dictatorial rule in Russia through one man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In the form of Khodorkovsky – the Citizen K of the title – director Alex Gibney reveals a complicated figure and gives us the unlikeliest of heroes. The thread of personal metamorphosis that Gibney tracks in Citizen K is what makes it such a dynamic and thought-provoking film.
If there is a flaw, it’s that Gibney, in his effort to give us the full scope of what triggered that metamorphosis, tries to pack in too much information into the movie’s two hours and eight minutes. He is forced to elide major chunks of recent Russian history because there is just so much to cover. Financed by Amazon, Citizen K would have been right at home as a longer-form docuseries on the on-line retailing behemoth’s streaming service.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky came of age in the waning days of the Soviet Union, and he used his nascent entrepreneurial skills to form a few businesses under the loosening restrictions of glasnost and perestroika. With the financial and societal chaos wrought by the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Khodorkovsky used his shrewd business sense to parlay his small economic empire into one of the biggest fortunes in all of Russia. He got a lot of help from vast systemic governmental and private sector corruption.
It’s fascinating, and a little frustrating, that the story Gibney is telling is so huge that the initial scheme that made Khodorkovsky’s fortune – a byzantine attempt by the Russian government and pro-capitalist advisors from outside the country to encourage private ownership of formerly state-owned companies – is covered in five or ten minutes of screen time. This sequence alone could have easily stood as its own film.
The same is true for the series of events that led to Khodorkovsky and six other men slicing up the whole of the Russian economy between them. Collectively they became known as The Oligarchs. They used back-room deals with government officials plus collusion and criminal activity to stifle competition by each taking a specific sector of the Russian economy. One interviewee describes it as “mobster capitalism.” Their wealth and influence in the new, capitalist Russia was rivaled by none.
Until Vladimir Putin came to power.
I don’t want to spend too much time navel-gazing about the parallels one can make between a few very rich and very powerful businessmen controlling the Russian economy and the same situation here in the United States. Senator Bernie Sanders makes the case way better than I ever could. But, I viewed Citizen K through my own specific lens, as we all do, and that lens is an American one. I couldn’t help but make connections between what happened there and what is happening here.
And Alex Gibney made this film through his own specific lens, which is also an American one. What makes Gibney such an excellent documentarian – his work includes the Oscar-winning film Taxi to the Dark Side; Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God; and the engrossing 2019 film The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley – is that he makes connections without ever having to explicitly state them.
To the attentive American viewer, certain passages of Citizen K stand out. Specifically, it’s the ones about the oligarchs who controlled Russian media using the power of television to make Vladimir Putin a political force in Russia. I don’t mean in the sense of a Manchurian Candidate conspiracy. Gibney uses the situation in Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s to point out that when business interests become so powerful that they bend the government to their will, it blurs the line between the regulators and the regulated. The result is kleptocracy, which is starting to feel very familiar to American citizens.
At its heart, Citizen K is about Mikhail Khodorkovsky waking up to Putin’s autocratic take over of the Russian government. When Khodorkovsky began to speak out about the governmental corruption in his country – it’s debatable whether his road-to-Damascus conversion on the subject was genuine concern for the Russian people or his own self-interest – Putin wasted no time putting the billionaire on defense. Russian authorities arrested Khodorkovsky on tax evasion and fraud charges, ultimately sentencing him to nine years in prison; international watch-dog groups classified him as a political prisoner.
Putin took advantage of the situation to freeze Khodorkovsky’s oil company’s assets and essentially buy it through a shell organization in a corrupt government auction. Putin pardoned Khodorkovsky in 2013 – after the latter had served eight years of his sentence – in an effort to raise Russia’s standing in the international community ahead of the Sochi Olympic games in 2014.
Khodorkovsky soon fled to London with his remaining fortune (down to $250 million or so from several billion, poor guy) when Putin’s government started connecting him to the murder of a Russian mayor years earlier – like I wrote above, this documentary covers A LOT of ground.
The real turn for Khodorkovsky comes late in the film. Citizen K details the exiled oligarch’s attempts to challenge Putin’s power through his involvement with the Open Russia foundation, which calls for free and fair elections in Russia along with other civil reforms.
Khodorkovsky is a flawed hero, to be certain – the best quote in the film is the man describing himself thusly, “I am not an ideal person, but I am a person with ideals.” Gibney takes care to examine all the facets of his subject’s life. The unscrupulous methods – mobster capitalism – that he used to obtain his wealth made me loath him for a good portion of the picture. At one point, it’s even suggested that he might have actually had something to do with the murder of that Russian mayor, which might mean more if the man orchestrating his prosecution for the crime, Vladimir Putin, wasn’t also implicated in it.
I eventually came to a begrudging respect for Khodorkovsky. No matter his past transgressions or his current motivations – in addition to, what I think, are his sincere wishes for a truly democratic Russia, there’s a sense of gamesmanship between himself and Putin; it’s a battle to determine who is tougher – Khodorkovsky is fighting for a better world.
Whether or not he is successful is a question Citizen K can’t hope to answer. One interviewee describes the sense of the long game that spending a decade in prison gave Khodorkovsky. It might take him decades to achieve his goal, but the movie makes clear that he will never give up.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- Citizen K is a deep dive into three decades of Russian history. There a little too much information to fit into a two-hour movie, but it’s fascinating, nonetheless. The complicated portrait Gibney paints of Mikhail Khodorkovsky is just as fascinating.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The documentary shows us a TV commercial for the voucher program I mentioned in the review. It. is. bonkers.
- Khodorkovsky went on more than one hunger strike while in prison, and they were very effective. He got what he was asking for in each case.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Watched this at home, through the magic of the interwebz.