Toronto International Film Festival
The cerebral documentary’s title character seems to be a mixture of profit motive and Old Testament prophet.
“After its involvement in the 2016 election, I wanted to do a story about Russia,” Oscar and two-time Emmy-winner Alex Gibney told an audience at the American Film Institute’s annual festival in Hollywood on November 16. Gibney’s interest became the film Citizen K.
The title refers to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an extraordinary oil oligarch who burst upon the post-Soviet scene in the mid-1990s. He became what Vanity Fair and the New York Times respectively called Russia’s “richest man,” and “most famous prisoner.”
Like Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane, Gibney’s Citizen K is a biopic about the rise and fall of a tycoon. Unlike Welles’ central character, Charles Foster Kane, Khodorkovsky did not inherit his wealth. The son of humble Muscovite engineers, Khodorkovsky joined Komsomol (the Communists’ ideological counterpart to the Boy Scouts). Nurturing a passion for explosives, he majored in chemical engineering at a Moscow university, which served Khodorkovsky well when he entered the energy industry.
Russia’s tumultuous transformation into a market economy, after USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika,” set the stage for Khodorkovsky’s ascension. Gibney chronicles how the transition from the Soviet Union’s socialistic “command economy” to Russia’s freewheeling capitalism gave budding opportunistic entrepreneurs the chance to make a killing. Khodorkovsky and other oligarchs-in-the-making accumulated their billions, buying up vouchers for privatized state enterprises from ordinary citizens bamboozled into believing they were just worthless paper.
When Russia faced economic collapse in the mid-1990s, President Boris Yeltsin offered a handful of oligarchs enormous publically owned assets, which were forfeited when the state defaulted on loans, in exchange for a bailout. Khodorkovsky and a small coterie of “gangster capitalists” manipulated this opportunity to seize private control of much of the Russian Federation’s economy, amassing vast personal fortunes in the process.
Khodorkovsky and other oligarchs-in-the-making accumulated their billions, buying up vouchers for privatized state enterprises from ordinary citizens bamboozled into believing they were just worthless paper.
As Citizen K tells it, Khodorkovsky read a book on banking to learn how to open and operate a Group of financial companies known as Bank Menatep in 1989. After being appointed as Russia’s deputy minister of fuel and energy, Khodorkovsky acquired the oil and gas conglomerate Yukos in 1996. The newly minted multi-millionaire (if not billionaire) also invested in The Moscow Times.
Khodorkovsky became an economic adviser to Yeltsin, who succeeded Gorbachev in the Kremlin. As Moscow’s mayor, Yeltsin was initially a pro-democracy dynamo, shown in the movie climbing a tank to oppose a hardliner coup attempt against Gorby. But after he became Russia’s president, Yeltsin’s health and sobriety declined in parallel with the country’s socialist government. The staggering president at times had to be physically propped up in public, just as his bankrupt government, unable to pay public employees, had to be propped up with the oligarchy’s aforementioned, ill-fated loans to boost his 1996 re-election bid.
Given the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I asked Gibney about possible Unites States influence on Yeltsin’s 1996 race for a second term. Gibney replied, “ I do not know for sure” but “the [American] foot was on the scale for Yeltsin. He was reelected by the oligarchs’ deal.”
But the ailing Yeltsin didn’t serve out his second term, handing power over in 1999 to Vladimir Putin. The film traces the rise of the once obscure ex-KGB agent (who declined to be interviewed by Gibney).
Khodorkovsky became an increasingly outspoken critic of Putin-style “managed democracy.” This set the oligarch and the president on a collision course. The two openly clashed in a February 2003 televised meeting between Putin and a group of businessmen. The feisty Khodorkovsky came armed with a powerpoint presentation alleging government corruption. Putin raised questions about Yukos’ business practices, suggesting it bribed tax officials.
After Khodorkovsky’s business partner and Yukos’ head of security were arrested in the summer of 2003, the tycoon was advised to leave Russia, but he characteristically dug in his heels and refused to flee his homeland.
In October 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested for tax evasion and embezzlement and found guilty after a lengthy trial, receiving a nine-year sentence. The formerly high-living Khodorkovsky served time at a remote penal colony in Krasnokamensk, near the Chinese border. After a second trial in 2010, Khodorkovsky was sentenced to another seven years behind bars for stealing Yukos’ oil.
Thus the mogul followed in the footsteps of Mother Russia’s innumerable political prisoners, including anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, and the Nobel laureates author Boris Pasternak, physicist Andrei Sakharov, and novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
According to Citizen K, Putin pardoned Khodorkovsky in 2014 because his mother was gravely ill and to curry international favor in time for the Winter Olympics in Sochi. But living in exile in London, the defiant Khodorkovsky continues to actively protest Putin’s authoritarianism from afar, demanding democracy, economic reforms, and human rights for post-Soviet Russia.
At two hours and eight minutes, the exhaustively researched, meticulously detailed Citizen K unspools like a sprawling Tolstoy tome, rich in characters.
At two hours and eight minutes, the exhaustively researched, meticulously detailed Citizen K unspools like a sprawling Tolstoy tome, rich in characters. It fits in well with Gibney’s oeuvre in its obsession with the abuse of power.
In the Academy Award nominated 2005 film Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room, the filmmaker tackled corporate excesses. He won the Best Documentary Oscar for 2007’s Taxi to the Dark Side, about torture in Afghanistan. Gibney also co-won Emmy Awards for taking on church pedophilia in 2012’s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God and for HBO’s 2015 Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. Ironically, Gibney also made We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks in 2013, when Julian Assange was still considered an anti-establishment darling.
Citizen K uses archival footage, news clips, and original material, including extensive interviews with Khodorkovsky, in what’s arguably Gibney’s most complex film yet. The cerebral documentary’s title character seems to be a mixture of profit motive and Old Testament prophet. Can one be a dissident and oligarch, martyr and multi-millionaire, at the same time?
With Citizen K, Alex Gibney solidifies his role as one of the screen’s top globetrotting truth tellers. Viewers can decide for themselves whether Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a hero, villain, or combination of both when Gibney’s latest documentary is released November 22.