Citizen K review: an oligarch in exile does battle with Putin

Dir: Alex Gibney. Cast: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Putin, Leonid Nevzlin, Boris Berezovsky, Igor Malashenko, Anton Drel, Martin Sixsmith, Derk Sauer, Tatyana Lysova, Arkady Ostrovsky, Maria Logan. 15 cert, 126 mins

The “unchanging present” of Russian politics is the landscape of Alex Gibney’s latest documentary, Citizen K – a wide-ranging rummage with an unlikely hero and a seemingly invincible villain. The hero is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil oligarch – once the country’s wealthiest man – who was judged so dangerous to Putin’s supremacy he became a political prisoner in 2003. And the villain, of course, is Putin himself, who couldn’t brook Khodorkovsky’s opposition and hauled him up, first for fraud and tax evasion, and then on contradictory charges of embezzlement and money laundering in 2010.

After his release in 2013, Khodorkovsky immediately moved to Zurich, and thence to London in 2015 – a dangerous place to reside for even mid-level diplomatic enemies of the Putin regime, let alone the man who’s been called the Kremlin’s leading critic-in-exile. Gibney gets this oft-enigmatic figure on camera for his considered, cynical, occasionally mischievous point of view. But this isn’t a biopic in documentary form, or the kind of one-on-one interrogation Errol Morris might have done.

It’s a sprawling overview of how the Russian popular vote has been devalued since the Yeltsin years, in what Gibney, borrowing a phrase from Khodorkovsky himself, calls an era of “gangster capitalism”. The illusion of freedom and democracy that came in with Yeltsin quickly started to look like smoke and mirrors, especially when that president became an ailing puppet, vastly unpopular with the Russian people, who wanted Putin for his successor when he resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999.

Of course, Khodorkovsky had his own role to play in the economic collapse of that period, having seized the opportunity to make his fortune like a particularly cut-throat Monopoly player: he was one of the seven oligarchs who controlled half the country's finances by the mid-1990s. When he forced employees at his oilfields to agree to whopping pay cuts, and then laid off tens of thousands of them, he says with sober afterthought that business “ceased being a game”. But however much the element of fun leaked out of it, he still succeeded in reaping the profits, up to a peak net worth of $15bn.

Then an unforeseen turning of the tide occurred, thanks to the oligarchs’ shaky alliance with Putin, that once-minor KGB official whose takeover they’d even enabled, anxiously fending off a backslide towards Communism. It didn’t take long before Khodorkovsky was speaking out against the undemocratic evils of state corruption, and being sentenced to a decade in Siberia for his troubles.

Gibney’s film certainly appreciates the irony of Khodorkovsky’s position – billionaire poacher turned pro-transparency gamekeeper is a tricky look to pull off – and gets plenty of mileage out of this audacious rebranding. But there’s not much in the way of mea culpa from Putin’s smiling, hyper-intelligent nemesis.

It’s left to other interviewees to describe Khodorkovsky as a changed man after prison, after swallowing his medicine with shrugging stoicism and coming back to combat Putin by any means necessary.

At two hours plus, the film strays off-target at times and doesn’t give the horrors of Siberia enough consideration. But it’s an interesting thematic grab-bag, scored with sarcastic grandeur with cues from Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and one pointed musical joke at the start – Zbigniew Preisner’s Song for the Unification of Europe, the epic choral theme from Three Colours Blue, over shots of flaming oil towers above the frozen Russian wastes.

That’s certainly not a number you’ll ever catch Putin humming, with his allergy to sanctions and Darwinian wish for all forms of power to wither but his own.