Citizen K

Caught this at Hamptons festival last month. I wanted to let it settle in and do a bit of research before writing a review. I know who Khodorkovsky is and that he was one of the post-Soviet oligarchs who went afoul of Russian Dictator Putin, but not the timing and full detail.

Put is a dangerous scumbag and I am happy to say so, but this film has some serious problems as well. It really doesn't address the context, not eh absence of a working legal regime as well as the need for actual financial markets, and just gives an indictment of patriotism when the Khodorkovsky phenomena had nothing to do with capitalism, but rather was a simple looting of assets, compounded with a feedback loop of paid corruption of government, one sees in any system that doesn't have a legal and democratic framework. As far as the charges against him, his trial and imprisonment -- the viewer doesn't really get a sense for the film makers that both offenses can be true: the charging could have been politically motivated, due process could have been absent or flawed; but at the same time it is clear he was guilty of massive theft and crimes. Really if you want to understand this, read the findings of the European Court of Human Rights, which heard Khodorkovsky's appeal to that court, and which found that while there were process issues aplenty -- that the charges against him were well grounded. Now I am not saying the makers make an innocent hero out of Khodorkovsky, but rather that his crimes are kind of winked at in the film. I am also troubled by the way the term capitalism is thrown around in the film. Russia has never been capitalist. It sure wasn't capitalist or liaise faire when Khodorkovsky's garnered his supply cornering in oil fields. It was a gangster socialist government when it was socialist as the United Soviet Socialist Republics, a closed socialist system in 1993 when Khodorkovsky was Deputy head of Energy Ministry in the early 1990's, and he was enabled by the loan for shares that had nothing to do with capitalism or markets. In fact you have to be a careful viewer to even notice that the subject is a former Soviet Socialist government deputy minister and a creature created by Soviet socialism (as is Putin).

The Khodorkovsky story is important, as is what tells us about Putin, but I suggest reading some basic short pieces in WSJ, Financial Times or even the Guardian on him instead of this very incomplete, and at times glib, film

I literally had great difficulty hearing and understanding the soft spoken BBC reporter because the background music was so loud and intrusive.

This is a very disturbing trend in documentaries. Background music shouldn't override the actual content! Knock it off!

Otherwise, the documentary was very informative and avoided schizophrenic choppy cuts, which sadly are also trendy.

This is a great template to understand what is happening in America with the Biden Administration. Biden is very similar to Boris Y.. When Biden dies, resigns, or gets re-elected, it's a perfect setup for a Democrat dictator, through another set of rigged elections.

Like Putin, if Biden gets re-elected, passes the Presidency, or Kamala gets elected, then it's a sure thing that America is toast, along with much of the world.

Most intelligent people saw this coming with Obama, but hoped that they were wrong. Obama was just the first stepping stone, and Biden is 10 steps.

I respect what Citizen K did, and the world needs more people like him.

This documentary gives a general history of Russia from 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union, through the turbulent 1990's and the rise of the oligarchs, to 2018, after a couple of decades of Vladimir Putin progressively asserting an iron grip over the country. Citizen K is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of those oligarchs and a man who came in to direct conflict with Putin when he began looking into politics and espousing democratic ideals. He was shipped off to a remote prison for a decade as a result, and speaks from London where he went after being released. While the documentary skates along and doesn't go incredibly deep, it communicates the events and the dynamic between the two men and those around them reasonably well. Its use of archival footage and interviews is solid, though offset by a soundtrack that's overly dramatic and annoying.

Khodorkovsky was a predatory capitalist and while he ironically became a better person in prison, I think director Alex Gibney should have asked him point blank about his possible involvement in the murder of a local politician in 1998, as well as pointed questions about his vast wealth. For example, Khodorkovsky points out a time when he "had" to force workers to take a 30% pay cut, and another time when he let tens of thousands of them go. The question is not put to him, gee Mikhail, at the time you were worth over $1B and along with six other guys had half of Russia's wealth; if you cared for these people why didn't you take these losses out of your massive profits? Too often we see him get away with smirking through his statements and painting himself in a positive light, even if I am happy that he now leads the Open Russia movement and is a staunch critic of Putin. In the film's defense, the fact that Russia was torn between oligarchs like him and the monster that is Putin, men who combined corruption and violence to preserve wealth and power, does comes through. The dynamics are suitably depressing, particularly when you see the parallels to other countries in the behavior of the ultra-wealthy, or political strongmen who stir up nationalism as one of their methods of attaining power.

Watching this documentary was like having a deja-vu. Im romanian and living in an ex comunist country, we experienced the same savage so called capitalism in the '90s. Politicians in cahoots with some "smart" guys were able to "seize" a country. Im not pretending to be familiar with Khodorkovsky's affairs but i cant help not see some similarities for both Romania and Russia's. They were bribing, stealing or better said leeching the state's wealth. So before taking any sides on this production dig a little more on the '90s in Eastern Europe's transition economy from state owned to a market economy. These men werent saints