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.
