Image via Khodorkovsky-movie.com
No one ever accused Ronald Reagan of being a genius(*). So when he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” he couldn’t have known what he was asking his Soviet counterpart let loose.
Four years after Reagan’s speech, the detritus of Communism littered the path to a post-Soviet Russia. The decade that followed the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) offered a number of impossible scenarios where a state rich with resources needed to unload its assets to private enterprises that were poor relative to the value of said resources. It was kinda like a set-up. The Soviet economy was dead, but the State, by virtue of circumstance, was not. Never would soft power be more powerful.
If we weren’t certain how that would work in practice, Cyril Tuschi’s documentary, Khodorkovsky, provides a fitting case study. It’s an uneven film that defies simple labeling within the documentary category. Khodorkovsky is a journey that advocates a position while sketching out a single character and telling the modern history of a country. As such, the best word for it is ambitious.
Image via EnglishRussia.com
Khodorkovsky begins somewhere in Siberia. Or what is made to look like Siberia by virtue of a silent squeeze zoom of white nothingness. It flashes very quickly to the moment Mikhail Khodorkovsky–the eponym around whom the film is built–was arrested in July 2003. No cameras recorded the arrest, so Tuschi renders the moment in stunning black-and-white animation. The first two scenes of the film suggest an epic tale.
Mr. Khodorkovsky trained as a chemical engineer and would-be apparatchik in the days just before perestroika and glasnost took hold. As the great restructuring of Russia’s economy unfolded, Mr. K was among the cunning, fortunate and exquisitely well-connected. After making a name for himself in finance in the mid-1990s, he assembled all the necessary pieces to win a bid to buy the newly established energy concern Yukos, which pumped out 2% of the world’s oil at that time.
At the outset, he wasn’t the greatest businessman. And he didn’t need to be. He was in the oil business. Oil, that is. Black Gold. In the late 1990s, Mr. K had some sort of business awakening (that may also have been political) whereby he began operating his oil and gas company with radical transparency. In short order, he went from ordinary millionaire to the richest man in all of Russia.
During a fateful televised meeting with then-President Vladimir Putin in February 2003, Mr. K challenged the head of state regarding the efficacy of his State. Shit was corrupt, Mr. K asserted. And it was causing the country’s economic aspirations to stagnate. Putin, you might guess, didn’t appreciate that. Not long after the meeting, the arrest happened. Mr. K has been imprisoned ever since.
You could learn all of that from the film. Or you could hit up Wikipedia to get the same info–plus some additional (and very important) details regarding the Mikhail Khodorkovsky story. The omissions made by Tuschi suggest that maybe a modern documentarian carries less of a burden than his predecessors. Why bother weighing your film with ancillary facts that can be quickly summoned from the Interwebs? Why not distill the story and present it with a stratospheric entertainment quotient? If the film is good enough, viewers will google more information on their own time, right?
Image via Ireneeng.com
Sitting in a movie theatre in Washington, DC, it was hard to tell how well the film played for a US audience. I could hear a couple speaking Russian from behind me and a small cadre of people trading heavily accented English in front. I suspected both groups to be subject matter experts on some or all of the documentary’s story lines. The much lesser informed and slightly confused bastard who sat in my seat had a lot of questions. Like, where was Putin when Khodorkovsky was building a finance and energy empire? What caused Khodorkovsky to make such a sudden–and hugely rewarding–change in his company’s business practices? Do all Russian people believe the government’s charges against Khodorkovsky or just the handful of people Tuschi caught on camera?
None of those questions were really answered by the film. Admittedly, some of that is nitpicking. It certainly makes for a better story if we see Mr. K as the beleaguered oligarch condemned by his countrymen. And the sparse presence of Putin in the film enables him to stand in as an avatar for the devastatingly powerful State. But Tuschi moves too briskly past some key plot points in this journey to be completely forgiven. We can assume Khodorkovsky enjoyed a simultaneous business and political awakening just before the turn of the century. Tuschi implies as much. What he doesn’t do is supply insight for why that critical turning point in the story occurred.
Apart from some of the narrative gaps, Tuschi’s cinematography alternates between stunning vistas and awkwardly framed talking heads. He also teases us with some gorgeous animation that fills in early gaps in the film but is eventually used to represent abstractions that don’t really advance or clarify the story.
It seems mighty Russian of us to offer a blunt critique of Khodorkovsky, the film. The truth is that it’s not bad. Not even close to that. It actually inspires quite a bit of thinking about Russia and whether it has evolved or devolved during its first decades following the fall of the Communists.
Image via Time
In Russia, 143 million people inhabit 6.5 million square miles of land. By way of comparison, that’s half as many people and twice as much land as its old friend, the United States of America. The country, therefore, is mostly the negative space that its citizens don’t occupy. That negative space–all of that vast, desolate, beautiful land–suggests a metaphor for the specter of the State. The system of government–even the people in charge of it–are less important than the notion that the State looms omnipresent as a ceaseless Russian tradition. It can have noble aspirations for serving the people or it can behave tyrannically. Perhaps both at the same time. Throughout Russian history, the State never seems to relinquish its purview.
What Mikhail Khodorkovsky represents is a unique challenge to the State: a clever capitalist who comes along at a time when the State’s power softens enough for an individual (or a group of individuals) to push the country into the great square dance of a global economy where countries, companies and certain individuals swap partners conveniently in pursuit of profit margins and growth. In Russia, the State is not so eager to have her assets flaunted for acquisition by any outside entity. Mr. K, as Tuschi’s film tells us, was moving to grow his wealth the way all the other square dancers do: selling off pieces of his businesses, taking on investors and spinning out companies. With his arrest, the State stopped the music abruptly. It may not be just, but according to Russian history, the logic follows.
Whether we credit Ronald Reagan or Rocky Balboa, the Soviets definitely took an L back in the 1980s. By using Mikhail Khodorkovsky as a narrative catalyst, Cyril Tuschi suggests that maybe the opponents of the State gained a pyrrhic victory at best. Mr. K and his counterparts in business accumulated great wealth with mostly modest buy-ins as the post-Soviet Russia struggled to dollar up. They did so, as the film implies, with the understanding that they would remain beholden to the State for more than just taxes while they grew their fortunes. That all of them associated with Yukos except Mr. K now live comfortably in exile–so comfortably that many of them sat for interviews with Tuschi–demonstrates an awareness of how best to dance with the State. She does, after all, still lead.
Tuschi begins his journey with a question: Did Mikhail Khodorkovsky choose to go to jail? He ends with a vague answer: it appears to be so. The journey reveals a weak why that can be emboldened with a brief contemplation of current events in Russia.
It’s an election year in Russia. Vladimir Putin is once again seeking the presidency. (As if he ever really left, say some.) Despite Arab Spring-style demonstrations against him, polls predict Putin will win two-thirds of the vote on March 4. The second coming of Putin seems inevitable. The outcome of his second act, however, is very difficult to project.
Gazprom, the most valuable company in Russia and the world’s largest producer of natural gas, is at the peak of its operating capabilities. With increased competition and the potential for decreasing yields from Russian wells, the State can expect to collect smaller bounties from what has been its largest taxpayer. Concern for such a defunding has triggered Putin himself to entertain outside investors for the Russian economy. Mr. K may dance quietly in his cell at that possibility, but he still dances in a cell.
Like nearly every other country in the world, the people of Russia are politically divided. The people who live in the cities believe and want very different things than do the people who don’t live in the cities. Putin’s base aligns with the non-urban interests. Unfortunately for him, metropolitan thinking on things like government corruption and economic opportunities is slowly fanning out into the negative spaces where the land is greater than the people. The State may finally have reached its point of diminishing returns.
If that turns out to be true, what comes next for Russia and her people? Maybe the authoritarian constitution that established peace in 1993 will turn out to be the first iteration of a post-Soviet State. Only two decades have passed in Russia since the dust settled on the end of the USSR. For many of the former Soviet republics that are not Russia, the dust is still settling. Nation building takes time. Re-building a nation can be an interminable endeavor. The process outlasts even the strongest wills of the individuals who control it. Sometimes, it endures because of the wills of those who don’t.
* Obvious exception: Grover Norquist
