Oscar-winning docu-maker Alex Gibney traces the rise and fall of dissident exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky in this scalding portrait of Putin's Russia.
With typically zealous journalistic diligence, prolific nonfiction filmmaker Alex Gibney digs into the curious case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in, providing a lucidly accessible account of post-Soviet Russia's lurching transition out of Communism into a free-market economy that became a Wild West of gangster capitalism.
By the time of Yeltsin's 1996 re-election campaign, the country was an economic shambles, the incumbent president's health was failing and his government on the verge of collapse. But the oligarchs so feared a return to Communism driven by disgruntled voters that they engineered a win for the malleable Yeltsin by using television, a medium that one of them, Igor Malashenko, had only recently finagled away from government control.
A cloud appeared over his empire when Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of a Siberian oil town who had stood up to Yukos over tax evasion, was shot dead on Khodorkovsky's 35th birthday. While Chechen thugs initially were blamed, the Russian government much later pointed to Khodorkovsky and his right-hand man Leonid Nevzlin as architects of the contract killing — an arrest warrant forces Khodorkovsky to remain in exile in London.
In Khodorkovsky's assessment, Putin had a quintessential KGB talent for convincing whomever he was with — liberal, moderate, conservative — that he was a like-minded ally. But Putin began clashing with Khodorkovsky once the latter started publicly expressing divergent political views and hinting at state corruption.
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