Mikhail Khodorkovsky is in prison not far from the Arctic Circle, but the story of the former oil tycoon who fell out with Vladimir Putin is being told near the Kremlin before Russia's parliamentary election on Sunday.
Ten months after a successful opening at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, German director Cyril Tuschi’s documentary "Khodorkovsky" had its Russian premiere on Friday night at a central Moscow movie theatre.
The showing at the opening of Moscow’s Artdocfest film festival marked a milestone in a somewhat rocky road for the film, which was reported stolen twice in the weeks preceding its Berlin premiere.
Its distributor in Russia and some former Soviet republics, Olga Papernaya, said five of the 20 cinemas she was targeting declined to take the film before the election for fear it portrayed the Kremlin in a bad light.
Artdocfest organiser Vitaly Mansky, Russia’s most prominent documentarist, dismissed suggestions the film faced censorship.
"If they wanted to ban it, they would have banned it here," Mansky told Reuters in the lobby of the 100-year-old cinema where the film was showing, almost in sight of the Kremlin.
Putin’s 2000-2008 presidency was defined for many in Russia and abroad by the jailing of Khodorkovsky, which critics say was politically motivated punishment for perceived challenges to Putin’s authority and funding of opposition parties.
Sunday’s parliamentary vote will be the first test of Putin’s ruling United Russia party since he revealed plans to return to the presidency for a six-year term in a March 2012 election after four years as prime minister.
In an interview, Tuschi said the film grew out of fascination with Khodorkovsky as a dramatic figure, and that it delved into the "iconic power struggle between Putin and Khodorkovsky".
Once Russia’s richest man and head of Yukos, one of its biggest oil producers, Khodorkovsky is serving a 13-year prison sentence after convictions on charges of large-scale financial crimes in two trials, in 2005 and 2010. He is due for release in 2016.
Unlike some other so-called oligarchs who grew rich and powerful in the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, Khodorkovsky stayed in Russia and resisted the Kremlin’s will after Putin came to power and sought to end those tycoons’ involvement in media and politics.
His 2003 arrest and 2005 fraud and tax evasion conviction preceded the bankruptcy of Yukos, brought down by back-tax claims, and its ultimate sale to state oil company Rosneft . He had been due for release this year before the second conviction, on theft and money-laundering charges.
"DEAR CYRIL"
In a letter from a Siberian prison in the film, Khodorkovsky tells "dear Cyril" that despite what he called speculation he fell foul of Putin for meeting him without a tie, and that the arrest was engineered to enable the state to take over Yukos and to punish him for supporting opposition parties.
The government says he was tried fairly for a crime and the sale of Yukos was above board.
In the documentary, submerged tension erupts when Khodorkovsky lectures Putin, then president, on corruption at a televised meeting with a group of tycoons.
The camera remains fixed on Putin as he barely conceals his rage, his face contorting unnaturally, then delivers a cool but furious riposte.
With that scene, the film makes clear: Khodorkovsky cannot find his way back to Putin’s good graces. But nor does he want to, it seems.
"A petty man could not forgive that," Yevgeny Saburov, a poet and academic who met Khodorkovsky, then a nascent businessman, when Saburov was serving as Economy Minister in 1991, says in the film.
The line drew drew a burst of applause from the audience.
Much of the documentary’s content is familiar to the reading public in Russia, where Khodorkovsky has regularly published editorials in major newspapers, debated Russia’s path in correspondence with three popular novelists, and compiled a book from behind prison walls.
The audience at the premiere — which included patrons of the Artdocfest festival, reporters, Khodorkovsky lawyers and an opposition politician — did not quite fill the auditorium.
Artyom Goloshchapov, a Moscow photographer who attended, praised the film for largely giving both sides of the story.
He said the timing of laughter and applause were a telling indicator of the audience’s sympathies.
"The hall tended to applaud when there were subtle jabs against you-know-who," he said.
