Martyr or Loser? Cyril Tuschi’s Khodorkovsky
Maybe it’s romantic projection, but I saw through Khodorkovsky that people can change
Cyril Tuschi, quoted in Bloomberg, Feb 17, 2011.
August 11, 2011
An editorial in the Guardian (Dec 28, 2010) noted a gold nugget of wisdom from Russia’s Vladimir Putin: a thief must be in jail. This, he would
qualify later, was in reference to the first conviction of the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, rather than the
second conviction (upheld in May). ‘As everyone who lives there knows,’ quipped the paper, ‘thieves in Russia don’t
exclusively belong in a jail. They belong in government.’ The state, the entire Kremlin, is one feast of loot and booty.
The system produces its own demons, its own fears, its own self-justifying rationale to exist. Its currency lies in
natural resources, the subject of Putin’s own plagiarised thesis, supported by a cabal of well positioned officials who
know the rules of the game.
How then, to portray this beast in operation? German director Cyril Tuschi has made a good go of it, and Khodorkovksy was the result. At the Berlin film festival this year, it was given a boost when the director lost his film to theft.
But critics who noted that boost were being unfair – Tuschi himself had done something remarkable on a budget of 400,000
Euros, interviewing the oligarch’s now very much dispersed inner circle, and the man himself.
Tuschi’s documentary begins with a stunning panorama – the snow settled on the ground of a remote Russian landscape; the
sun, brilliantly reflective off the white surface; drills operating, and then, orthodox churches. The picture is
striking: on the one hand modern in symbolism (Russia’s muscling over natural resources), and its unchanging traditions.
This, it seems, is the land of various eternal assumptions: God, energy, the firm hand.
What Tuschi does do, at least in part, is show how much Khodorkovksy was part of the very system that is persecuting
him. One adapted to its schizophrenic ways, its psychic disturbances. The press release of the documentary described the
oligarch as something of a highly versatile and evolved creature – ‘from a perfect socialist to a perfect capitalist and
finally, in a Siberian prison, becoming a perfect martyr’ (Bloomberg, Feb 17). Such perfection can be an enemy of the
good.
With the fall of the communist system, Khodorkovsky and others profited from junked socialised enterprises that were
sold for a song to Russians. Had this not happened, Russia’s energy interests could well have been in the hands of
foreign corporations with the means of paying at the market rate. But with this parochial logic, the wheels were set in
motion. Yukos was acquired and transformed into a global enterprise, audited by US accounting practises.
As the money was being accumulated, as his position as Russia’s richest man became clearer, Khodorkovsky started to
cross boundaries. He began meddling. He violated the covenant with the Putin government by turning political: make
money, be it for yourself, for Russia, but in heaven’s name do not dare tamper with the orb and sceptre. Remember: we
put you there in the first place. At a meeting between Putin and business leaders in 2003, Khodorkovsky brought up the
thorny issue of corruption in the system. A mammoth $3.4 billion tax bill was duly slapped on Yukos. The shots were
fired but the plucky oligarch decided to stay. Charges of fraud, tax evasion, and conviction would follow.
As the businessman Christian Michel observes to Tuschi, jail was hardly unattractive for a man who had begun to nurse
political ambitions, thus sacrificing ‘his queen in order to win the end game’. A decent revolutionary needs a baptism
of incarceration.
There are an assortment of colourful characters. Dmitry Gololbov, former head of the legal department at Yukos oozes
admiration and incandescent anger. His former boss receives a good pasting. During his observations, which at times
verge on ranting, he puts his finger on the vital premise: ‘[Khodorkovsky] was one of the oligarchs who created the
whole judicial system he is in right now.’
The British journalist Ben Aris, no friend of the jailed figure, concurs and junks any notions of victomology. Oligarchs
make poor material for martyrs – Khodorkovsky began his ‘corporate life as the very worst corporate governance abuser’.
Public relations airbrushed this past out of existence. The question was not whether Khodorkovsky was innocent, being
implicated in the same state of plunder as every other figure of similar rank, but why he, over others, was convicted.
The problem with such a system is that a figure like Khodorkovsky becomes a magnet by simply being in prison. The longer
he is allowed to decompose in a closed setting, the more dangerous he will become to the incumbents. He is becoming
society’s ideological coat rack – and on that, people will hang their grievances upon. The enemy, it would seem, never
leaves the citadel. That is the end game.
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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.