Khodorkovsky

Cyril Tuschi's documentary about the jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a fascinating insight into this mysterious and ambiguous figure, into the dark heart of Putin's Kremlin, and even into the soul of contemporary Russia itself. Khodorkovsky was jailed in October 2003 for non-payment of tax. Before that, he had been one of the world's richest men, head of the Siberian oil giant Yukos. Tuschi's film portrays Khodorkovsky's tax evasion as more a case of failing to give the top gangster his cut. The sudden emergence of Russia's super-rich elite was not the natural process of dynamic capitalism: more an action by which Putin, the capo di tutti capi, created a platoon of supportive mafiosi for whom state assets were carved up. Khodorkovsky was one of these men, but around a decade ago infuriated Putin with his talk of an "open Russia" and was pursuing business links with the US, and with the oil-rich Bush family – apparently on the verge of selling shares in Yukos to foreigners. Putin's motives in imprisoning Khodorkovsky look nakedly political and territorial. But is Khodorkovsky cut from the same cloth? In jail, he could be making a theatrical display of penitence for his own role in state plunder, or perhaps he is just biding his time for elevation to Russian secular sainthood and his own populist grab for power. He is evolving into that traditional figure capable of holding the public spellbound, in the west and Russia itself: the political prisoner, and it is tempting to compare him to Solzhenitsyn, or the imprisoned officers of the 1825 Decembrist uprising. Tuschi even invokes Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. This film is a commanding insight into Putin's Russia.