For democracy’s sake see Citizen K
Review Citizen K (M, 128 mins) Directed by Alex Gibney Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★1⁄2
Maybe the mark of a great documentary maker is that they can take tranches of information – even on a subject you know little about – and make it accessible, comprehensible and even fascinating.
And Alex Gibney (Going Clear and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) is one of the very best in the business.
Before I watched Gibney’s Citizen K, I don’t think I had ever heard of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or if I had, then ‘‘exiled Russian billionaire, maybe?’’ would have been about all my hilariously feckless memory might have offered up.
But now, a couple of hours later, I find myself in possession of a decent working knowledge of what happened in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
And of how one minor KGB functionary named Vladimir Putin could rise from complete anonymity to president within only a few years.
I could probably even, over a beer, explain to you how nearly the entire Russian economy came to be controlled by a handful of unelected billionaires. And how Putin, who had been their ally, turned on them and seized much of their power and wealth for himself and his new inner circle.
And, trust me on this, it is a fascinating story and one that’s more urgent and important to understand than any spy thriller or fictional drama could ever be.
See this film if you can. In its bones, Citizen K is about how democracies are destroyed. No democracy can function without a free and fearless press, holding leaders to account and ensuring that the people who vote understand the issues their society is confronting.
In Russia, it was all too easy for Putin to re-nationalise the press and to bring all media back under state control. It was the very first thing he did when he went on the offensive.
Here in the west, while we sneer at dictatorships and revel in our apparent freedom, we have still allowed a couple of privately owned companies to suck nearly every potential advertising dollar out of our economy.
The result has been the media companies whose business model relied on that advertising, being forced to fight for niche audiences and telling them only what they want to hear, while the facts – and actual journalism – is dismissed as ‘‘just another point of view’’.
As we have all learnt these past few months, the results can be devastating. So, what I took from Citizen K, beyond its welcome primer on Russia today and how it came to exist, is a dire warning to all governments: Either protect and nurture a truly free press while it still exists, or watch your country crumble into factions and chaos in the coming years.
Citizen K is available to stream on You Tube.