Film’s Focus on a Flawed Russian Figure Brings Ire With Putin Into View

MOSCOW — “Khodorkovsky,” a German filmmaker’s documentary on the saga of the jailed former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who for some has become a symbol of opposition to Vladimir V. Putin, made its official premiere in Moscow on Friday, in a theater just blocks from the Kremlin and just two days before parliamentary elections that are expected to hurt Mr. Putin’s party.
The screening was part of a long-scheduled documentary film festival. Obstacles that hindered the film’s wider release in Russia seemed to underscore the apparent jitters of the ruling elite and the growing cracks in Mr. Putin’s once infallible image: As the elections approached, movie theaters that had been planning to show the film began pulling out en masse, without citing reasons.

At the ArtDocFest at the Khudozhestvenny movie theater near the Kremlin on Friday night, an audience of several hundred Russian intelligentsia laughed at documentary footage of Mr. Putin chastising Mr. Khodorkovsky during a meeting with Russian billionaires in the Kremlin in 2003.

They applauded after Yevgeny Saburov, a former minister in President Boris Yeltin’s government, described Mr. Putin’s actions as the vendetta of a “petty man” who can’t stomach criticism.

The film, by Cyril Tuschi, ends with the brief scene of Mr. Khodorkovsky behind glass in a courtroom cage. And in a letter quoted earlier in the film, Russia’s most famous prisoner says he has no time for self-pity or thoughts of revenge because he is too busy in prison analyzing his own actions and studying his legal case.

Mr. Khodorkovsky, who is widely despised among poorer Russians for making billions from murkily privatized oil wells and other assets, has also continued the Russian literary tradition of lengthy manifestos and correspondence from prison.

Sergei Yursky, a Russian actor who has openly supported Mr. Khodorkovsky, said in an interview after the screening that the film captured what he sees as the oligarch’s Shakespearean essence.



“He is King Lear,” Mr. Yursky said. “His whole essence changed because he was able to understand himself from the side, to see his sins from the side.”

Mr. Yursky argued that in contrast to Lear, who changed “because he was alone, and poor, expelled from everywhere and standing under the rain and snow,” Mr. Khodorkovsky, who around 2000 introduced Western-style practices and accounting to his business empire, did this unbidden, when at the height of wealth and success.

One of the points debated in the Russian blogosphere — by those who either attended Friday’s premiere, an earlier showing in St. Petersburg or at a Moscow club, or who have downloaded it from the Internet — is whether Mr. Khodorkovsky harbors long-term political ambitions, or wields symbolic power as a figure of resistance to Mr. Putin.

In the period before Sunday’s parliamentary elections, conversation in cyberspace and around kitchen and cafe tables suggested that outrage over Mr. Putin’s orchestration of his return to the presidency roused a significant number of Russians from a political torpor. The elections are expected to cut into the parliamentary majority held by Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, though certainly would not end it.

Marat Guelman, a Russian art world impresario who has confronted authorities but also played a pro-Kremlin role in previous election campaigns, said while smoking outside the movie theater Friday night that the film should be shown to all Russians younger than 30. Still, he acknowledged that an increasingly open distate for Mr. Putin would not bring major political change, at least not immediately.

“The entire system has to change,” he said. “If those deputies who are elected from United Russia this time will break into left, right and centrist factions, then maybe the next elections will be real.”

By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKYPublished: December 3, 2011