Rebellion - The Litvinenko Case

As a film, this documentary doesn't really succeed: It is disorganized, relies too much on artsy gimmicks, puts the filmmaker too much into the foreground, is overly long, and fails to draw a clear portrait of the central figure, Alexander Litvinenko, whose motives continue to remain murky. Much more background should have been provided about the main protagonists and events, and the accusations the director makes against Putin and the FSB should have been backed up with more hard evidence, of which there is probably plenty. One feels the need to supplement this film with some reading from the books by Anna Politkovskaya, the assassinated Russian journalist, who also appears in this film in a short interview.

However, the film does succeed in creating a broad, if somewhat impressionistic, sketch of the present system of political rule in Russia by FSB functionaries, oligarchs and gangsters and of the creepy atmosphere of secrecy, paranoia, ruthlessness, lawlessness and manipulation of the hapless Russian people who appear to have willingly submitted themselves to this tyrannical rule. I think the picture Nekrasov paints of rampant corruption from the bottom to the top in government, the legal system, police and FSB, and in business is fairly accurate, and it should be cause for grave concern.

If Russia were one of the small republics at its Southern borders, all this would be of no great relevance but Russia is a former superpower that still sits on thousands of nuclear warheads, is economically disintegrating and has a population of 140 million which includes a substantial fraction of resentful nationalists who would be easy prey for an aspiring dictator. Overall, a scary picture. I'd wish the public in the West would be better informed about what's really going on in Russia and Western political leaders had no illusions about what kind of a system they're dealing with. This film, in spite of its shortcomings, at least makes you aware of this need. Right now, there doesn't seem to be much competent and critical journalistic coverage of this system, esp. internally where such efforts have been almost completely silenced.

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