Honestly, I had serious doubts that it would turn out to be anything especially interesting. The format is so limited, after all: talking heads on screen discussing Nemtsov. What new could there possibly be there?
They filmed me for an hour, and it was obvious they would keep three minutes. And then there would be 30 people like that, three minutes each.
But it turned out that the two-hour film Too Free a Man, made by Vera Krichevskaya and Mikhail Fishman, is, forgive the cliché, utterly gripping from start to finish.
It is really three films in one:
A very good film about Boris Nemtsov.
A very good film about how Russia’s newly emerging democracy was broken by the oligarchs and the media that served them. With active help from government officials, of course.
A very good film about how Putin drew the necessary conclusions, and how the foundation of his approval rating became control over the media, above all through those same oligarchs.
So this is genuinely a very important film about the 1990s. I was born in 1976, so I lived through the USSR as well, and I thought I remembered all the key events in Nemtsov’s political life quite well, having followed them at the time. But while watching the film I kept saying to myself, “Ahhh, so that’s why.”
For example, Boris quite often mentioned “Svyazinvest” when I asked him about the 1990s. And I always used to think: why was he so hung up on that pathetic “Svyazinvest”? Just one particular privatization deal. Not the most important one by a long shot. Some trivial nonsense.
But here the whole story is laid out in full by the key participants, and you can literally see how democracy and freedom of speech were being killed.
When Borya and I spent the night in a cell at the Tverskoye police station, I told him about a draft plank in our program: that in the beautiful Russia of the future, resource oligarchs—and financial-industrial groups in general—should be banned from owning media outlets. At the time, this had not yet been written down anywhere; we only published it recently.
And to my surprise, Nemtsov immediately said: yes, that’s exactly what should be done. Even though he was, after all, from the SPS camp (the Union of Right Forces, a liberal political party), supposedly in favor of big capital and all that.
And then you watch the film and realize: it is silly even to be surprised that Nemtsov supported it. He, a young and honest politician, was deliberately smeared for months by oligarch-owned media with all kinds of garbage until they drove his ratings into the ground.
If I had seen this film earlier, my programmatic post “An Oligarch Is Not Your Bro, Opposition Activist” would have been even harsher.
“White trousers” and “he made officials switch to Volgas” were hammered into people’s heads so thoroughly that I myself mentioned those white trousers twice in an interview. And that very episode is shown in the film. Nemtsov is just walking along: a dark blazer, light-colored trousers. You would never even notice. But they—the oligarchs—smeared him for weeks and months over those “offensive white trousers” because he would not hand over that idiotic “Svyazinvest” deal to them at a low price.
And this is a very real threat for the future. Just look at what is happening in Ukraine. Things are so difficult there in part because there are almost no genuinely independent media outlets. Everything belongs to oligarchs, and they use the media—and politics in general—for their corporate wars. How can an honest media outlet survive in that situation? It can’t: you will always lose out to the publication owned by some oil magnate or sausage king, backed by a constant stream of non-market money.
So *Too Free a Man* is also an outstanding guide to modern Russian history. It ought to be shown in classrooms.
I also really liked how the filmmakers got some of the participants—people usually inclined to be restrained in public—to open up. Everyone noticed how surprisingly candid Fridman was. Khodorkovsky is even a little shocking, saying out loud what many had only thought.
Yeltsin’s “Tanya and Valya” (his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and Valentin Yumashev, two key figures in his inner circle)—I do not like them at all, but here they were very much to the point and also helped explain important things.
Chubais’s absence from the film is a million times more eloquent than any words he might have said. It was the first question the filmmakers got from the audience at the premiere.
In short, I highly recommend it to everyone, regardless of their political views.
The film has an official distribution license, so as I understand it, it will be shown in cinemas across the country—well, at least wherever it is not banned.