Corruption in the Russian bureaucracy

Corruption in the Russian bureaucracy is not confined to a few venal officials: it operates through ordinary administrative procedures, personal connections, official investigations, and even campaigns for reform. The novel makes its workings visible in both small transactions and large schemes. Chichikov learns to turn delay into leverage, public responsibility into private enrichment, and the appearance of integrity into another instrument of profit; when exposed, he loses his accumulated wealth but not his capacity to begin again.

Ordinary Procedures and Informal Influence

The bureaucracy first appears as a world of offices that must be approached through a carefully cultivated network. On his first day of calls in N. City, Chichikov visits the Governor, Vice-Governor, Public Prosecutor, President of the Local Council, Chief of Police, Commissioner of Taxes, and Director of State Factories, then adds the Inspector of the Municipal Department of Medicine and the City Architect. At each stop he flatters his host. He praises the province’s roads to the Governor and the local gendarmery to the Chief of Police; he even gives two officials a higher rank than they possess, a mistake that pleases them. The Governor invites him to a reception, and other officials offer dinners and tea parties. Access is built socially before it is exercised administratively.

That social groundwork matters when Chichikov seeks to register his purchases of peasants. At the municipal offices, he asks where serf-indenture business is conducted and is questioned about the nature of his application. He presents a purchase list and says he has obtained powers of attorney from vendors who are absent. Although he wants the transfer registered that day, Ivan Antonovitch says further proof is required and that the process cannot be completed immediately. Chichikov invokes his close friendship with the President of the Council, but the clerk replies that this connection alone is insufficient. The scene shows how formal requirements and personal influence coexist: the paperwork does not disappear, but access to people in authority becomes part of the attempt to move it.

The registration proceeds through a gathering of witnesses, including the Public Prosecutor and Inspector of the Medical Department, whom Sobakevitch describes as men with little to do. After the indentures are signed, docketed, and registered, Chichikov pays only half the usual government charges. The President has arranged for the other half to be entered against another applicant’s account. The transaction thus receives official completion while its fee is informally redistributed. The precise paperwork gives the arrangement an administrative form; the personal intervention alters who pays for it.

Delay, Fees, and the Performance of Disinterest

In his account of Chichikov’s earlier career, the novel shows how petty corruption adapts when open bribery is investigated. Once Chichikov obtains a lucrative post, he tells petitioners not to offer rewards and presents prompt service as a matter of duty. He takes their addresses and promises documents the following day, but the work is not even begun. After repeated delays, petitioners learn that copyists must be paid: not a small sum for each copyist, but a rouble, of which only a quarter-rouble goes to each clerk and the remainder is said to go to the government. The petitioner who had been reassured by Chichikov’s apparent disinterest is forced back into the office to discover what payment the process actually demands.

This method turns the language of reform against the public. Officials claim that directors have become honest and that illicit fees have been stopped, while clerks continue to extract money through a newly formalized charge. Petitioners remember the older, more direct arrangement in which a payment to the director settled a matter; under the supposedly cleaner system, they wait a week and pay more, without knowing when their business will advance. Chichikov does not simply accept a bribe at the counter. He performs incorruptibility, allows delay to create pressure, and lets the petitioner conclude that an additional payment is necessary. The system’s visible rules and its practical demands pull in opposite directions.

Public Works and the False Promise of Reform

The same gap between public purpose and private benefit expands in a commission overseeing the construction of a government building. Chichikov becomes one of its most active members. The commission works for six years without taking the building above its foundations, with delays attributed to the climate or to unsuitable materials. Meanwhile, handsome private houses appear elsewhere in town for the commission’s members, who grow prosperous. The contrast is direct: the public project remains stalled while the officials associated with it acquire homes of their own.

A new Director, a military martinet hostile to bribe-taking, appears to interrupt this arrangement. On his first day he demands accounts, discovers deficits and missing sums, and notices the civilian-style houses. Officials are dismissed, and houses are confiscated or converted to religious institutions and schools for soldiers’ children. Chichikov and his associates lose their positions and the structure they had built. Yet the Director’s campaign does not permanently cleanse the administration. Other officials learn his temperament and maintain a discreet exterior while accommodating him. He comes to believe he has selected capable and proper men, even as the new group turns the pursuit of irregularities into a profitable operation. Its members acquire thousands of roubles, while former officials are eventually allowed back into service. The reform changes who benefits and how the benefit is concealed, rather than ending corruption.

Customs Service and Organized Contraband

After losing his post, Chichikov reaches the Customs Department, a long-standing ambition because he associates it with foreign goods and personal comforts. He masters its procedures within weeks and becomes known for exacting searches carried out with unwavering politeness. He examines suspected travellers and discovers goods concealed in clothing and vehicles; for a time, his diligence makes it difficult for smugglers to operate. His service appears exceptionally incorruptible: he refuses to keep confiscated articles that have not been handed over to the government, and his conduct wins astonishment and promotion.

The appearance of integrity gives him the authority he needs for a larger fraud. Chichikov proposes a plan to detect contraband and receives extensive powers of search and investigation. He has already known of an organized smuggling association but postpones joining it while he lacks enough influence to secure a substantial share. Once he has the necessary authority, he sends word that the time has come. He also recruits a fellow official, and the contrabandists begin operating under the protection of the very officer empowered to detect them. In the scheme described by the narrator, Spanish sheep cross the frontier carrying Brabant lace between layers of fleece. After three or four such passages, Chichikov and his accomplice have acquired about four hundred thousand roubles each; some accounts put Chichikov’s share at half a million.

The partnership collapses after a quarrel, followed by an anonymous report to the authorities. The narrator also mentions a different explanation for the dispute but leaves the truth unsettled. What is established is that the customs dealings are exposed: the two officials are questioned, deprived of their property, and required to write out what they have done. Chichikov conceals part of his gains and uses courtesy, persuasive speech, flattery, and occasional payments to influence the outcome. He avoids a criminal trial and is retired less harshly than his accomplice, but emerges stripped of nearly everything. His remaining resources are ten thousand roubles, two dozen linen shirts, a small bachelor’s britchka, and his two servants, Selifan and Petrushka. The episode ends not with his conversion, but with another forced restart.

Corruption Beyond the First Fraud

The habits formed in these earlier offices remain relevant when Chichikov later tries to conduct business through another administrative system. At Colonel Koshkarev’s estate, he asks for a few peasants who are dead. The Colonel directs him into an elaborate chain: a written Statement of Plea goes to the Office for the Reception of Reports and Returns, then to the Estate Works Committee, then to an administrator and secretary. Chichikov objects that the process will take too long and states his request plainly; the Colonel tells him to write that the souls are, in the prescribed wording, 'so to speak, dead.' The scene turns bureaucratic procedure into absurd delay, while recalling the earlier registration of his purchases. Here, the obstacle is not presented as a straightforward bribe, but as a process so circuitous that the applicant cannot readily reach a decision.

The investigation that eventually gathers around Chichikov also exposes the reach of his earlier record. Amid disputes over the validity of wills and allegations about an inheritance, authorities receive information about both his purchase of dead souls and his collusion in customs contraband. Matters he believed known only to himself and the people directly involved have entered official channels. The novel thereby links administrative corruption across time: the same career includes land-transfer paperwork, obstructed petitions, public-works fraud, and customs conspiracy, while later scrutiny reconnects those episodes. Corruption is a network of procedures and relationships, but it can also preserve a trail of evidence that resurfaces when fortunes change.