Moscow Cleansing Department

The Moscow Cleansing Department is the municipal agency that appoints Poligraph Poligraphovich Sharikov to supervise the removal of stray animals. Its role in the story is brief but consequential: an official appointment gives Sharikov a recognized job and a platform for threats, while exposing the gap between bureaucratic credentials and the conduct they authorize.

Appointment and remit

Sharikov returns to the apartment wearing a leather tunic, breeches, and riding-boots, and announces that he has taken a job. The typewritten certificate identifies him as a comrade appointed to head the department’s sub-department responsible for eliminating vagrant quadrupeds, including cats. The document supplies the institutional title that his announcement alone could not establish.

The appointment is connected to Shvonder, who arranged the position. Earlier, Sharikov had sought registration and an identity card, arguing that official papers would protect him from being treated as a deserter. The job therefore extends a wider struggle over documentary recognition: papers first make him legible as a Moscow resident and then identify him as a municipal official.

Work and consequences

Sharikov explains the odor of his clothing by saying that he spent the previous day strangling cats as part of his work. His post thus brings the department’s stated remit into the private apartment, where the consequences of the job become immediately apparent to the people around him. The contrast is pointed: the certificate presents a formal public function, but the work is encountered through Sharikov’s account of what he has done and the reaction it provokes.

His official position also becomes a source of leverage in domestic disputes. When a household worker is distressed, Sharikov threatens to have her salary cut the next day. The narrative does not establish the precise scope of his workplace powers, but his threat invokes his title as sub-department controller and gives an employment-related form to a personal grievance.

Documents and political conflict

The department’s authority enters the final conflict through another document. A written accusation identifies Sharikov by his full official title and charges Preobrazhensky, Bormenthal, Zinaida Bunina, and Darya Ivanova with his murder. The charge converts a conflict centered in the apartment into a matter presented under the department’s name and attributed to its controller.

The department is therefore present less as a developed institution than as a chain of documentary effects: an appointment certificate, an asserted workplace authority, and an accusation bearing an official designation. Its name helps give Sharikov’s new social identity public force, even as his conduct and the later dispute make that identity part of the story’s unresolved contest over who may define him and what institutional papers can make true.