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NIKOLAI GOGOL’S DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY  
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Andy Merrifield
December 7, 2025
Monthly Review
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_ Almost 200 years after Nikolai Gogol wrote The Government
Inspector, has the Trump Administration brought back the need for
humor and satire to address political corruption to shock audiences to
awareness of their own implication in the plot. _

Ivan Malyutin, The Staging of The Government Inspector in the
Provinces, 1926, Wikimedia Commons

 

Almost two centuries after its opening night, Gogol’s five-act
satirical play _The Government Inspector_ continues to create a stir
with every performance, seemingly no matter where. Maybe because
corruption and self-serving double-talk aren’t just familiar
features of 19th-century Russia, but have become ingrained facets of
all systems of government and officialdom, making them recognizable to
Gogol’s audiences whatever their language and culture.

In our own times, truth, justice, and temperance—virtues Plato said
political systems needed to enshrine to call themselves
“good”—have been shamelessly manipulated, and scamming is
normalized, a built-in feature of modern “democracy,” wallpapered
on the corridors of political power. Elon Musk haunted recently as a
latter-day government inspector, another character who smacks of a
Gogolian gag: a shameless imposter pulling rank, beyond the pale,
maybe beyond any laughing matter. Gogol probably would have seen it
otherwise. He always tried to laugh this stuff off. He’d laugh
nowadays, too, doubtless. Searching online for his name, I’m asked:
Do I mean “Google”? No, I don’t mean Google.

Gogol freely acknowledged that his friend Alexander Pushkin provided
the initial spark for _The Government Inspector_. “Do me a
favor,” Gogol wrote the poet on October 7, 1835: “send me some
subject, comical or not, but an authentically Russian anecdote. My
hand is itching to write a comedy…give me a plot and I’ll knock
off a comedy in five acts—I promise, funnier than hell. For God’s
sake, do it. My mind and stomach are both famished.” Though, per
custom, Gogol might have nabbed the tale without Pushkin’s
realization. “One has to be very wary with this Ukrainian,”
Pushkin later cautioned. “He robs me before I have time to shout for
help.”

Starting in the early 18th century, government inspectors roamed
Russia with the intent of rooting out small-town corruption and
mismanagement. Saint Petersburg officials were dispatched to the
provinces, journeying incognito across vast distances to isolated
backwaters that were usually forewarned of the inspector’s coming.
But nobody knew when exactly they would arrive, often not even the
inspectors themselves. Over the years, rumors became rife of lone
travelers who would try to pass themselves off as government
officials, if only to be wined and dined by unsuspecting locals. In
1833, when visiting Orenburg province to research _The History of
Pugachev_, about the Cossack insurrections that almost unseated
Catherine the Great, Pushkin himself had been mistaken for a
Petersburg official doing his rounds.

Pushkin’s experience was reappropriated by Gogol who touched it up,
embroidering it with his own unique slapstick magic, and transformed
it into one of Russia’s best-known comic pieces—funnier than hell,
as he said. He never gives a name to the town where the action takes
place; we know, though, it’s really somewhere, outside the Russian
capital, miles away from the glitz of Petersburg, a generic small town
that Gogol knew firsthand from his upbringing. “Why, you might
gallop three years away from here,” someone says in _The Government
Inspector_, “and still end up nowhere.” In the play, the town’s
mayor, an old fogey who’s a little bent, gets wind of the visiting
government inspector, expected to arrive any day from the capital. The
announcement causes great commotion—everybody knows the district
isn’t the most honest.

Gogol’s cast comprises the town’s cronies—the mayor, the judge,
the school inspector, the chief of police, the doctor, warden of
charities, postmaster, and a few lackies, together with the mayor’s
wife and daughter. The mayor frets that shopkeepers and townsfolk will
spill the beans on his administration. “They’ve been complaining
that I squeeze them hard,” he says, “but as God is my witness if I
do sometimes accept a little trifle from them I do it without any ill
feeling.” The judge warns everybody that “you better watch out, or
we’ll find ourselves in hot water!” Thus the stage is set for the
inspector’s imminent arrival, and town leaders cover their backs,
gloss over the bribes and petty extortions, sweep the streets, and try
to stay sober. “Damn it,” says the mayor, “if the inspector asks
why the hospital chapel—you know, the one for which funds were
allocated five years ago—hasn’t been built yet, don’t forget to
say that we did start it, but it burned down.”

After a while, somebody notices that the young man from the city,
along with his manservant, have been running up a hefty tab at the
inn. Pretty soon minds begin to run away with themselves. “You know
that young gent,” one yokel says, “is an official from Petersburg.
His name is Ivan Aleksandrovich Khlestakov. There’s something fishy
about the way he’s been behaving. Been here for a fortnight and
never sets foot outside the place, has everything charged to his
account and won’t pay a copeck for anything.”

And so Gogol’s play advances in vaudeville fashion with a case of
mistaken identity, as Khlestakov, a featherbrained, cash-strapped
wastrel from Petersburg on his way to cadge money off his father’s
estate, becomes the said government inspector. (In Ronald Wilks’s
Penguin translation, the script is refreshingly idiomatic and slangy,
true to Gogol’s, underscoring the genius of his wordplay and ear for
the language spoken by real people.)

When Khlestakov first encounters the town officials cozying up to him,
buttering him up, he’s oblivious to what’s happening. It’s his
foot servant, Osip, more intelligent than his master, who cottons on,
and warns Khlestakov not to milk it for too long before they’re
outed as imposters. Get out while the going is good. But Khlestakov
has none of it. Hilarious scenes unfold. A spread is put on for him,
and he’s invited to lodge at the mayor’s house, shown around the
charitable institutions and schools. Bemused, he meets personally
one-on-one each town official, touching them up for a few hundred
rubles here and there, for which they gladly oblige. Before long,
Khlestakov grows into the role, begins to believe in his own lofty
status, starts laying it on thick about his importance as a
departmental head, honored and respected by the Tsar, hobnobbing with
his “old pal” Pushkin.

The townsfolk are enamored by such an illustrious personage; and, like
Chichikov, that other imposter from _Dead Souls_ (a tale,
incidentally, also sparked by Pushkin), fawn over him, anointing their
own egos in the process. Khlestakov winds up the mayor’s wife,
flirts with her, then glibly proposes to their daughter Marya, playing
and preying on everyone’s delusions of grandeur. The mayor tells the
town’s storekeepers, who’ve hitherto been griping about the
squeeze the mayor put on them: “I’m not marrying my daughter off
to some little jerk, but to a man of the likes of whom the world has
never seen, a man who can do anything. Anything!”

Sounding a little like someone in office we know, wreaking revenge on
all and sundry who’ve crossed him, “I’ll teach those sneaky
bastards complaining about me, eh,” the mayor says, “I want the
names of all those who’ve been moaning about me—especially those
filthy scribblers who concocted petitions for them.” He calls a
meeting of the town officials, announcing to everyone how his luck has
changed, how from now on he and his wife will be installing themselves
in a plush Petersburg pad, mingling in higher circles, with
aristocrats, and that his new son-in-law will ensure he’s promoted
to some important post. The mayor’s wife is already bragging about
her husband becoming a general, grumbling that “the air here is, I
must say, so very_ provincial_” (Gogol’s emphasis). Meanwhile,
Khlestakov and Osip split the scene, supposedly exit on business,
vowing to return the next day, or the day after that—but we know
it’s not true.

The fantasy world Gogol creates comes crashing down when the
postmaster rushes in with an opened letter in his hand, written by
Khlestakov, addressed to a journalist friend of his in Petersburg. It
was about to be dispatched special delivery, yet the postmaster
couldn’t resist peeking inside it, breaking the seal, and reading
its contents. “I was driven by some supernatural force,” he says.
“I was about to send it off, but curiosity the likes of which I’d
never felt before got the better of me. ‘I can’t open it, I
can’t’, I thought, but then something kept tugging at me, drawing
me on.”

The mayor is livid: “How dare you open the private letter of such a
powerful personage!” “Well, that’s just it,” the postmaster
says, “he’s not powerful at all and he’s not even a personage!
He’s a complete nobody, just a little squirt.” Reading the letter
aloud, the postmaster says: “the whole town took me for some
governor general…. You’d die laughing—they’re all such
dreadful freaks. Now, those little sketches you write for the
magazine—why not stick them in? Take the mayor, for example. He’s
as stupid as a mule.”

It all hits like a bombshell. “Well,” says the mayor, head in
hands, “he’s finished me off! I’m a broken man, played out. All
I can see are pigs’ snouts everywhere instead of faces.” Everyone
is bewildered. Then the judge wonders, asking a question that is
perhaps the whole point of Gogol’s play, maybe even the whole
problem with contemporary politics: “_How did it happen, gentlemen?
How could we have blundered like that?_”

“See how your mayor’s been duped,” says the mayor to himself.
“Fool! Imbecile! Blockhead! [_Shaking his fist at himself._] You
thick-nosed idiot—taking that little squirt, that bloody pipsqueak
for a powerful personage.”

I can just picture him now, bowling along to the sound of jingling
bells, letting the whole world know about it! And if that’s not bad
enough being a laughingstock already, along will come some hack, some
miserable pen-pusher and stick us all in a comedy…. Ooh—you lot!
I’d like to get my hands on all you blasted scribblers. Ooh, you
lousy hacks, damned liberals, devil’s spawn! That’s what really
hurts! The scribbler won’t give a rap for rank or reputation as long
as the audience grins from ear to ear and claps his hands. [_Stamps
furiously on floor._] _What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at
yourselves, that’s what!_

These lines were Gogol’s _coup de grace_, words that in the
performance of _The Government Inspector_ the mayor turns to the
audience, addressing their laughter. It was Gogol’s killer ploy. As
audiences watched a tale of corruption and misdeeds in office, they
found themselves implicated in the plot, bearing the brunt of
Gogol’s jokes, of his lampooning and pillorying. In laughing at the
mayor, they were laughing at themselves, and this, for Gogol, was the
crux of his comic theater: _the shock of recognition_.

Gogol’s famous finale act is his so-called “Dumb” (or
“Mute”) scene. A gendarme enters the stage, just as the mayor has
taunted the audience, proclaiming the following news: “The official
who has just arrived from St. Petersburg by Imperial command requires
your presence at the inn immediately. [_These words strike like a
thunderbolt. All the ladies cry out at once in astonishment. The whole
group suddenly changes position and stands as if turned to stone._]”
Each actor assumes a speechless pose, arms stretched out, heads thrown
back; others squat on the floor or stand toward each other, mouths
gaping, eyes popping, transformed into pillars. “The petrified group
maintains this position for about a minute and a half. ”

Laughing and thinking

When Gogol wrote his notes on _The Government Inspector_, his
“after-thoughts” upon fleeing Russia in 1837, he’d corrected
several scenes, added and subtracted from his original text. He’d
especially reworked Act V, disappointed by how poorly the dénouement
had been interpreted in earlier performances, rectifying it with
instructions about its proper enactment. He didn’t like the
over-the-top vaudeville nature of the acting and scripting, either. He
wanted a comedy that was genuinely funny, yet somehow deep, its
laughter profound—it wasn’t mere amusement he wanted to create,
something entertaining only for an evening out.

Gogol was clear that the play shouldn’t be over-acted. “Beware of
falling into caricature,” he says. It was message for his actors.
“The actor,” he says,

must make a special effort to be more modest, unpretentious, and
dignified than the character he is playing. The less the actor thinks
about being funny or making the audience laugh, the more the comic
elements of his part will come through. The ridiculous will emerge
spontaneously through the very seriousness with which each character
is occupied with his own affairs…Only the audience, from its
detached position, can perceive the vanity of their concerns. But they
themselves [the actors] do not joke at all and have no inkling that
anybody is laughing at them.

The character of Khlestakov, the bogus inspector, bothered Gogol most
of all. While an evident mediocrity, frivolous and deceitful,
Khlestakov is also cunning and malicious. There is, in short,
something sinister about him. To create him solely as a laughingstock
is to miss the point, miss the menace of a character who isn’t only
a buffoon and clown. He is that, too, of course. And yet, says Gogol,
Khlestakov “doesn’t bluff. He forgets he’s lying and believes
what he says. He has become expansive…people are listening to
him…. He’s sincere, completely frank, and in telling lies shows
the stuff he’s made of…he lies with calculation, like a theatrical
braggard; he lies with feeling; his eyes convey the pleasure it gives
him.” Khlestakov is a “man who tells cock-and-bull stories
enthusiastically, with gusto, who’s unaware how words spring from
his lips, who, at the very moment he’s lying, has absolutely no idea
that he is doing so. He merely relates his perpetual fantasies, what
he would like to achieve, as if these fantasies of his imagination had
already become reality.” It sounds disturbingly like somebody we
know, the head of a large country vowing to make it great again.

Gogol says he chose an anonymous town for the play, a town of the
imagination, largely because dishonesty and double-talk
is _everywhere _in human society. The real point here is the
consummate ease with which political systems can be hijacked and
debased, replaced by a pretense wherein higher up officials, as well
as lower down minions, feather their own nests, line their pockets
with favors and finance. Scamming becomes institutionalized at all
levels, the functioning logic of the system itself, so widespread that
it gets embedded in everybody’s minds. Honesty gets you nowhere. The
only honorable character, says Gogol, is _laughter_. Indeed, laughter
for Gogol is the sole _positive_ character in the play. But then
again, whose laughter? What are you laughing at? Well, you’re
laughing at yourselves, that’s what—or else you should be. “Let
us banish corruption from our souls!” says Gogol. “There exists a
weapon, a scourge, that can drive it out. Laughter, my worthy
countrymen! Laughter, which our base passions fear so! Laughter,
created so that we might deride whatever dishonors the true beauty of
humans.”

Could there ever be real laughter and the _shock of
recognition_ again in theater? Is there still some way art the likes
of which Gogol wrote can be performed to help transform how people
think about politics and our political leaders—about ourselves? Is
there a point in our lives when the shock of recognition signals
enough is enough and that this absurdity on stage, in our political
life, has to stop, that we’ve been duped by imposters for long
enough now, that it’s high time we laugh at them and laugh at
ourselves for believing them, for applauding their antics in mass
adulation. Maybe what Gogolian theater can bring us isn’t just the
shock of recognition but _misrecognition_: those lies aren’t going
to reach their ideological target anymore; we can fend them off by not
recognizing ourselves in them.

In this respect, misrecognition becomes vital, the reluctance of
spectators to identify with the spectacle being watched. There’s no
complicity between the two, no pity or sentimentality, no anger or
disgust—only a sort of _distancing_ that counteracts any possible
emotional empathy audiences develop with the characters. Gogol never
lets this happen. His scenes move too rapidly, never let anybody
reflect. There are no heroes in his plays, no moralizing, no dichotomy
between good guys and bad guys, between the deviants and the virtuous;
rarely is there a moment on stage when sanity prevails, when everybody
seems on solid ground.

Gogol wants laughter to prompt a _thinking_ response from his
audiences, laughter that fosters not hot _feeling_ outburst but
critical interpretation. Maybe this critical interpretation comes
afterward, after the audiences go home. Gogol was a fan of
Aristophanes’ drama yet sought no classical ideal of theater, where
repressed energy erupts into what Aristotle called _catharsis_—a
stirring emotional release, usually at the play’s finale. That all
sounds like the din of demagogic rage. Gogol wants to snub any
hyperbolic triumph. In laughing at the cast, and in laughing at
oneself, a public might cease to identify with what they’re
watching. They might find a critical position on the outside and not
get taken in on the inside. It’s precisely this critical distance
that needs to be carried over into real life, where it might promote a
more resilient human value.

Rescripting Gogol

In 2025, one can’t help but think of a rescripting of _The
Government Inspector_. The daily news makes ugly reading and yearns to
bring Gogol’s play back to life—daily news about DOGE and its
shenanigans, about its falsehoods and scams. Muskesque government
inspectors slash and burn federal coffers, ax workforces, eliminate
social security agencies and overseas development organizations, seize
control of technology across government agencies, dismantle regulatory
frameworks, close down helplines and the Financial Protection Bureau,
stripping away safeguards against ordinary people getting ripped off,
even ruined. Even the name “Department of Government Efficiency”
sounds like a nineteenth-century Gogolian throwback! Remember how he
starts his story _The Overcoat_, “in one of the government
departments, but perhaps I better not say exactly _which_ one. For
no one’s touchier than people in government departments, or, in
short, _any_ kind of official body…. And so, to avoid any further
unpleasantness, we had better call the department in question _a
certain department_” (Gogol’s emphases).

When I say “rescripting” of Gogol, I mean role reversal. _What if
the whole logic of Gogol’s play is reversed_? What if the townsfolk,
the public, were honest, doing their jobs, maybe dragging their feet a
bit here and there, making errors at the workplace and in life—but
basically upright and conscientious. Instead, it’s the government
inspectors of _a certain department_ who are corrupt, who’re on
the make, who’re the real imposters. They have no real mandate;
it’s a sham that they’re able to wield power. Everybody they hunt
down is legitimately scarred, running around and wanting to show
everything in the best light, even while privately knowing they’ve
nothing to hide. The arbitrariness of the system comes from the top,
from the alleged government inspectors, from “officials” without
official credentials, their edict ideologically driven to root out
political opposition. Wastage and efficiency are ruses to cost-cut and
dismantle the public sector, that as they turn a blind eye to
corporate welfare. (Elon Musk’s business empire—Tesla, SpaceX,
etc.—has sucked up thirty-eight billion dollars of government
funding in one shape or another, through contracts, loans, subsidies,
and tax credits.)

“Rescripting” means retitling Gogol’s play _The Citizen
Inspector_. A message resounds through the corridors of a _certain
department_, that an audit is going to take place, a people’s audit,
that a representative of the people, of the tax paying public, “The
Citizen Inspector,” will be arriving anytime, soon, to monitor
corruption and to root out the inefficiency of DOGE “efficiency.”
They’ll be delving into the books and accounts of this faraway
unaccountable office buried in the bowels of this certain Washington
department. On behalf of the people, the Citizen Inspector demands
absolute transparency and cooperation.

One suspects that the comic antics of the play would derive from the
natural idiocy of the cast involved, by its bumpkin nature, that DOGE
is running around not really knowing what they’re doing—or else
maybe they know full well what they’re doing and it’s precisely
that which is the sick joke, a gag Gogol could tell well. Laugher
would arise from the serious absurdity they proclaim. In the end, we
can laugh aloud at the cast and laugh at ourselves for letting
ourselves be taken in by this cast. (Was anybody really taken in?)
We’ll die laughing at such dreadful freaks. At the play’s finale,
they’ll be another dumb scene. A petrified group of “officials”
maintains its position for a minute and a half; a gendarme has just
stormed in announcing the illegality of their activities, and that all
are summoned before the People’s Court to be tried for crimes
against humanity…

_ANDY MERRIFIELD is an independent scholar and the author of numerous
books, including Dialectical Urbanism (Monthly Review Press, 2002),
Magical Marxism (Pluto Press, 2011), and, most recently, The Amateur
(Verso Books, 2018), What We Talk About When We Talk About Cities (and
Love) (OR Books, 2018), and __Marx, Dead and Alive_
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Review Press, 2020). He can be contacted at
[email protected]._

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