Gogol inspires funeral fraud

A provincial civil servant - apparently inspired by Nikolai Gogol's classic Russian satire, Dead Souls - has been arrested for inventing 250 dead citizens to claim funeral grants from the government.

The woman, who has not been named, managed to defraud the state of 330,000 roubles (about £8,200) over two years, after collecting hundreds of state subsidies paid out to help needy families bury their dead.

The hero of Gogol's novel, Paul Chichikov, a retired government official, planned to make himself rich by exploiting the bureaucratic chaos within the 19th century Russian state to buy dead souls (serfs who had died, but who were still listed on the tax rolls) from provincial landowners. Paper ownership of these non-existent serfs would, he hoped, boost his social standing and act as collateral against large loans.

The present-day government official in Kolomna, a small town 100 miles south-east of Moscow, exploited the inefficiency of the modern system: she persuaded impoverished citizens to sell her the rights to fabricated dead relatives in order to collect their burial allowances.

Using her position as the acting head of a state benefit payment office, she talked willing Kolomna residents into taking forged papers, authorising the issue of a funeral grant, to their local post office, where they received 830 roubles (£21).

Under the deal, they returned most of the money to the civil servant, keeping just 50 roubles (£1.25) for themselves.

The town's poorest inhabitants were eager to participate in the fraud, grateful for even the small payment they received. Freelance taxi drivers and local soldiers were frequently recruited to provide imaginary dead relatives for the city official.

After an internal audit uncovered the scam, the civil servant was imprisoned, just as Chichikov was. A trial will begin next week and she faces up to 10 years in jail.

The local prosecutor, Gennady Lichikov, sensitive to the very mention of Gogol, who cruelly ridiculed provincial prosecutors in his plays, admitted that there were parallels between the author's 1842 satire and the Kolomna scandal.

"This case, just like the immortal Gogol's work, involves dead souls," he said. "The hero of Dead Souls bought up the documents of non-existent people in order to make himself a rich landowner. The heroine [sic] of this case has manipulated the documents of non-existent people for her personal profit."

But, he added, the readiness of local inhabitants to sell off fictitious family members for such pitiful sums of money reflected a state of utter destitution more reminiscent of Maxim Gorky's play, The Lower Depths.