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dead
souls
This page considers the 'dead souls' industry - making
an illicit profit by employing dead (or non-existent)
people.
It covers -
introduction
Nikolai Gogol's 1842 Dead Souls recounts the
rise and fall of bureaucrat-turned-conman Chichikov, a
buyer of 'dead souls' in a Tsarist Russia where people
were a commodity.
Chichikov, arrives in the town of N', visiting provincial
landowners with an offer to 'buy' those dead serfs - dushi
('dead souls') - whose identity still features on the
official register (updated though a census every decade),
thereby giving the landowner an immediate cash benefit
and relieving the property owner of the obligation of
paying tax on possession of human livestock.
Dead serfs have no value as labourers but from Chichikov's
perspective are a useful derivative, one that he can deploy
in reinventing himself as a member of the gentry. Ownership
of one hundred souls or more provides a basis for legal
identity as a gentleman; just as usefully the souls can
be mortgaged to a bank (providing capital for buying land
and other souls, dead or alive) or even claimed as an
matter of compensation if the government pays off landowners
for freeing the serfs.
phantom soldiers
Gogol's picaresque narrative reflects the tradition in
early-modern and pre-modern societies of officials - particularly
in the military - claiming remuneration for people who
had expired or who indeed had never existed.
That is unsurprising in epochs where army captains and
other people were allocated a lump sum for distribution
to people under their control and where there was little
independent auditing of whether the money went to real
people. Literature on pre-1780s armies thus highlights
problems with underperformance of military units composed
of 'phantom soldiers' - people who were either wholly
fictitious or who simply did not turn up for duty (eg
because they were dead or safely home in bed).
The phantom soldier problem did not disappear with modern
bureaucracies, although its extent has been greatly reduced
by identity verification mechanisms.
At the turn of last century UK local government accountant
extracted around £80,000 by employing phantom teachers,
a scam discussed in 'Certified Correct: The Great Wolverhampton
Council Fraud' by John Smith in Corruption in Urban
Politics and Society, Britain 1780-1950 (Aldershot:
Ashgate 2007) edited by Smith & James Moore.
Ports, shipyards and other industrial operations similarly
struggled with padded payrolls.
The 1970s saw suggestions that between 20% and 30% of
the armed forces of Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam were
phantoms. More recently there has been criticism that
the US government has been disbursing substantial funds
to agents in Afghanistan and Iraq for payment of security
personnel who either do not exist or who simply do not
bother to show up for work.
Form an international governance perspective phantoms
are of concern in relation to peacekeeping and democratisation
initiatives, with armies and paramilitary or insurgent
groups exaggerating their numbers and thence receiving
funds as part of demilitarisation aid.
It is highlighted in Deactivating War: How Societies
Demobilise After Armed Conflict (NDC Occasional Paper)
(Rome: NATO Defense College 2006) by Natalia Springer.
next page (gender)
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