Monday
A Gogol reference recently showed up in Ukrainian war news so of course I jumped on it. It’s in connection with the secret service officials that Putin has had arrested. The reference appeared in a tweet by one Andrzej Koslowski, a Warsaw math professor who has been tracking developments. The FSB is Russia’s current iteration of the Soviet Union’s KGB:
As he always does, the phenomenal @christogrozev telephoned the FSB generals reported to have been placed under house arrest to see if they answer the phone. They didn’t pick up the receiver while others did. The arrests seem to be connected to literally billions that were spent by the FSB on recruiting […] in the Ukrainian government, military, security services, universities etc, to help with the coup that was meant to give Russia control of Ukraine. instead they bought “dead souls” and stole the money.
Dead Souls (1842) is about a conman (I’ve compared him to Trump here and here) who is buying dead serfs from Russian landowners. Apparently, landowners are taxed for the number of serfs they have working their land and, because the census is out of date, often they are taxed for people who are no longer alive. The scoundrel Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov figures that, once he buys a substantial number of these “dead souls,” he can take out an enormous loan against them and pocket the money.
If the Gogol reference is literal and Koslowski correct, then the people to whom FSB claimed to have paid to become Russian sympathizers were actually dead. While I don’t know if this is true, it’s consistent with other reports of Russian corruption we’ve heard—says, oligarchs siphoning off money from Russia’s military and other public trusts to purchase estates, yachts, foreign apartments, and other niceties.
In any events, the only Ukrainians cheering Russia’s advances would have to be dead souls since the live Ukrainians appears universally opposed.