During school days, a game of volleyball filled the classroom recess, only to be followed by sprinting to the next class when the bell rang. Sometimes arriving first was impossible because the score needed to be settled, yet mid-lesson everyone settled into place. The narrator presents a prompt to the panting volleyball players to fill in a quick answer. If the questioner gives up, a long, artistic reflection on life’s limits follows. In one moment, a question arrives: who would describe the phrase “The monster oblo, naughty, huge, looking and barking”? Translated from Russian, that line roughly means “The beast is round, mean, enormous, with many mouths and barking.”
“Clearly, this is bureaucracy in action,” the text observes. In the Government Inspector, Khlestakov exclaims: “And at that very moment thirty-five thousand couriers!” The point is that many more people are involved in sending these couriers, and the outcome leaves many speechless in the face of bureaucratic moves.
Chichikov’s remark to Manilov rings out: “I won’t deviate from civil law, though it harms me in service; duty is sacred, but law leaves me feeling foolish.” Such lines are cited to reflect how local bureaucratic life is viewed from the outside.
The author does not simply praise Radishchev’s epigraph from the 1790 Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, where the beast serves as an allegory for the autocratic serf system. Instead, the piece shows how the system persists and how bureaucracy enjoys enduring prominence, sometimes eclipsing other concerns. The central argument is clear: bureaucratic systems resist renewal, much like a stubborn habit that followers defend with conviction. The author’s stance mirrors a belief in the theater of public life, where passion for the craft often competes with institutional inertia.
Managing a set of complex rules without full understanding is challenging, yet bureaucracy survives by simple moves. The first trick is to combine or separate, sometimes without clear rationale, leaving ordinary people to puzzle over the logic.
In Moscow, a school network once merged with kindergartens, a change explained by a department head with a curious analogy: cucumbers pick evenly in a good marinade, so mixing ordinary schools with so‑called deviant ones should also yield balanced outcomes. The result is a system with thousands of students and hundreds of teachers, a scale that seems unstoppable. A notable figure, formerly responsible for educational technology at a major university, now leads a department dedicated to training future educators who may approach the art of teaching with a practical, if unconventional, eye.
Bureaucracy is depicted as a universal force. The ministry that absorbed research institutes once managed by a national academy seeks consolidation and campus moves, sometimes with unclear reasons. The adage about easier tasks sometimes being harder to execute is invoked to explain these shifts.
At the start of 2023, defense ministry reorganizations created new regional districts and reassembled brigades into divisions, a move credited to leadership changes. The text notes promises of efficiency possibly costing more in the near term and questions whether the moment is right for such a push, given pressing national priorities. This narrative questions whether military reform can align with broader societal needs during ongoing operations and other urgent issues.
Saltykov-Shchedrin’s influence appears again through references to city governance notes that urge subordinates to be tough and not look away. The piece connects these lines to a broader view of public life, suggesting that even in modern times, a certain stubbornness shapes how systems operate. The author recalls a school reform in Moscow that moved toward a five-day week with long school days and a crowded schedule, a change that seemed difficult to imagine yet became a part of daily life. International rankings and local university efforts hint at a tension between educational ambitions and structural realities, where access to higher education sometimes extends beyond the prerequisites of secondary schooling.
There is a recurring sense that the country needs practical scientific and engineering solutions more than an abundance of publications in foreign journals. The text highlights a common sentiment: the value of action over pages of articles, especially when leadership and policy are involved. A familiar observation about hierarchical systems suggests that people tend to ascend to their own level of competence, a critique often expressed in discussions about bureaucratic growth. When management layers exceed a certain size, the need for a clear objective can fade from view.
A defining feature of bureaucracy is secrecy. The narrative recalls classroom lessons about the cautious stance toward sensitive questions, where official responses may be framed as not permitting answers. The two enduring questions emerge: who bears responsibility, and what should be done next. Two centers of need were established to address issues locally and in other regions, echoing a recurring theme in public administration: collaboration is essential, yet results remain uneven in practice. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s line about the inevitable mistrust of public officials in Russia’s history remains a touchstone for readers examining governance.
The bureaucratic framework is portrayed as having universal logic. When questions arise about the allocation of funds for public projects, a clerical explanation sometimes settles on a metaphoric answer about the strength of the devil, a reminder of the limits of human control in large institutions. Decades of investment in technology and programs raise a puzzled question: where do the promised electronic devices, servers, and networks end up? The mystery persists, underscoring the gap between intention and outcome in large systems.
Whether blame should be assigned or not, the sense remains that bureaucracy endures. A British author once suggested that graduating from a prestigious school can grant freedom to act, or not to act, at will; a thought that echoed in early critiques by Karl Marx about state and administration. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s warnings about patriotism and governance resurface as a reminder that power, once accumulated, can steer decisions in unexpected directions. The text ends with a call to understand and engage with the bureaucracy, lest it outpace those who seek to reform it. There is a clear invitation to reflect on public service, to value purposeful effort and, above all, to act—because otherwise the system will determine the course of life for many people.