The phenomenon of “phantom soldiers” in the modern Russian military exhibits a striking conceptual parallel to Dead Souls (1842) by Nikolai Gogol. In the novel, the protagonist, Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, travels through the Russian countryside purchasing the legal ownership of deceased serfs¨Dso-called “dead souls”¨Dwho remain officially registered as alive due to outdated census records. He intends to use these fictitious assets as collateral to secure a substantial state loan. A comparable mechanism appears in contemporary reports of military corruption: officers allegedly retain deceased or missing soldiers on official rosters, thereby continuing to receive and appropriate their salaries. In both cases, bureaucratic inertia enables the transformation of death into an economic resource. This practice constitutes a shadow system operating outside formal legality and governed instead by informal norms (по понятиям). At a deeper level of abstraction, both phenomena reveal a structural equivalence between death and capital: the dead are rendered administratively “alive” in order to circulate within systems of value. This suggests not merely corruption, but a cultural logic in which death becomes fungible and economically instrumentalized. The broader social context of such practices may be understood through the lens of systemic violence. Vladimir Sorokin has described violence as a dense, opaque substance¨D“a black, extremely heavy frozen material”¨Dthat resists transparency and explanation (Sorokin, interview with Snob, 2017). Within this framework, violence functions as a binding force within institutional life, including the military. This raises a theoretical question in relation to Walter Benjamin’s essay Critique of Violence (1921): should such practices be interpreted as instances of mythic violence, divine violence, or a hybrid form? The monetization of death in both literary and contemporary contexts suggests a persistence of mythic violence embedded within modern bureaucratic systems.
