Embezzlers

This novel, published in 1927, is a satire of Soviet bureaucracy. The embezzlers of the title embark on an embarrassing tour that takes them from Moscow to Leningrad and Kharkov and several small towns en route. They journey in pursuit of the high life but end up in abject poverty and captivity. The satire is a commentary on the greed of individuals in the context of the New Economic Policy begun in 1921.

The author, Valentin Kataev (born 28 January 1897), grew up in Odessa in present-day Ukraine. In 1915, without completing his secondary education, he volunteered to serve in the artillery of the Russian Imperial Army. During his active service, he was gassed and twice wounded and by the time of the October Revolution was an invalid in hospital. He fought in the civil war, at first as a White Army volunteer, and was later imprisoned for eight months. His first poem was published in 1910; he began writing short stories during the war; Embezzlers was his first novel.

At the start of the novel the trend for embezzling is introduced:
“They grab some government money, hop in a cab and away they go, nobody knows where. I imagine they drift around from town to town. I ran across an article today, for instance, where it said that in October at least 1,500 people left like that from different offices around Moscow.”
This information is told to Filipp Prokhorov, the chief accountant, by Nikita, a colleague. Filipp sometimes approached his work “with a sovereign air”:
“he would imagine himself to be nothing less than an experienced general courageously and astutely directing enormously intricate military manoeuvres from his vantage point on a hill above the battlefield.”
His military career had fed his imagination. He served in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and then was made a captain in the army reserves. The First World War “hardly bothered [this] reserve captain at all” as “thanks to his wife’s connections and the efforts of the firm for which he was working at the time [he] contrived to get an exemption.”

Filipp’s partner in the embezzlement spree is his cashier, Vanechka. When on the expedition he returns to the main town (Kalinov) near his childhood home, he perceives it as he did before he left home:
“It was as if nothing had happened to him since that childhood... no draft in 1916, no service in a field bakery, no company headquarters in Moscow, no evacuation stations, no Red Army guard battalion...”