Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector is widely acknowledged by his peers as a satire aimed at the extensive bureaucracy of nineteenth-century Russian government. In the foreword to The Government Inspector, D. J. Campbell mentions that Gogol admitted, "In The Government Inspector I tried to gather in one heap all that was bad in Russia." Beresford, in his introduction to Gogol's The Government Inspector: A Comedy in Five Acts, explains that through common practices such as "bribery and extortion," many public officials "tyrannized over the local population" in Russian towns. Beresford further describes the state of Russia under this massive bureaucratic system: "The whole of this immense empire was strangled by red tape, cramped by administrative fetters, and oppressed by a monstrous tyranny of paper over people." According to Nigel Brown in his Notes on Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector, Gogol was the first Russian writer to examine the realities of the official world in literature, exposing it through humorous satire. In the play, Hlestakov, a young man mistaken for the government inspector, is actually at the lowest level of the fourteen possible ranks within the Russian civil service hierarchy. His successful impersonation of a higher-ranking public official underscores both the ignorance of the townspeople he deceives and his own exaggerated self-importance. The chaotic setting of the governor's office in the opening scene immediately depicts small-town Russian bureaucracy as absurdly inefficient and unprofessional. The piles of paper and numerous characters with official titles seem to accomplish nothing meaningful. Furthermore, the lack of communication between the small town and the central government in Saint Petersburg suggests that the Russian bureaucracy was so geographically vast that it was impossible to control the conduct of civil servants or the effectiveness of local government offices.

All the town's public officials are thoroughly corrupt. The judge "openly admits to taking bribes," the postmaster casually opens and reads other people's mail, and the police are frequently drunk, fighting, and known to whip women. The most corrupt of them all is the governor, who consistently takes bribes, misappropriates funds meant for church construction, and extorts money from local shopkeepers. Through his satire on the corruption within the Russian bureaucracy, Gogol explores larger themes of human corruption. Beresford claims that the play is "an attack on all forms of moral depravity, of which bribery and corruption are but examples." Due to this universal theme, Beresford argues that "Gogol's play is thus as relevant to the world of the twentieth century as it was to its own time, and it points to a perennial evil of civilized societies." Essentially, as Lavrin notes in his book Gogol, "Gogol was really ridiculing a much wider field of rottenness than the officialdom he knew."

The Government Inspector is a story centered around deception and self-deception. The townspeople convince themselves that Hlestakov is the government inspector, allowing him to take advantage of this misunderstanding for his own gain. Hlestakov becomes so engrossed in his new role that he almost starts to believe he truly is the high-ranking official he is impersonating. Meanwhile, the townspeople try to mislead the supposed inspector about the corruption in their local government, only to end up deceiving themselves. Beresford observes that Gogol used the theme of mistaken identity "to reveal a fundamental state of chaos in human life." Beresford further explains,

It is no coincidence that the plot of most of his works revolves around deception, as he believed deception was at the core of existence. He viewed humans as entangled in a web of confusion and deceit, misled not only by outward appearances but also by their own illusions and falsehoods.