5 ideas
Every office he visits to prove he is alive needs a document that only a living, registered citizen can obtain. He stands in front of the officials, yet the paper outranks the man, and the state goes on treating him as a non-person. It is a concrete case of administrative records overriding physical reality.
Bureaucratic power works less by saying no than by making the person who could say yes permanently unavailable. He is out, in a meeting, transferred, or 'come back tomorrow.' Refusal becomes endless deferral, so no one can be blamed and the petitioner has nothing to push against.
Read the small bribe, the favor and the 'tea money' as the system's actual operating procedure rather than a breakdown of it. Official rules are made rigid enough that almost nothing moves without an informal payment. The formal process then exists mainly to create the friction that gatekeepers can sell relief from.
Nesin's method is to follow an official procedure faithfully, one reasonable step at a time, until it reaches an obviously insane result. Because each step is accurate, the reader cannot dismiss the story as exaggeration. The absurdity is shown to live in the system's own logic, not in the satirist's distortion.
Where direct criticism of the state brings prosecution, laughter lets writer and reader share a verdict on power without stating it as a charge. The joke is deniable enough to publish but clear enough to be understood. Its danger still shows in what happened to the writer: Nesin was jailed repeatedly for his work.