4 ideas
Governor Brudasty governs Glupov with a small organ in his skull that plays only two phrases: 'I won't tolerate it!' and 'I'll ruin you!' The fraud surfaces only when the mechanism breaks and his head has to be sent away for repair. The episode tests the claim that authoritarian administration needs no mind behind it, only a small repertoire of threats that the governed will obey on their own.
The Headbangers are a tribe so inept that they knead the Volga with oatmeal. Having failed at self-rule, they go searching for a prince willing to govern them. The prince who finally accepts announces at once that he will flog them, and they accept this as the natural price of order, naming their town Glupov. The founding myth makes subjugation a voluntary contract that the ruled initiate themselves, rather than a conquest imposed from outside.
The last governor, Ugryum-Burcheev, razes Glupov to build a geometrically perfect barracks town where every life is regimented in straight lines. He orders the river dammed because its flow offends his plan, but the water keeps washing the dam away. He abandons the site, and his rule ends when a mysterious 'It' sweeps in and he vanishes into thin air. The episode models totalizing rationalist utopia as doomed because living processes cannot be ordered into stillness.
The history is narrated through archivists who record famines, fires, floggings and absurd decrees in a respectful, matter-of-fact tone that treats each governor as legitimate. This dutiful voice makes the grotesque look routine. It lets the reader see how official record-keeping normalizes abuse simply by narrating it as ordinary succession.