Among the governors of Glupov are Dementy Brudasty, nicknamed The Music Box for a mechanical device in his head, designed to replace a human brain; Vasilisk Borodavkin, who wages 'the wars of enlightenment' against the Glupovites; Erast Grustilov, a friend of the Russian sentimentalist author and high-ranking official Nikolai Karamzin.

The last governor of Glupov is Ugryum-Burcheev, who rebuilds the town into a totalitarian state according the administrative ideal of the Russian Empire and to his utopia of a 'straight line', intended to make everyone equal in subordinacy to him as a godlike leader.

There is something of Swift in Saltyko[v]; that serious and grim comedy, that realism — prosaic in its lucidity amidst the wildest play of fancy — and, above all, that constant good sense — I may even say that moderation — kept up in spite of so much violence and exaggeration of form.

After interest in the chronicle increased in the 20th century, it survived various interpretations, and it was later noted that Saltykov attacks the "situation" in which the helpless and passive masses obey the 'governors', the bearers of power and exclusivity; that he conveys his ideas of history and the role which the people play in it through such satirical devices as the grotesque and "laughter through tears"; that the author in his satire of Utopia (Utopian socialism) in his description of Ugryum-Burcheev's rule predicted the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and anticipated famous dystopias such as Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Virginia Llewellyn Smith notes: "Unlike Gogol, Saltykov never gives the impression that he himself scarcely distinguished fantasy from reality, and one result is that his narrative has moments of genuine pathos."