Shigalyov attempts to create a totally free utopian society but cannot even make it work on paper, his construction concluding with "unlimited despotism". Dostoevsky's fictional failed political order predicts the later fall of the Russian communist movement into an oppressive totalitarian regime. It also suggests that such an outcome is implicit in the architecture of unlimited freedom, and cannot be avoided.
             How is it that one can aim for complete individual freedom, end up with a system embodying the exact opposite, and still declare that "there can be no other"? Long-eared Shigalyov wrote a book that was obviously quite interesting but (without going too far into another theme of the novel) showed the distortion his thoughts had undergone thanks to the presence of "demons" in his mind. Nevertheless, the crux of his argument was laid out fairly well by himself and the lame schoolteacher: Shigalyov "got entangled in [his] own data" while figuring out ways for a society to reach the pinnacle of communism and found that, in the end, classes still must exist. In fact, nine-tenths of the people formed a subordinate class whose will was to be removed; entire generations were to be reeducated and made into a "herd". This "herd" was characterized by its unlimited obedience to the ruling class and its "primeval innocence" attained through the reeducation process. The occupants of its ranks also had to work to support the rulers. The other tenth of the population was "granted freedom of person and unlimited rights over the remaining nine-tenths". The disastrous changes Russia went through from the Bolshevik revolution to totalitarianism under Stalin would have been comforting to Shigalyov, if only in the sense that his conclusions of the end result would have been validated.
             Shigalyov's class society went against its expressed goals of equalit...