Shatov is Stavrogin's disciple who believes that only the Russian people is the people that carries God. He was born a serf of Varvara Petrovna, was a student of Stepan Trofimovich, and is killed by Pyotr's quintet in the Stavrogins' park.
He was expelled from the university, married Marie in Geneva and lost her within three weeks, went to America with Kirillov, returned poor, and lives on the upper floor of Filippov's house. He changed his ideas abroad and leapt to the opposite extreme. He tells Stepan that his generation never loved the people because it did not know them: one cannot love what one does not know, and whoever has no people has no God.
On the night of Part Two, he pours out to Stavrogin the complete doctrine: no people has organized itself through science and reason; each people lives by seeking a god of its own, and God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from beginning to end. The people, he says, is the body of God. Stavrogin observes that he lowers God to an attribute of the nation; Shatov replies that, on the contrary, he raises the people to God.
Asked directly whether he believes in God, Shatov answers with a chain of "I believe": in Russia, in its Orthodoxy, in the body of Christ, in a new coming that will take place in Russia. And he can only manage to say that he will believe in God. A whole theology of the people, without the personal step that it presupposes: it is the barest confession in the book.