Vladimir Shlapentokh

At the same time, speaking about his disgust of the Orwellian fear present in a totalitarian society, Shlapentokh suggested in his book Fear in Contemporary Society: Its Negative and Positive Effects (2006) the usefulness of Hobbesian fear for the maintenance of order even in such a democratic society as the United States. In his opinion, "positive socialization" and the internalization of positive values is simply not enough to sustain order in Western societies. Without the fear of sanctions, people would violate the law and disturb social order much more often than in a society where order is sustained only by internalized values, a view dominant in American sociology since Talcott Parsons.

At the same time, speaking about his disgust of the Orwellian fear present in a totalitarian society, Shlapentokh suggested in his book Fear in Contemporary Society: Its Negative and Positive Effects (2006) the usefulness of Hobbesian fear for the maintenance of order even in such a democratic society as the United States. In his opinion, "positive socialization" and the internalization of positive values is simply not enough to sustain order in Western societies. Without the fear of sanctions, people would violate the law and disturb social order much more often than in a society where order is sustained only by internalized values, a view dominant in American sociology since Talcott Parsons.

The authoritarian society has become the heart of Shlapentokh's research and writing. In his foremost book on the nature of totalitarianism, A Normal Totalitarian Society (2001), he endeavors to convey his vision of the Soviet Union's evolution from its origin to its end. In this book, Shlapentokh rejects the views of two warring camps in Sovietology: the faction that views the Soviet system only as a regime, which was imposed on the Russians by a band of ideological fanatics and adventurists, and the opposing group, or the revisionist camp, which tended to perceive the USSR as a type of pluralistic society that had ample participation from the masses within the government.

In his study of anti-Americanism in Russia and in other countries, Shlapentokh insisted that it was the elite and not ordinary people who inspired anti-Americanism, and that the anti-American sentiment of ordinary people was usually a product of the media which was controlled by the elites (see: The New Elite In Post-Communist Eastern Europe 1999. Edited by Shlapentokh et al.; "Moscow's Values: Masses and the Elite," in Nation Building and Common Values in Russia 2003; "Russian Civil Society: Elite Versus Mass Attitudes Toward Democratization" in Democratization, Comparisons, Confrontations and Contrasts 2008).

In a book written in collaboration with historian Mikhail Loiberg and economist Roman Levita, The Province Versus the Center in Russia: From Submission to Rebellion (1997), Shlapentokh analyzes the evolution of the feudal structure in Soviet society during the civil war and the Perestroika era when feudal tendencies were particularly strong. In his book, Contemporary Russia as a Feudal Society: A New Perspective on the Post-Soviet Era (2007), in addition to several articles first published in 1995, Shlapentokh describes three major sectors of post-Soviet Russia: liberal, authoritarian, and feudal, paying special attention to the role of the feudal segment as well to the role of the liberal sector. As he demonstrates in numerous publications on Putin's regime, the significant role of private property in post-Soviet authoritarian society makes Russia's transformation into a totalitarian regime impossible. In his other publications, Shlapentokh, with contributions from Woods, demonstrates how all three major sector models are necessary for the study of many developments in American society, such as the relations between corporations and the government, the impact of money on the election process, private security, and the impact of personal relations on politics, among others.

Instead, Shlapentokh regards the Soviet Union as a quite efficient "normal" totalitarian society with the state as its central institution. The Communist party, the main instrument of the state, through its network, was an efficient coordinator of activities pertaining to all branches of organizations throughout the country, and was able to quickly mobilize resources for military objectives. In fact, the Soviet Union was able to run all elements of society, which was particularly important in allowing Soviet society to reproduce itself. Shlapentokh denies the inevitability of the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s, and believes that if Gorbachev had not launched his ill- conceived reforms, the USSR, which was not endangered unlike tsarist Russia by foreign countries, could have continued to function for many years.

Shlapentokh applies his segmented approach to the analysis of three societies: Soviet society, post-Soviet Russia and the United States. He was one of the first to study the processes of privatization during the post-Stalin era (see: Public and Private Life of the Soviet People 1989; Soviet Ideologies in the Period of Glasnost 1988). Among the private institutions of Soviet society, Shlapentokh paid special attention to friendship as somewhat of an antidote to the might of the Soviet state. In his book Love, Marriage, and Friendship in the Soviet Union (1984) as well as in his memoirs, An Autobiographical Narration of the Role of Fear and Friendship in the Soviet Union (2004), Shlapentokh showed how important friendship was to the everyday life of the Soviet people due to the affordances that it offered through its social network and social capital.

Shlapentokh differentiates between public (open) ideology and the closed (internal or "party") ideology of the elites themselves. He shows, for instance, in his book Soviet Public Opinion and Ideology: The Interaction Between Mythology and Pragmatism (1986), that the "internal ideology," or the ideology of the Soviet ruling elite, strongly differs from public ideology, which is comparable to how the oligarchic ideology of the corporate class is different from public ideology in the United States. The existence of two types of ideologies explains why in most societies there are two channels of information, one for the public and one for "the inner circle." Shlapentokh considers the Soviet public and party ideologies as complex and relatively flexible structures with distinct trends flowing through them, which consequently explains why, with each new leader, ideologies have tended to change substantially (see: Soviet Ideologies in the Period of Glasnost 1988).

Paying the utmost attention to fear in authoritarian and, in particular, totalitarian societies, Shlapentokh organized three conferences dedicated to terror in the Soviet Union and in other repressive regimes. The first of his conference series, entitled "1984," was devoted to Orwell and took place at Michigan State University, appropriately enough in 1984. In Shlapentokh's opinion, being as an outsider, Orwell better understood the essence of Soviet society than many critical analysts inside the country. He insisted that the numerous authors who discussed Orwell ignored or underestimated the contribution that Orwell's 1984 had to the social sciences, such as the discovery of an efficient mechanism that allows people to adapt to any hierarchical organization, from a department at an American University to the Soviet totalitarian society. He also asserts that only "the love of Big Brother" guarantees the individual perfect conformity, which is discussed in Shlapentokh's essay "George Orwell: Russia's Tocqueville," published in a book of compiled scholarly essays on Orwell, George Orwell into the Twentieth Century (2004).

From 1982, Vladimir Shlapentokh served as a consultant to the United States government, regularly reporting on social processes, ideology, and public opinion on post-communist states, including Russia. Vladimir Shlapentokh spoke English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and other Slavic languages.

Shlapentokh also discusses another mechanism of adaptation to the dominant ideology which he labels as "'values for me and values for others," which was initially published in the article "The Study of Values as a Social Phenomenon: the Soviet Case" (Social Forces 1982). In this theory, Shlapentokh claims that many people in various societies, which seemingly subscribe to the strong beliefs of the dominant ideology, actually expect others, but not themselves, to behave according to them. It can be contended that official values are regarded by many people as "gala values," as values not for them personally, but as values for others. These people also expect others, but not themselves, to be consistent in their views.

Vladimir Shlapentokh was born and educated in Kyiv in the former Soviet Union. Shlapentokh conducted the first set of national public opinion surveys in the Soviet Union, working as a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Moscow. By the time he emigrated to the United States in 1979, he had published ten books, as well as several articles on the methodology of sociological studies and various social issues.

No other expert on surveys in the United States has paid as much attention to the veracity of respondents as Shlapentokh has, developing his theories on this issue in two books published in Russian (see: The Empirical Validity of the Statistical Information in Sociological Studies 1973; The Quality of Sociological Information: Validity, Representativeness and Prognostic Potential 2006). Because of his belief in the strong impact that ideology and media had on respondents in sociological studies and polls, Shlapentokh was one of the first in contemporary polling practices, along with fellow sociologist Boris Grushin, to develop the technique of using many different procedures which helped in comparing data from various sources of information, in order to find the most reliable data.

In studying the interaction between ideology and public opinion, Shlapentokh joined, in the early 1970s, phenomenologists Berger and Luckman who focused on the concept of "multiple realities," which supposes that people hold very different images of the same "objective reality." Later on, Shlapentokh analyzed the images of insiders as outsiders in his book, The Soviet Union: Internal and External Perspectives on Soviet Society (2008) written with coauthor Eric Shiraev. Among the insiders, special attention was paid to the ruling elite, the liberal intellectuals, and the average person. The outsiders included the Sovietologists, American media and American public opinion whose models of the Soviet society were in deep contradiction with each other. By all accounts, Shlapentokh with Shiraev made the first attempt in social science to show in a systematic way, with the use of available empirical data, how the same society, its political, economic, and social structures, as well as its culture and history, was perceived so differently by its residents and by foreigners. Shlapentokh rejects relativism in the social sciences, and operates under the concept of "hard reality," which is defined as a reality that can only be delineated by existing objective empirical data. .

Vladimir Shlapentokh began his career in social science as a Soviet sociologist and was one of the founders of a new science which had been forbidden in the USSR until the 1960s. In the 1960s and 1970s, until his emigration to the United States, he was the leading expert on methodology of sociological studies, publishing a number of the first Soviet books on sampling techniques, as well as on survey techniques. These publications served as textbooks for several generations of Russian social scientists. The first popular book on sociology in the USSR, Sociology for All (1970) was a best seller in the country and attracted many young people to the sociology profession.

Shlapentokh was the director of the first national surveys based on random samplings in the 1960s and 1970s, which were the first national scientific surveys in the history of the Soviet Union. The results of these surveys were included in numerous Russian publications, and were also translated into English. He furthermore employed his experience as an empirical sociologist in dozens of studies in the Soviet Union, as well as, much later, for the international project regarding world attitudes towards America in the aftermath of September 11 (see: America: Sovereign Defender or Cowboy Nation? Edited by Shlapentokh together with Woods and Shiraev, 2005).

As Vladimir Shlapentokh's major contribution to social science, his segmented approach theory to the study of society is paramount. The segmented approach breaks with the principles of "system analysis," as formulated in the 1950s-1960s which continues to be generally unchallenged in social science. Shlapentokh contends that it is impossible to explain society with the contribution of just one theoretical model which supposes that the whole society functions according to the principles of a single system. In Shlapentokh's view, most societies are segmented and exhibit a combination of different universal social structures which existed in the past and still exist today. Shlapentokh comes up against the erroneous use of the historical approach in social analysis which supposes the permanent appearance of new social structures and the disappearance of the old ones. The term "combinatorics" is for Shlapentokh a key concept for understanding why mankind, with only a few types of social organizations, has been able to create such vast social diversity over time and space.

Vladimir Emmanuilovich Shlapentokh (Russian: Влади́мир Эммануи́лович Шляпенто́х, Vladimir Èmmanuilovič Šlâpentoh; 19 October 1926 – 6 October 2015) was a Soviet-born American sociologist, historian, political scientist, and university professor, notable for his work on Soviet and Russian society and politics as well as theoretical work in sociology.