[2] 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.[when?]

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.

[2] Vladimir Shlapentokh spoke English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and other Slavic languages.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He suggests that fear of the authorities, party bosses, and political police, was a major underlying reason for the endurance of the Soviet system.

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.

In Shlapentokh's opinion, being as an outsider, Orwell better understood the essence of Soviet society than many critical analysts inside the country.

The ruling political elite impose the values and norms of the dominant ideology on the population, which they are able to do by using their monopoly on media, education, and culture, as well as by means of coercion.

In his opinion, the many problems of post-Soviet Russia, beginning with the failure of democratization, should not be ascribed to the masses but to the new elites, which, having attained the means for personal enrichment, have in turn supported the authoritarian system so as to guarantee the stability of their own newly acquired wealth and status.

The major mark of totalitarian society, the role of fear and ideology, makes clear why Shlapentokh made the focus in his methodological studies the empirical validity of sociological data.

This issue had largely escaped the attention of American sociologists who overestimated the impact of the freedom of expression on the readiness of their respondents to be sincere in their surveys.

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.