ABSTRACT
Americans think of the Soviet Union, for instance, as an exceptionally systematic, indeed totalitarian society—one which would break up into its component parts if it were not for the apparatus of State and Party. Societies are systems, whose component parts fit together and influence one another. Some societies are more integrated than others, sometimes because they have strong central institutions, sometimes because they have highly coherent cultures. Soviet views of the United States, by contrast, emphasize the division of the society into classes. America is certainly a class society, as a recent diagram of social stratification in the United States shows. The dominant American images of the Soviet Union are seriously out-of-date. A political image, is the image of that country as a totalitarian system only held together by the exercise of mass terror. Co-existence with the Soviet Union is a very unsatisfactory and fragile condition: little more than armed balance of terror.
