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. . In the comparison of different models, or perceptions, of the same society, Shlapentokh supposes that those perceptions which are more critical of the actual society are closer to "hard reality" than the apologetic images of the society. Of course, we should dismiss critical views inspired by the blind hatred of society or those that are based solely in conspiracy, as these views are marred by a distorted view of reality and thus do very little for the true analysis of society. Shlapentokh pays special attention to the actual repression in the Soviet system as well as to the fear of potential repression. 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. 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).