Russia
... the political style is much more polarized - against the personal style.  Russian culture is more deeply dualistic - "warm" / "cold" - than American - which is more monistic, more "of one substance", "of a style".

In Russia
... this ultimately led to the formation of the "intelligenciya" (understood as a culture rather than as a group) - which now [in 1991], perhaps, for the first time may have grown strong enough to both sieze - and also hold - power (as they did not manage to do after the Revolution).  The "intelligenciya" constitutes a stabilizing / homogenizing element, which dampens the dualism of Russian modernity by internalizing it.  Ethics of a tightrope walker.

In America
... the opposite seems to be about to happen.  The originally open society is closing up.  "The party's over..." (symbolically, this is an expression of the end of the "Second American Revolution" - the '60s).  And with this, society is tightening and becoming institutionalized - with clear-cut, generation-long class-differences etc.  Something more dualistic, layered, complexly rigid, is emerging.