2. The authority of intelligentsia as a group representing exemplary cultural patterns (including what is usually understood by civilization as well as high art) had much to do in the Soviet society with the process of modernization – the speeding up of urban life, education and the cultural revolution. Beginning in the 1930th, the promotion by the intelligentsia of the classics of Russian culture supported, on the one hand, the ideological myth of the party-state according to which the Soviet state was the heir to the best traditions of the past; on the other hand, the intelligentsia’s belief that the classics represented eternal values and that the role of the intelligentsia was to make them accessible to the masses. This complex of ideas served as the foundation for the education of these masses and represented the essence of the Soviet School. Seen in this light, the controversies among the different groups of Soviet intelligentsia (state employees, internal émigrés, liberal dissidents, or nationalist-minded opposition) may be seen as a contest not only for a dominant interpretation of the classics but also for the domination of the School, for the opportunity to shape mass education.

3. The Soviet system, its model of development, and more specifically, its educational institutions and intelligentsia have exhausted possibilities for development and self-reproduction. Studies have shown that that in reality the classics’ share in the reading repertoire of the allegedly "the most reading country in the world" was very modest. In 1980s, the books written before the revolution of 1917 could be found in only 25% of homes with books. The names of the main classics of Russian literature were important only for the new collectors of books, namely those who aimed to purchase editions of collected works in short supply. High school and college students, children of the same book culture recruits, formed another significant segment among the classics consumers.

4. In 1990s, classical authors yield in popularity to various hits and detective novels, romances, history and memoir literature. A similar phenomenon can be observed in the preferences among viewers of film and TV: they prefer popular thrillers, romances and soap operas, historical films comedies as well as old soviet movies. For the present, we have stable structure of mass behavior among the readers and viewers as well as consumers of goods and in the area of political preferences. These preferences are well-formed, legitimated and acknowledged. If before the main factor for audience stratification was education, the key factors today are age and sex.

5. In modern Russia, mass culture is diffused through and by mass-media, especially television foreign models and patterns predominate. The values and models of behavior disseminated by the mass media in Russia are those of success, family, human emotions, solidarity in the struggle against obstacles, romance. These ideas are conditioned by the notions of a stable society, the importance of the here and now, the gratification achieved today. Not only the plot and the main protagonists are important for the consumers of these cultural products, but also the semantic background of the action, the setting: its milieu, the fabric and habits of everyday life, the modes of inter-personal communication.

6. Mass culture, especially its foreign patterns, possesses its own idea of what constitutes an individual. This is a person who is ready to live and behave "like everybody else" (the imagined majority ) and who also distinguishes himself from socially contiguous minority and resists alien mass culture, though not because he values or has access to high culture (Enlightenment), but rather, because he needs to affirm his own self and establish himself within the framework of the prevalent, normative behavior.

7. In today’s Russia, mass culture is rejected by social groups who, in the process of disintegration of the Soviet system, are losing their authority and dominant position as the carriers of culture. Their claim is that mass culture is of low quality, that its significance is limited merely to entertaining, that it is not serious, that exposure to it makes people torpid and leads society to degradation, that its basis is the power of money, a Western notion, alien to the Russian culture. These groups are opposed to the civilizing of everyday life by which the masses adapt themselves to the reforms, they wish to keep modernity at a distance, to conserve cultural patterns emblematic of the past, and often resort to the defensive mechanisms of xenophobia. It is not the cultural elite but yesterday establishment that is trying to set itself against the masses.