The historical and transformational essence of mass culture and the ways of its development in modern civilisational paradigms

The article reveals the historical and transformational essence of mass culture. The author consistently analyses the stages of comprehension of the phenomenon of mass culture in Western cultural studies from its origins to the present day, coming to the conclusion that the prospects of its development into a socially constructive phenomenon that contributes to the harmonisation of the common and the individual were exhausted by the 70s of the XX century. Being, like any other democratic, «market» phenomenon, a dynamically developing sphere, mass culture quickly reached its evolutionary completion, giving rise to countless subcultures and, thanks to the digital revolution of the XXI century, creating an opportunity for the existence of one person's subculture, i.e. for the total atomisation of society. The author notes that Russian cultural studies, which had the opportunity to develop without being constrained by strict ideological frameworks in the post Soviet period, received the developments of Western colleagues in a ready made form together with the abrupt change of social formation. Leading Russian theorists, standing on the methodological positions of Russian sociology of culture, criticised their Western colleagues' approach to the analysis of mass culture as an instrument serving the di erentiation of the individual, and substantiated the prospects for the transformation of mass culture towards traditionalism. The author believes that the above phenomena have become one of the factors of the new doctrine of the cultural policy of Russia, enshrined in the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation dated 24.12.2014 № 808 (ed. 25.01.2023) «On Approval of the Fundamentals of State Cultural Policy».