The article studies classical cultural revolutions of 20th century from the perspective of attitude to traditional culture. These revolutions include the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, in Nazi Germany, as well as the later Great Cultural Revolution in China. They have some common features: all of them took place in totalitarian societies and were organized by higher authorities as forced, in relation to traditional culture, political reforms. These reforms often represented open destruction of cultural legacy. The theory of cultural revolutions implied the abolition of cultural elite and the creation of absolutely new culture. This aim was supposed to be achieved by influencing the individuals consciousness, so the cultural reforms were often seen as the process of mass consciousness manipulation where the government administrated by means of implicit ideology and provoked the situation of nonreflex organized approval of the majority. However, authors come to conclusion, that despite of the seeming originality of revolutionary reforms, they could not be realized, if they were based on the transmission mechanisms, established by traditional culture experience. These mechanisms, rooted at the level of mass consciousness and collective mental ideas, were used in the course of uneven political and cultural reforms.

В статье рассмотрены механизмы культурных преобразований в ходе самых известных культурных революции ХХ века. Авторы утверждают, что несмотря на их враждебное отношение к культурному наследию сами они базировались на механизмах трансляции, выработанных предыдущим опытом традиционной культуры.