Three decades have passed since Russian society changed its development program, abandoning the task of building a socialist society, which was the goal of its efforts for the preceding seven decades. The expired period, however, seems to be insufficient to understand the causes of the social metamorphoses that occurred. As demonstrated by the survey on the assessment of October 1917 in Russia, conducted by the journal “The World of Change”, people’s ideas are still tied to the usual clichés and cannot be separated from everyday routine, although the very picture of the events of 1917 already possesses enough data that allow to go beyond the scope of traditional reconstructions. This also applies to the key problem of the transition from capitalism to socialism, which was debated in 1917, the necessary cultural level of the country's population. Its characterization was previously largely subjective, since neither the general theory of this process nor its systematic general picture existed. Nowadays, we have at our disposal all the necessary tools, which greatly expanded our predictive capabilities.