One of the goals of Stanislav Ovcharenko's work is to show that a direct and rapid transition from the long existence of a totalitarian society to democracy is practically impossible, due to the damaged cultural code of a free individual in conditions of unfreedom. The main arena of confrontation now, not only in the post-communist world, but throughout the rest of the world, is the irreconcilable conflict between culture and barbarism, organic to an aggressively ignorant person. Culture must learn to defend itself. To do this, the author proposes to consider social processes as a type of natural development of both the society and the individual, and not as beautiful-hearted humanism, alien and incomprehensible to the bearers of non-Western culture and civilization. Moreover, similar events occur in similar circumstances, which allows us to make a correct prognosis. The Russian "repentant intelligentsia" died after 1917, precisely because of groundless humanism. The author tried to comprehend and explain these turning-point events in the proposed book Light and Shadows of the Cultural-Civilization Conflict.