Soviet being is a non-trivial socio-cultural phenomenon. Its understanding is important not only in historical terms. It is important for understanding modern Russian society, the prospects for its development. All the more important is the understanding of its socio-cultural background. In this regard, this work contains an attempt to solve two problems: to identify the stable value-normative content of the Russian cultural and historical experience; to determine the factors for this experience dynamics, to determine the dynamics factors of the formation of this experience, which acted in pre-revolutionary Russia. The solution to the first problem revealed a complex of value-normative attitudes that complement and concretize each other. The dominant is passive enduring, combined with moral maximalism, a heightened desire for justice. This combination is due to historical experience, the main content of which is the attitude of the people and the authorities. The solution to the second problem made it possible to single out two main reasons for the pendulum-inverse nature of Russia's development. Firstly, this is the weak development of social forces «from below» with dominance of power. Secondly, it is the catch-up nature of modernization borrowings initiated by the power «from above». Therefore, such reforms turn out to be untenable and lead to inverse rollbacks. This creates the conditions for fixing the mentioned value-regulatory complex. At the same time, general civilization processes (urbanization, the formation of a mass society) changed the character of Russian society, realizing its involvement in modernization processes. These interrelated causes created the prerequisites for the phenomenon of Soviet being, as a qualitatively new character of the society development.