The linguistic base of the country changed twice, and some complain that it's undergone another shift recently.
In all cases it's because the official culture--which valued works of literature, music, elevated styles of speech or at least certain forms of speech--were denigrated to the point of being ridiculed. In some cases some portions or aspects of the "high" culture had become effete and extravagant. That didn't hold for most of the high culture, which valued tradition and certain kinds of behavioral and cultural norms.
In the first upheaval, in the early 1800s, it was Romanticism. This was an upper-crust affair and while it affected the culture, it didn't coarsen society. Society was already coarse and the refined portions were a small layer floating on the top. This "upheaval" was only in some kinds of norms. The lower-class culture stayed where it was.
By the mid 1910s there was a fairly sizeable "upper culture", with societal norms for a kind of merchant and middle class. Industrialization had been happening quite quickly in the 1890s and early 1900s. There were norms for speaking and behaving.
The Russian Revolution sharply coarsened the culture because the "new culture" was that of the proletariat. It openly disavowed the older culture and its adherents vowed to replace it. Some adherents were talented. Most of them either wound up rejecting the vile proletarian culture that was forming and were incarcerated as class enemies or they committed suicide, whether literal (by hanging themselves, etc.) or by drinking themselves into mediocrity. The economy was in the toilet, as well, as the USSR's pace of industrialization utterly collapsed. The "vanguard" destroyed things well, but the old guard restored the economy and culture--but only in part. It lacked power and authority and that flopped in the end.
Stalin rescued high culture and looked backwards. Slavishly imitating the past, his "culture" codified some behavioral norms that were better than proletarian norms, but "high culture" was utter imitative drek.
There were hopes in the 1990s that the gray culture that existed under Brezhnev and which was fading under Gorbachev would blossom into a bright, lively cultural medium. Literature, music, societal norms. Under El'tsyn this flopped, and what happened was another "Untermenschen" revival, as the culture of the masses was taken as the new norm.
The new norm was more sexist, racist, jingoistic, narrow-minded, and petty-minded than the old was. On top floated a vibrant cultural scene, but it was largely separated from normal people and largely unhinged.
Moral: "High culture" can be removed from the populace and too refined. On the other hand, low culture has always been brutish and thuggish, because that's what the majority of people gravitate to unless they're taught otherwise. For the last 40 years or more we've been taught that popular culture is a commercially valuable commodity by the Right; we've been taught that low culture is an ideologically preferable, "authentic" and superior kind of culture by the Left.
We've gotten what we've paid for and worked for.
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