This article presents a study based on surveys conducted annually for the past nine years by the Samara Foundation for Social Research, commissioned by the committee for youth affairs of the administration of Samara Oblast. The sample consists of about 800 young people aged fourteen to thirty. In the present study the authors have focused on examining the most typical forms of organization of leisure time, such as going to cultural institutions and attending mass spectacles, as well as the most traditional form, reading. In the study the authors were interested in the form of leisure activity that is favored by young people, a form that can be looked at as one indicator of young people's cultural development and their orientation toward "high culture" or mass culture. The basic assumption of the study was the following: a preference for "high culture" entails a rejection of leisure institutions of "mass culture," and vice versa. This assumption was based on the observable opposition between mass culture and elite culture in today's society, and while in some countries the opposition was resolved by way of the interaction and interpenetration of these two cultures, in Russia at the present time it has not been overcome. Culturologists have denied the possibility of a compromise between high art and mass art in Russia. The authors also examine the functional relation between leisure activity and social and demographic characteristics and the functional relation between leisure activity and material condition. The findings of the surveys are discussed. (Contains 9 tables and 24 notes.)