With the rise of the concept of “culture”, numerous attempts were made to integrate it into state policy, but failed. “Culture” then required a clear and unambiguous definition. A new effort, known as the “debate about cultural and creative industries”, was undertaken in a new historical context at the beginning of this century. This article tries to clarify the main arguments and positions in these recent debates, and to analyze the attempt of a new operationalization of culture by means of economic discourse in the critical perspective. This attempt was carried out under the new academic slogan of “creative industries”, with which politicians, international and national functionaries, as well as representatives of the academic community pinned their hopes on the invention of a new model of economic growth. One of the principal theses of the article is that this kind of operationalization is not realistic because “creativity”, like “culture”, is not amenable to any mathematization, commodification, or unambiguous interpretation. The policy of “creative industries” is considered through a tendency to a total commercialization of cultural production and its global standardization. The article analyzes different national models of its implementation, as well as the results. One of the most important outcomes of this policy is a growing distrust of the “archaic” forms of cultural knowledge that have been formed in and by national states: the statistical approach as well as its instruments are inappropriate and inadequate as state-of-the-art when the corporate sector almost completely defines rules and standards of a cultural production. This raises the question of whether the state needs a holistic view of culture and the exercising of control functions in this sector of production. In this perspective, the article raises the problem of whether the policy of creative industries is adequate and appropriate for the Russian Federation.