The article – which has been published for the first time now – is the text of a lecture given last spring. It follows through the history of the Russian model directing the reader's attention to a number of new points of view. He states that the illusion of the possibility to introduce socialism was a common mistake of the bolsheviks and the social democrats. In Russia at the beginning of this century the Leninist road was more feasible than that of the social democracy. He argues that Marxism-Leninism is in fact the ideology of national catching up of the half-peripheries. He deducts the relative survivability of Stalinism from the need of original accumulation on the one hand, and on the other, he claims that the Stalinist model was also in the interest of the USA: in this way, the Soviet Union fulfilled its own regional role in the Pax Americana. The main goal of Khruschev's reforms was to calm down the elite and their failure came from the irrational belief in growth and the playing down of meeting the welfare demands. He judges the present chances pessimistically from the point of view of perestroika, however, optimistically from the point of view of socialism because he thinks that the true chance of Marxism has arrived now.

The failure of the East European (Russian) model is not the failure of the left wing, with the disappearance of the bloodthirsty ghost it is the right wing which looses its arguments. At American universities a new upswing of the left can be expected. The peoples of Eastern Europe long for a welfare social society rather than the model of the existing capitalism.

Berdiaiev's book, as it can be termed as a prophesy concerning many elements of the Russian model, has become very popular among Hungarian readers interested in political sciences. The reviewer – while acknowledging a number of merits of Berdiaiev's work, underlining many of his productive ideas (from the mutual Utopia of the opposition of Slavofil-Western ideas, to the role of the anarchic-egalitarian tradition, cultural backwardness, the far too abstract handling of the proletariate by Russian marxism etc.)- calls the attention to the falsifications of the study. This especially applies to those points where today Stalinism is washed together with bolshevism and certain trends of bolshevism with the whole of bolshevism. Finally, he calls Berdiaiev himself to testify and decide that what has been realised or what failed in the Soviet Union was not socialism.