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.

Discussing the causes behind the lasting lack of performance of the Hungarian economy, the author discusses three main causes: the political private property and its nature, its dominant role in the Hungarian economy, and the lack of coordination of articulate, varied forms of ownership. He argues that what is needed is the reform of the structure and not of the forms of ownership.

Those who reject socialism as an ideology on the basis of past experiences, disregard the fact that the social system build with the slogans of socialism should in no way be identified with socialism itself. The efforts of renewal in 1956,1968 and in the 1980s were based on the illusion that the East European systems can be reformed by „lifting in" certain elements of capitalism.