At the end of his book of 1902, Chto delat?, Lenin declared laconically that the Russian Marxists would have “to liquidate the third period.” The “third period” here meant the years after 1898 when, according to Lenin, organizational fragmentation and ideological confusion had sabotaged the Russian Social Democratic movement. A voluntary federation of the scattered parts of the movement would, in Lenin's view, merely perpetuate in new form the confusion of the “third period.” Not reform but “liquidation” was thus essential. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party would have to be reconstructed in Russia around the framework of Iskra's agents, who in turn were to be directed by the editors of Iskra abroad.

Here was the justification for the campaign which the leaders of Iskra had already initiated and which they knew among themselves as the “state of siege.“

Halfway between the publication of Széchenyi's Credit (Hitel, 1830) and the revolutionary year 1848, the Diet of 1839-40 stands out as an interesting episode of the Hungarian Reform Age. The importance of this period is generally recognized, but its interpretation is still problematic. Pre-World War I liberal historiographers tended to blame the “government of Vienna” for all the blunders committed before 1848. The conservative Szekfű school, more charitable to Metternich and Austria, was no less nationalistic in its approach to the non-Magyar minorities of Hungary, maintaining the myth of Magyar “spiritual supremacy” between the two world wars. Today, Marxist Hungarian historians try to be fair in their writings about the nationality problem but frown upon analyses of Austro-Hungarian cooperation, considering them apologies for the Habsburg Gesamtmonarchie. Modern Western historians, too, differ in their evaluation of nineteenth-century Hungarian reform and its leaders.