The article is devoted to the thoughts of the outstanding scientist N.S. Timashev on pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russia. N.S. Timashev was not a historian or philosopher. However, the systematic nature of his analysis of the social processes of Russian and Soviet society, his predictions about the prospects for the development of post-communist Russia allow him to be considered one of the founders of "Russian studies" and "Soviet science" in the West. According to Professor Timashev, after 1905-1907 Russia changed dramatically and, ultimately, could become a democratic country if World War I and the October Revolution of 1917 did not happen. «Timashev considered the “communist revolution” a “great retreat”, a historical accident that gave a signal to a series of the destruction of pre-revolutionary liberal Russian society. However, unlike many Russian emigrants who were sharply negative about the experience of building socialism in Russia, N.S. Timashev recognized the merits of the Soviet government in the industrialization of the country, which turned it into an industrial superpower, and hoped that the USSR would become less repressive and more democratic. At the same time, having carried out a detailed analysis of population growth dynamics, industrial production indicators, and illiteracy rates in Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1939, Timashev showed that these positive indicators could be achieved without revolution. After 1949, the main topic of analysis of the Soviet political system was the problem of ideology. One of his optimistic predictions of a new, free Russia is due to the fact that along with the existence in the USSR of formally only one official communist ideology (Marxist-Leninist, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist) there was an “underground (free)” ideology. According to the forecast of N.S. Timashev, with democratic shifts in the country, this clandestine ideology "will come to the surface" and may undermine "Soviet communism", which will serve as the foundation for the establishment of a new socio-economic and cultural order.