Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1884 — 1948) — Russian philosopher, representative of Russian religious existentialism. Berdyaev survived two revolutions in Russia and two world wars. Berdyaev characterizes the modern era as a transitional one from an exhausted culture to a machine civilization, from a «new history» to a «new Middle Ages». The author of the original concept of the philosophy of freedom Nikolai Berdyaev proposed his own, not losing relevance, vision of technical progress.