Academic Peter Stillman believes Marx's status as a determinist is a "myth". Friedrich Engels himself warned about conceiving of Marx's ideas as deterministic, saying: "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase." On another occasion, Engels remarked that "younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it". While historical materialism has been referred to as a materialist theory of history, Marx does not claim to have produced a master-key to history and that the materialist conception of history is not "an historico-philosophic theory of the "marche generale", imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself". In a letter to editor of the Russian newspaper "Otetchestvennye Zapiskym" (1877), he explains that his ideas are based upon a concrete study of the actual conditions in Europe.