What Is to Be Done?

This article is about Lenin's pamphlet. For the Chernyshevsky novel, see What Is to Be Done? (novel). For other uses, see What Is to Be Done? (disambiguation).

What is to be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement
Original cover
AuthorVladimir Lenin (as N. Lenin)
Original titleЧто дѣлать? Наболѣвшіе вопросы нашего движенія
LanguageRussian
Published1902
Part of a series on
Leninism
Schools of thought
Concepts
People
Theoretical works
History
Related topics

What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement[a] is a political pamphlet written by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (credited as N. Lenin) in 1901 and published in 1902, a development of a "skeleton plan" laid out in an article first published in early 1901.[1][2] Its title is taken from the 1863 novel of the same name by the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

The text's central focus is the ideological formation of the proletariat.[3]: 30  In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with employers over wages, working hours, and the like. To educate the working class on Marxism, Lenin insists that Marxists should form a political party, or vanguard, of dedicated revolutionaries in order to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet, in part, precipitated the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.[4]


Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).

  1. ^ Le Blanc, Paul. 2008. Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings of Lenin. London: Pluto Press. pp. 9, 128.
  2. ^ Lenin, Vladimir (1901). "What Is To Be Done?". Lenin's Selected Works. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 11 February 2018.
  3. ^ Ministry of Education and Training (Vietnam) (2023). Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism. Vol. 1. Translated by Nguyen, Luna. Banyan House Publishing. p. 30. ISBN 9798987931608.
  4. ^ Malia, Martin (1994). The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-919795-0.