Vladimir Lenin: What Is to Be Done?

About the Author

Like many champions of the working poor, Lenin was not of them. He was born into a prosperous family in Simbirsk (known as Ulyanovsk from 1924 to 1991) on the Volga River. His father was an inspector of schools and a ranking noble. Lenin was of mixed ancestry, including Russian, Swedish, German, Jewish, Kalmyk, and Mordvinian. Like most Russians, he was raised in the Orthodox Christian tradition. He was baptized as a sixteen-year-old in 1886. Lenin's “baptism” into the world of radical politics came the following year, when his older brother, Alexander, was arrested and executed for involvement in a plot to assassinate Alexander III, a very repressive czar. Lenin's sister was also implicated and sentenced to house arrest. Lenin soon enrolled in Kazan University but was subsequently expelled for his radical ideals. He studied independently for a time, focusing on Marxism, law, history, and languages, and he later enrolled in the University of Saint Petersburg, from which he graduated with a law degree in 1892.

After a short legal career, Lenin, already a convinced Marxist, turned increasingly to revolutionary propaganda and organization. He was arrested in late 1895 and sent to Siberia, where he shared company with other exiled Marxists, including Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who became his wife in 1898. Lenin's first major publication, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, appeared in 1899. This began a prolific writing career. After his release in 1900, Lenin traveled widely in Western Europe. He came into contact with most of the leading left-wing thinkers and activists of the day, joined the RSDLP, and cofounded its official paper, Iskra (“The Spark”). It was at this time that Lenin began to regularly use his pseudonym—which means “man from the Lena river”—instead of his real name. (The Lena River actually is thousands of miles east of Lenin's birthplace.) Lenin's ideas on capitalism, revolution, and Communism had already begun to develop beyond their Marxist origins into a somewhat altered theory known subsequently as Marxism-Leninism (or just Leninism). Some of its most characteristic innovations, which focused on questions of organization, can be seen in What Is to Be Done?