Vladimir Lenin: What Is to Be Done?

Audience

Despite his view that social democrats must propagandize as widely as possible, Lenin wrote What Is to Be Done? with a narrow audience in mind. It was aimed first and foremost at certain Socialists and pro-worker groups then active in Russia or as émigrés (some of whom are explicitly named in the excerpts presented here). It was intended to convince as many of these people as possible of the correctness of Lenin's ideas— and of the wrongheadedness of alternatives—specifically on questions of party organization and activity in Russia at that time. More broadly, but certainly secondarily, it was written for the wider international Socialist movement of the day. The pamphlet was, of course, read somewhat beyond these circles as well, including by the czarist authorities. Lenin had only recently adopted his famous pseudonym at this point, and his identity was not well known.

The pamphlet's real rise to fame came after 1917, once Lenin had established himself as the founder of a new and hugely controversial state. Whereas in the Soviet Union the whole body of Lenin's work quickly became a kind of secular scripture (especially after his death in 1924), in the West only What Is to Be Done? began to attract particular attention. Beginning in the late 1920s, Stalin, Lenin's successor, took the Soviet Union off in bold and terrible new directions. His first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) forced breakneck industrialization on the country, and agriculture was brutally collectivized with disastrous results. At the same time, Lenin's works became increasingly available in translation abroad. Of all his writings, What Is to Be Done? seemed to offer Western observers the clearest insights into the roots and real nature of the Soviet system that Lenin had created and Stalin later dominated. This opinion, although not unchallenged, is still largely accepted today.