Vladimir Lenin: What Is to Be Done?

Context

What Is to Be Done? appeared at a critical moment in the history of the Russian labor movement as well as in the history of the RSDLP. In the very early 1900s the conditions for social revolution in Russia were developing rapidly. Industrialization, although it was still nascent, had expanded significantly, especially under the influence of the Russian minister of finance, Count Sergey Yulyevich Witte, who had pursued a major expansion of railroads and other industries. Foreign investment capital had begun to pour into the country. The number of industrial workers, or urban proletarians, in Russia had reached two to three million (out of a total population of about 160 million). Most of these workers were concentrated in the few large cities, including Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where conditions were particularly oppressive and exploitative. Worker unrest festered, and workers began to organize. The government responded only with minor concessions, such as an 1897 law that established a maximum 11½-hour workday in larger factories. Meanwhile, worker discontent and demands continued to rise.

Beginning in the 1880s, a growing number of Russian intellectuals had begun to look at these developments through the lens of Marxist philosophy, which initially had been expounded abroad. The explosive pamphlet The Communist Manifesto, by the German thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, had been published in 1848. Marxism—soon dubbed “scientific Socialism”—viewed all history as a struggle between economic classes, primarily between those who owned the means of production and those who did not. Developed further in Marx's other writings, the theory offered a grand analysis of industrial capitalism and predicted its inevitable demise at the hands of class-conscious proletarians who would destroy the very foundation of the system that oppressed them.

Convinced that the march of history was on their side, Lenin and other members of the RSDLP sought to introduce into the broad workers' movement the concepts and ideals of Marxism, but they did not all agree on the appropriate methods for doing so. By far the largest and leading Socialist party in Europe at the time was the German Social Democratic Party, which in most respects provided a model for the much smaller Russian group. Matters were complicated, however, by the differences between the German and Russian political environments. German intellectual Socialists benefited from relatively advanced political freedoms that allowed the Social Democratic Party to participate openly in the political process. German industrial workers could legally unionize, demonstrate, and read and share ideas without necessarily bringing on government reprisal.

None of this was true in autocratic czarist Russia when Lenin wrote What Is to Be Done? All political power emanated from the czar. At least prior to 1905, Russia had neither a parliament nor a constitution. Political parties were illegal, and their members faced harassment and arrest at every turn; moreover, the legal system did not recognize basic civil rights. Workers could not legally organize, demonstrate, or strike. Between 1898 and 1903, Russia experimented briefly with so-called “police unions,” which were groups of workers authorized by the state and under police control. The intent behind allowing these unions was to undermine or control working-class movements rather than to achieve significant change, however. To Lenin, all of these circumstances meant that social democracy would have to work very differently in Russia than elsewhere. In particular, it would have to be differently organized, which is the main theme of What Is to Be Done?

The title of Lenin's work is borrowed from the identically titled 1863 novel by Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. A leading radical thinker in his own right, Chernyshevsky wrote in the immediate aftermath of the epochal 1861 emancipation of Russia's serfs by Czar Alexander II. This event—and the difficulties and discontent it engendered among the newly liberated peasants—provided the context within which a generation of pre-Marxist Russian radicals wrote and worked. Chernyshevsky was one of the founders of an unsuccessful Russian revolutionary movement known as Populism or Narodism, which advocated agitation among the peasants in order to weld them into a revolutionary force for the overthrow of the czarist regime and its replacement with a decentralized system based on peasant communes. The movement largely burned out in the summer of 1874. Although Lenin later criticized Narodism as utopian and unachievable, he was greatly impressed with Chernyshevsky's depiction of the revolutionary hero as a practical and utterly dedicated individual who through immense personal effort could affect the course of history.