What Is to Be Done?
1902 pamphlet by Lenin that argues for a vanguard to spread Marxism since workers do not spontaneously become political by fighting economic battles, which precipitated the Bolshevik–Menshevik split
What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement is a political pamphlet written by Vladimir Lenin (credited as N. Lenin) in 1901 and published in March 1902. He previewed the work in a May 1901 Iskra article, "Where to Begin", which he called "a skeleton plan to be developed in greater detail in a pamphlet now in preparation for print". The title of What Is to Be Done? was taken from an 1863 novel of the same name by Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky.
The booklet's central focus is the ideological formation of the proletariat. Lenin argues that the working class will not become politically advanced simply by fighting economic battles against employers over wages, hours, and the like. To imbue the working class with Marxist principles, he recommends a cadre of dedicated revolutionaries form a vanguard political party that can teach Marxism to workers.
The legacy of What Is to Be Done? has been much debated.
The public source identifies “What Is to Be Done?” as 1902 pamphlet by Lenin that argues for a vanguard to spread Marxism since workers do not spontaneously become political by fighting economic battles, which precipitated the Bolshevik–Menshevik split. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around What, Done and pamphlet.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q946877. VIAF identifies the subject as 185103722. The Library of Congress control number is n84067953. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1901, 1902 and 1863.
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This entry incorporates text from “What Is to Be Done?” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.