Lenin Rediscovered ─ What Is to Be Done? in Context

Just over 100 years ago, Vladimir Lenin's What Is to Be Done?, commenting on the conditions of Russia's Social Democratic movement, was published. The political pamphlet has been enshrined by many as the founding document of the Russian Bolsheviks although, in the view of Lih (PhD, Princeton U.), hardly a worse choice could have been proffered because of the historical contingency of the figures criticized and the policies advocated in the work. However the analysis of What Is to Be Done? in terms of its specific aims and immediate historical context, he believes, is certainly valuable to efforts to reconstruct at least the pre-World War I views and philosophy of Lenin. He argues that the pamphlet reveals Lenin as a political "Erfurtian," characterized by allegiance to the Russian Social Democratic party and the writings of Karl Kautsky, commitment to the merger of socialism and the worker's movement, definition of Social Democracy's mission as spreading the "good news" of the world historical mission of the working class, aspiration to the establishment of an independent class-based political party, insistence on the need to overthrow the tsarist autocracy as a means towards political freedom, commitment to worker political hegemony, and internationalism. He then analyzes the immediate polemical context of What Is to Be Done? and its worldview, partly in terms of what it reveals about the Bolshevik/Menshevik split of 1904. A new translation of the 1902 text is appended to the commentary. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Lars T. Lih, Ph.D. (1984) Princeton, is the editor of Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, the author of Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921, the chapter on ideology in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Russia and numerous articles on the Bolsheviks.