A pamphlet that Lenin wrote in 1901 and 1902, soon after his return from Siberian exile, and published in Stuttgart in March 1902. It develops the argument of his Iskra article "Where to Begin" (May 1901): that the Russian Marxist movement should replace its loose local circles with a centralised organisation of committed revolutionaries, tied together by an all-Russian political newspaper, and that the working class would not reach political consciousness through economic struggle alone. Much of it is a reply to the "Economists" and to the journal Rabocheye Dyelo, whom he names and quotes. It is a document of party organisation, agitation and the press, which is why the archive's page on Soviet agitprop cites it.
The text is the English translation by J. Fineberg, first published in New York in 1929, in the International Publishers printing that carries the editor's notes. That printing also has an editor's foreword of December 1931, which is not part of the 1929 text and is not reproduced; the page's rights note says why. Whether Lenin's model of the party was a response to conditions under the Russian autocracy or a general prescription was argued at the time and is argued still, and the pamphlet is partisan by design: it argues one side of a dispute inside the Russian movement against other socialists, and the party split the following year. The English edition is a Communist publisher's, and its editor's notes (marked "Ed.") and series present it as a Bolshevik classic. The text is machine-read from a scan and has not been proofread.
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- Preface 934 words
- I. Dogmatism and “Freedom of Criticism”
- A. What Is “Freedom of Criticism”? 1,376 words
- B. The New Advocates of “Freedom of Criticism” 2,099 words
- C. Criticism in Russia 2,622 words
- D. Engels on the Importance of the Theoretical Struggle 1,968 words
- II. The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Class-Consciousness of Social-Democracy
- Opening 258 words
- A. The Beginning of the Spontaneous Movement 1,461 words
- B. Bowing to Spontaneity. Rabochaya Mysl 3,892 words
- C. The Self-Emancipation Group and Rabocheye Dyelo 3,819 words
- III. Trade-Union Politics and Social-Democratic Politics
- Opening 277 words
- A. Political Agitation and Its Restriction by the Economists 3,967 words
- B. A Tale of How Martynov Rendered Plekhanov More Profound 1,371 words
- C. Political Exposures and “Training in Revolutionary Activity” 2,410 words
- D. What Is There in Common between Economism and Terrorism? 1,291 words
- E. The Working Class as Champion of Democracy 6,031 words
- F. Again “Slanderers,” Again “Mystifiers” 1,271 words
- IV. The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionists
- Opening 334 words
- A. What Are Primitive Methods? 1,507 words
- B. Primitive Methods and Economism 2,725 words
- C. Organisation of Workers, and Organisation of Revolutionists 6,112 words
- D. The Scope of Organisational Work 2,697 words
- E. “Conspirative” Organisation and “Democracy” 3,419 words
- F. Local and All-Russian Work 4,017 words
- V. The “Plan” for an All-Russian Political Newspaper
- Opening 322 words
- A. Who Was Offended by the Article “Where to Begin”? 2,161 words
- B. Can a Newspaper Be a Collective Organiser? 4,732 words
- C. What Type of Organisation Do We Require? 2,718 words
- Conclusion 1,081 words
- Appendix: The Attempt to Unite Iskra with Rabocheye Dyelo 2,689 words
- Correction to “What Is To Be Done?” 326 words
Download as plain text 69,887 words, with the provenance header above the text
Provenance and rights
- Edition
- What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, translated by J. Fineberg and edited by Alexander Trachtenberg. New York: International Publishers (Little Lenin Library, vol. 4); a printing of 1931 or later carrying the notice "Copyright, 1929", from the Internet Archive scan whatistobedonebu0000vile_w0f6_g0a1. The translation was first published in New York in 1929 in Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, vol. IV, The Iskra Period, book II. The Russian original appeared in Stuttgart in March 1902.
- Text source
- Internet Archive, item whatistobedonebu0000vile_w0f6_g0a1 (page-layout OCR, djvu.xml)
- Text basis
- Machine-read (OCR) text of a library scan, not proofread; spot-checked against the page images and against an independent scan of the 1929 edition.
- Rights
- The translation (J. Fineberg, ed. A. Trachtenberg) was first published in the United States in 1929, in Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, vol. IV, book II (International Publishers, notice "Copyright, 1929"; registered as A 19207, entered 31 December 1929 in the Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1930). A work published in the United States in 1929 entered the public domain there on 1 January 2025. This printing repeats that 1929 translation and its editor's notes; a comparison of the two scans found the same wording. Lenin died in 1924, so the Russian original is also public domain. The editor's foreword printed in this volume is signed "December, 1931", is not covered by the 1929 notice and is not included. The library is served from the United States; readers elsewhere should check their own law (the translator died in 1957). Checked October 2, 2026.
- Changes made
- Machine-read (OCR) text of a library scan, not proofread: recognition errors are the scan's, not edits (for example the first word of the preface is read as "Accorp1nc" for its drop-capital "According", the italic "Iskra" is sometimes read as "[skra", and a few footnote references are garbled). Page numbers, running heads, printer's marks and specks removed; line-end hyphens resolved against the same book and line wraps rejoined; paragraphs that run across a page break rejoined; chapter and section headings set in title case. The printed footnotes (Lenin's own and the editor's, marked "Ed.") are moved to just after the paragraph that was open at the foot of their page and set as quotations. The title page, the epigraph page, the contents list, the editor's foreword of December 1931 and the publisher's advertisements are not included. The wording, spelling (British forms such as "organisation") and punctuation are the source's own.
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