• DOI:10.1353/kri.2003.0008
• Corpus ID: 162307936

How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin's What is to Be Done?

@article{Lih2003HowAF,
  title={How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin's What is to Be Done?},
  author={Lars T. Lih},
  journal={Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History},
  year={2003},
  volume={4},
  pages={49 - 5}
}

• Lars T. Lih
• Published 14 March 2003
• Education
• Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

Once upon a time I taught in the political science department of a small liberal arts college. As one of the teachers of the introductory course for first-year students, I proposed that the reading for the session we spent on Lenin be switched from selections from What Is to Be Done? to Lenin’s final articles of 1923 (this was during the perestroika period when these late articles were by far the most prominent Lenin texts). A colleague – a specialist in Chinese politics – quashed my proposal. After citing the famous sentence in What Is to Be Done? about “consciousness from without,” he commented approximately as follows: “According to Marx, being determines consciousness. According to Lenin, consciousness is independent of working-class being. Lenin stood Marx on his head and this is the basic fact we have to get across to our students.” This little episode defined for me the undisputed ascendancy of what I will call the textbook interpretation of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (henceforth WTBD). If a teacher could say only one thing about the outlook of the founder of the Soviet Union and of 20th-century communism, he or she should use this or similar sentences from Lenin’s book of 1902. As is the way with textbooks, this reading of Lenin is presented to students as a plain and simple fact. Indeed, although I was the Soviet specialist in the department, it was my colleague who expressed the consensus of the academic specialists on Russian and Soviet history. The textbook interpretation has three mutually reinforcing strands. The first is that the essence of Lenin’s outlook is his loss of confidence in the workers and his fear of their “spontaneity” ( stikhiinost′). Lenin’s hard-eyed realism about the incapacity of the workers, combined with his own fanatical will to revolution, gave birth to the idea of a party based on “professional revolutionaries” from the