Lenin publishes What Is to Be Done?

The Union linked socialist intellectuals with workers and factory organizing. Police arrested Ulyanov and other members, illustrating how state repression shaped clandestine political organization and...

After imprisonment, Ulyanov was sent into internal exile. There he continued writing and organizing through correspondence; the coercive geography of exile connected imperial rule to the lives of...

A small congress declared the formation of the RSDLP, although arrests and weak coordination left the organization fragile. Its founding reflected labor, socialist, and national movements across the...

Written during exile and published in 1899, the study used economic data to argue that capitalist relations were expanding in Russia and differentiating the peasantry. Its analysis challenged populist...

Following the end of exile, Ulyanov left Russia and joined a group building Iskra, a newspaper intended to connect socialist circles across the empire. The project relied on editors, couriers,...

Disputes over membership, organization, and strategy produced factions later known as Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The labels did not mean fixed, unified camps from the outset: alliances and positions...

Written after the 1903 congress split, Lenin reconstructed the arguments over party membership and central authority from congress minutes and documents. The polemic gave organizational questions a...

Imperial troops fired on a mass procession of workers carrying a petition to the tsar. The killings helped trigger strikes, peasant uprisings, and national movements throughout the empire. Workers and...

Lenin argued that workers and peasants could form a revolutionary alliance against autocracy, while insisting that the coming democratic revolution would not itself abolish capitalism. The text offers...

During the 1905 Revolution Lenin debated what powers a revolutionary government should exercise and how socialists should relate to it. His argument was made amid strikes, mutinies, and popular...