What Is to Be Done?

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 pamphlet's central focus is the ideological formation of the proletariat.^: 30 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 ideas put forth in the pamphlet regarding the composition and organization of a successful revolutionary party were said to have precipitated the 1903 split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) into the Bolshevik ("majority") faction and Menshevik ("minority") faction. Some, including Lenin, claimed that readers of What Is to Be Done? misrepresented its contents to further their own agendas.