What Is to Be Done? (Russian: Что делать?, tr. Chto délat'?, lit. 'What to Do?') is an 1863 novel written by Russian philosopher, journalist, and literary critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky, written in response to Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev.

The chief character is Vera Pavlovna, a woman who escapes the control of her family and an arranged marriage to seek economic independence.

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On April 9, 1917, a train pulled into a station at Thayngen, a Swiss town on the German border. There was a group of 32 Russians on board and the customs officials confiscated chocolate and sugar from them. The passengers were exceeding the legal limit on importation of goods. Then the train shuffled in to Gottmadingen on the German side of the border. Two German soldiers boarded the passenger cars and separated the Russians from the rest, moving them to second- and third-class berths.

The “Russians” were an eclectic group, including 10 women and two children. Their names would have been known in left-wing and revolutionary circles of the time, so some traveled under aliases. On board was Karl Radek from Lvov in what is now Ukraine, and Grigory Zinoviev and his wife, Zlata, also from Ukraine. There was the half-Armenian Georgii Safarov and his wife as well as Marxist activist Sarah “Olga” Ravich. Grigory Useivich from Ukraine was accompanied by his wife Elena Kon, the daughter of a Russian woman named Khasia Grinberg. The vivacious French feminist Inessa Armand (pictured) sang and cracked jokes with Radek, Ravich and Safarov. Eventually their shouting angered the leader of the group, who poked his head into their berth and scolded them. The leader was Vladimir Lenin, and he was taking his small group by sealed train for a weeklong journey that would end at Finland Station in St. Petersburg. Half a year later Lenin and some of his cohorts would be running a new state, the Russian Soviet Republic.

Some observers saw Lenin and his band as a motley group of Jewish revolutionaries. Alexander Guchkov, the Russian minister of war in the Russian Provisional Government after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, told the British military attaché General Alfred Knox that “the extreme element consists of Jews and imbeciles.” Lenin’s train had included 19 members of his Bolshevik party, several of his allies among the Mensheviks and six Jewish members of the Jewish Labor Bund. Almost half the passengers on the train were Jewish.

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MEANWHILE:

Inessa Fyodorovna Armand (born Elisabeth-Inès Stéphane d'Herbenville; 8 May 1874 – 24 September 1920) was a French-Russian communist politician, member of the Bolsheviks and a feminist who spent most of her life in Russia.[1][2][3] Armand, being an important figure in pre-Revolution Russian communist movement and early days of the communist era, had been almost forgotten for a long time (due to deliberate Stalinist censorship, partly in consideration of her relationship with Lenin) until the partial opening of Soviet archives during the 1990s (despite this, many valuable sources regarding her life still remain inaccessible in Russian archives).[4] Historian Michael Pearson wrote about her: "She was to help him (Lenin) recover his position and hone his Bolsheviks into a force that would acquire more power than the tsar, and would herself by 1919 become the most powerful woman in Moscow.”[5]

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Armand and Lenin were very close friends from 1911 to 1912 or 1914–how sexual it was remains a debated point among scholars.[26][27][8][28]

Krupskaya (LENIN’S WIFE) wrote about her:

We were terribly glad... at her arrival. . . . In the autumn (of 1913) all of us became very close to Inessa. In her there was much joy of life and ardor. We had known Inessa in Paris, but there was a large colony there. In Krakow lived a small closely knit circle of comrades. Inessa rented a room in the same family with which Kamenev lived. My mother became closely attached to Inessa. Inessa often went to talk with her, sit with her, have a smoke with her. It became cosier and gayer when Inessa came. Our entire life was filled with party concerns and affairs, more like a student commune than like family life, and we were glad to have Inessa... Something warm radiated from her talk.[29]

In In Memory of Inessa Armand, Krupskaya further suggested that Inessa and Lenin were bonded together by their common favourite fictional work What Is to Be Done?:

Inessa was moved to socialism by the image of woman’s rights and freedom in What Is To Be Done? Like the heroine, she broke her ties with one man to live with another, concerned herself with good deeds to redeem the poor female and the prostitute, tried to solve the problems of woman’s too servile place in society. Indeed, whole generations of Russian radicals were influenced by Chernyshevsky’s many-sided utopian novel and were moved to imitate its “uncommon men and women”. Just as Marx could be the spiritual ancestor of people as various as Bernstein, Kautsky, Bebel, and Luxemburg, so Chernyshevsky was a formative influence for the two men who in their persons incarnated the two opposing poles of socialism in 1917: Tsereteli and Lenin. If Inessa found in the novel her image of woman’s rights and freedom in love, and Lenin the prototypes of his vanguard and his leadership, Tsereteli found there his ideal of service to the people.[13]

Angelica Balabanoff recalled about the relationship between Armand and Lenin:

Lenin loved Inessa. There was nothing immoral in it, since Lenin told Krupskaya everything [again the same code]. He deeply loved music, and this Krupskaya could not give him. Inessa played beautifully — his beloved Beethoven and other pieces. He sent Inessa to the Youth Conference of the Zimmerwald Group — a little old, but she had a credential from the Bolsheviks and we had to accept it. He did not dare to come himself, sat downstairs in a little adjacent cafe drinking tea, getting reports from her, giving her instructions. I went down for tea and found him there. Did you come na chai, I asked, or na rezoliutsii? (for tea, or for the resolution?) He laughed knowingly, but did not answer. [Inessa fought hard, but the resolution Lenin prepared for her was defeated 13–3.] When Inessa died, he begged me to speak at her funeral. He was utterly broken by her death.[13]

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SO:

What Is to Be Done?

More than the novel itself, the book is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for the response it garnered.

The novel inspired several generations of revolutionaries in Russia, including populists, nihilists, and Marxists. Likewise, Vladimir Lenin, Georgi Plekhanov, Peter Kropotkin, Alexandra Kollontay, Rosa Luxemburg, and Swedish writer August Strindberg[12] were all highly impressed with the book. 

Emma Goldman, a Russian-born anarchist, describes her intent to found a sewing cooperative based on Vera Pavlovna's model found in the novel.[13][14]

The novel came to be officially regarded as a Russian classic in the Soviet period, as Chernyshevsky was celebrated as a forefather of the revolution.[15][16] According to Joseph Frank, "Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution."[17]

The novel was controversial upon its publishing and continues to be. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky mocked the utilitarianism and utopianism of the novel in his 1864 novella Notes from Underground, as well as in his 1872 novel Demons, as did Vladimir Nabokov in his final novel in Russian, The Gift. 

Leo Tolstoy wrote his own What Is to Be Done?, published in 1886, based on his own ideas of moral responsibility.[18] Vladimir Lenin named his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? due to the influence the novel had on him.[7]

The novel's influence spread beyond the Russian radical tradition and Russian radical intellectuals. For example, it is referenced by Tony Kushner multiple times in his play Slavs!, by André Gide's Les caves du Vatican (Lafcadio's Adventures), and, some have argued, by Ayn Rand.

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THIS WAS A SHORT FORAY INTO UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIAN SPIRIT BEYOND WESTERN PLATITUDES…. THIS FLIES HIGH ABOVE THE LITTLE NAZI JEWISH SHIT CALLED ZELENSKY WHO CAN’T RISE BEYOND BEING A WESTERN DICK-PIANO PLAYING PUPPET — AND WHO HAS BANNED ALL RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN HIS LITTLE MEDIOCRE KIEV FIEFDOM — UNDER INSTRUCTIONS FROM HIS CAPITALIST THIEVING MASTERS.

IT’S TIME FOR HIM TO BE REMOVED.

NOT STRANGELY, CHINA AND RUSSIA, IN THEIR OWN WAY, HAVE RELATIVELY MASTERED AND CLEANED UP THE GAME OF FINANCE BEYOND THE DECREPIT CORRUPT AMERICAN CAPITALISM.

A WOMAN CALLED INESSA ARMAND MAY HAVE HAD A LITTLE PART IN HELPING THIS DEVELOPMENT — AND THE UNCHARTERED TO AND FRO DYNAMICS THAT GAVE WOMEN A VOICE IN THE REVOLUTIONS…. THE STORY OF HER DYNAMISM SHOULD STILL GIVE A VOICE TO WOMEN WHO FEEL UNDER FOOT AND DEMAND EQUAL RIGHTS — IN ALL COUNTRIES, INCLUDING MUSLIM NATIONS.

BY NOW THE WOKE THING, AS IMPORTANT AS EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THEY/THEM/IT ARE, THIS SHOULD BE SEEN AS A SOCIAL DISTRACTION FROM THE IMPORTANT THRUST OF FEMINISM THAT ROSE IN RUSSIA…

MY FEELING IS THAT AMONGST HIS BROAD KNOWLEDGE OF PHILOSPHY, VLADIMIR PUTIN IS AWARE OF THIS IMPORTANT HISTORY. 

PERSONAL NOTE: GUS COLLECTED THIS INFORMATION TO HONOUR A GREAT FRIEND WHO LIKE INESSA WAS A FEISTY AND FOCUSED JOYFUL SOCIALIST WOMAN. SHE DIED A FEW DAYS AGO. SAD.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW................