I myself do not really view “What is to be Done?” as a great beginner work for Marxists, since it mentions a lot of obscure philosophers or groups that a modern audience (with their cursory knowledge of Russian history being from the lips of liberals, or worse, conservatives) would hardly know the context of, and I am reading a version that has notes on these people!
That is not to say that it is not an influential or essential work of Lenin (I think it might be up there with “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” and “The State and Revolution” in terms of either factor), but one has to be willing to trudge through Russian names that you will likely never hear again.
(perhaps you could have put a trigger warning at the beginning)
In regards to your topic, I have heard something about that from a former conservative professor of mine, but it was in the same vein of propaganda that all the other anti-USSR lectures were in, so I did not really think much of it beyond it possibly being more propaganda (the person thought that Stalin was worse than Hitler when comparing the methods that they used to persecute people).
Do you have resources on the cultural sphere of Soviet society? It is not a part of my current knowledge, so resources on it would be nice.
Sorry, I didn’t think it was needed since I wasn’t going into explicit details.
That is a fair response. The issue with critics of the USSR is that while they mostly rely on atrocity fiction and Orwellian propaganda they often end up stumbling on genuine criticisms every now and then and making them part of their arguments. This ends up lending credence to their other, more sensationalist criticisms just by association which in turn makes their propaganda more effective (propaganda is most effective when the core claim isn’t necessarily a lie) and has the side effective of comrades dismissing genuine critique as propaganda by mistake, which can make us look bad if its a real critique.
As for resources I don’t really do a lot of research on Soviet society myself; mostly I just absorb the research of other comrades. Lady Izdihar and RevolutionaryTh0t have several videos going over women’s rights in the USSR (and really just Soviet society in general) if you’re interested. You can find them both on YouTube.
Ah you have a point with a small amount of truth mixing into the soup of atrocity fiction, and it honestly makes their propaganda stronger than it normally would be (because sometimes that truth is miscontextualized or exaggerated beyond absurdity, like the quote from Marx saying he is not a Marxist being used to make people believe he stopped being a Marxist when I do not think that was the original context of the quote).
I definitely know of those two, but I have not gotten around to watching them much (I probably should some day).