What Is to Be Done? in the context of Leader of the Soviet Union

During its 69-year history, the Soviet Union usually had a de facto leader who would not always necessarily be head of state or even head of government but almost always held office as Communist Party General Secretary. The office of the chairman of the Council of Ministers was comparable to a prime minister in the First World whereas the office of the chairman of the Presidium was comparable to a president. According to Marxist-Leninist ideology, the head of the Soviet state was a collegiate body of the vanguard party (as described in Lenin's What Is to Be Done?).

Following Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power in the late 1920s, the post of the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party became synonymous with leader of the Soviet Union, because the post controlled both the Communist Party and (via party membership) the Soviet government. Often the general secretary also held high positions in the government. Since the post of general secretary lacked clear guidelines of succession, the office's successor needed the support of the Political Bureau (Politburo), the Central Committee, or another government or party apparatus to consolidate power. The President of the Soviet Union, an office created in March 1990, replaced the general secretary as the highest Soviet political office.

A communist front (or a mass organization in communist parlance) is a political organization identified as a front organization, allied with or under the effective control of a communist party, the Communist International or other communist organizations. It is a structure used by Communist and left-wing parties to intervene in broader political movements. They attracted politicized individuals who were not party members but who often followed the party line and were called fellow travellers.

Vladimir Lenin originated the idea in his manifesto of 1902, What Is to Be Done? Since the party was illegal in Russia, he proposed to reach the masses through "a large number of other organizations intended for wide membership and, which, therefore, can be as loose and as public as possible". Generally called "mass organizations" by the communists themselves, these groups were prevalent from the 1920s through the 1950s, with their use accelerating during the popular front period of the 1930s. The term has also been used to refer to organizations not originally communist-controlled which after a time became so such as the American Student Union. The term was especially used by anti-communists during the Cold War.