Vladimir Lenin popularized political vanguardism as conceptualized by Karl Kautsky, detailing his thoughts in one of his earlier works, What is to be done?. Lenin argued that Marxism's complexity and the hostility of the establishment (the autocratic, semi-feudal state of Imperial Russia) required a close-knit group of individuals pulled from the working class vanguard to safeguard the revolutionary ideology within the particular circumstances presented by the Tsarist régime at the time. While Lenin wished for a revolutionary organization akin to the contemporary Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was open to the public and more democratic in organization, the Russian autocracy prevented this.[1]