Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  A few people, including the popular writer Maxim Gorky, took a dimmer view. He predicted that the “dark instincts” of the Russian people would “flare up and fume, poisoning us with anger, hate, and revenge. They will kill one another, unable to suppress their own animal stupidity.” He was prescient, as the nation would soon learn.

  Another skeptic emerged during the national celebration: Zinovy Rosenbaum. Beginning in February 1917, Rand’s father quietly began stockpiling cash and family jewelry against the day when the revolution would turn ugly. He didn’t have long to wait. On the heels of the czar’s defeat came the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, an archenemy of the propertied classes and of all the privileges that come with money. He, too, had a utopian plan: to marshal the forces of poverty, envy, and anger, built up over hundreds of years of economic inequality, in pursuit of a classless society. In April, he arrived at the Finland Station from European exile, red banners flying from his train.

  In the summer of 1917, the Rosenbaums and their extended family took a final carefree summer vacation in Terijoki, today called Zelenogorsk, a leafy resort town on the Russian-Finnish coast about thirty miles from St. Petersburg. This was one of the happiest summers of Rand’s childhood. For one thing, she was reading Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott’s historical romance set among twelfth-century English knights and ladies. The book follows the adventures of the gallant young Ivanhoe, home from the Crusades and in love with the mild-mannered Lady Rowena. Ivanhoe, in turn, is loved by Rebecca, a gifted Jewish healer whose father, the wealthy merchant Isaac, sponsors Ivanhoe’s chivalric exploits.

  Amid a tangle of plots and subplots, Scott proposes that capitalism (as represented by Isaac) and character (which charming Rebecca has in spades) will be the defining values of the coming modern world. But the heraldic universe of Ivanhoe is not yet ready for modernity, and the hero finally spurns the beautiful Rebecca in favor of Rowena. Rand never remarked on this turn of the plot in a favorite novel, but the rejection of a superior girl for an insipid one and the second-class status of Jews were all too familiar to her. Robin Hood also makes an appearance in the book as the altruistic spokesman for popular resentment against the Norman nobles. This was probably Rand’s first encounter with the legendary English outlaw who takes from the rich and gives to the poor—which also happened to be the stated objective of the Bolsheviks. For Rand, Robin Hood immediately became a villain, a symbol of the cowardly, destructive idea that “need, not achievement, is the source of rights,” as she wrote in 1964. Readers of Atlas Shrugged remember the character of Ragnar Danneskjöld, an anti-Robin Hood who takes back from the poor and gives back to the rich.

  When Rand returned to school that fall, the city’s mood had darkened. The Provisional Government’s first official act had been to confer equal rights on Jews, an unpopular move with most Russians. While the government also rapidly granted basic freedoms of speech, press, and assembly to the people at large, the lower classes were unmoved by abstract freedoms; they wanted bread, fuel, land, and jobs with a living wage. These were not forthcoming. In fact, shortages were such that the government began to ration bread.

  Equally important, Kerensky didn’t end the war; through a blizzard of speeches, he tried to rally the army for a push to victory. This shifted popular sentiment leftward. In legislative elections in September, the Bolshevik candidates, running on a promise to end the war, nationalize factories, and confiscate landowners’ fields, made gains. Unfortunately, this didn’t alarm Kerensky. In early October, when V. D. Nabokov asked him whether an armed Bolshevik attack on the new government was now possible, the prime minister answered that he hoped so; he was sure his troops could defeat the radicals once and for all.

  Then, to worldwide dismay, on October 25, 1917, Lenin and his Bolshevik followers struck. Simply by occupying a few key buildings, cutting telephone lines, and winning over a handful of strategically placed soldiers, they gained control of the capital and overthrew Russia’s fragile republican government. A bloody civil war for command of the rest of the empire followed, but this one-day coup was the unspectacular beginning of the dictatorship of the proletariat, whose ensuing brutalities Rand would one day brilliantly detail in fictional form. Kerensky, who fled the country, spent the rest of his life explaining why he shouldn’t be blamed for the failure of his nation’s single great moment of political opportunity. Russian parliamentary democracy had lasted exactly eight months.

  Rand kept a diary during this period, where she wrote down her ideals and, on her thirteenth birthday, noted her decision to be an atheist. Later, she remembered her reasoning this way: Since no one had ever been able to prove that God exists, God was obviously an invention, and even if God did exist and was perfect, as reputed, then man would necessarily have to be imperfect and “low” by comparison, an idea she said she rejected then and never reconsidered. She may have been more deeply influenced than she remembered by anger at the seeming lack of justice, divine or otherwise, in the events taking place around her.

  A few years after starting her diary she burned it; by then, keeping a written record of ideals that clashed with the official Bolshevik party line was perilous, even for a child. Much later she said that she used this diary to work out her views on popular ideas and maxims of the time, such as that people should “live for the state” or “live for others,” specifically for the poor. It will come as no surprise to Rand’s readers that, even then, she didn’t like the sound of living for someone else. She remembered picturing her beloved heroes—Cyrus, Thunder, perhaps Kerensky—being forced to set aside their noble ideals and dashing temperaments to serve and obey proletarian “non-entities,” as she called them, simply because those nonentities were illiterate and poor. Never! People have a right to live for themselves, she decided, transforming her native sense of entitlement into an integrated “sense of life.” The unique rights of individuals, especially gifted individuals, would become a fundamental building block of—and point of contention about—her novels of ideas, starting with We the Living. Later, she would often say, “Whoever tells you to exist for the state is, or wants to be, the state.”

  Long before she began making notes for We the Living, she reached another conclusion: that political and philosophical ideas, especially those that are heroically clothed and set in large-scale social novels, have the power to shape perceptions and change the world. As scholars have noted, novels and poems have been a surrogate for banned political speech in Russia. Literature as a subversive force is a peculiarly Russian notion, one that was widely celebrated during Rand’s youth. As Lenin was consolidating power in 1917, he invoked not only Karl Marx but also, more tellingly, the works of Ivan Turgenev (Fathers and Sons), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Poor Folk), Maxim Gorky (The Mother), and especially Nikolai Chernyshevsky (What Is to Be Done?) as inspiration and grounds for action. Lenin said that Chernyshevsky’s novel, a nineteenth-century tale of superhuman sacrifice in the service of a coming revolution, converted him to Communism at age fourteen, and he named his own seminal revolutionary tract What Is to Be Done? in tribute. It’s little wonder, then, that Rand once referred to her own novels as anti-Communist propaganda, or that she henceforth viewed national politics as a morality play whose theme is individual freedom in contest with overt or hidden mob force.

  She continued to write stories, though no copies and few accounts of these exist. She would have needed the company of her heroes that fall and winter, because she was losing her only friend. In late November, Olga’s father, who was plotting a final legislative challenge to the Bolshevik usurpers, sent his wife and children south, to the Crimea, near Yalta, an area that was still free of Communist control. Within weeks, he and his liberal colleagues were rounded up, briefly jailed, and threatened with death. He escaped and joined his family. In 1919, the Nabokovs immigrated via Constantinople to Europe and the West. Rand never saw any of them again.

  The worst was yet to come. In a campaign of class warfare waged by an ascendant Lenin against the mi
ddle class to pacify the poor, Rand’s father’s pharmacy, along with many of the city’s factories, banks, shops, and offices, was raided, stamped with a red seal, and shuttered. Lenin called this “looting the looters.” By encouraging acts of proletarian plunder and retribution against the city’s bourgeoisie, Lenin’s new government consciously initiated the Red Terror. Twelve-year-old Rand was in the store on the day Bolshevik soldiers arrived, brandishing guns. The anger, helplessness, and frustration she remembered seeing in her father’s face remained with her all her life; the tenacity she bestows on her American businessman-hero Hank Rearden as he confronts the U.S. government’s bureaucratic “looters and moochers” in Atlas Shrugged can be seen as her extended version of getting this scene right. Her father was out of business, and out of work.

  Although Lenin and the early Communists weren’t overtly anti-Semitic, Jewish merchants were targeted as scapegoats of the new regime, just as they had been in the old one. The government inflamed popular envy of Jews by euphemistic references to the “bourgeoisie,” and Jews were left especially vulnerable to robbery and violence. It’s likely that Zinovy’s and Anna’s St. Petersburg relatives, including the Konheims and Rand’s grandfather Kaplan, also lost their businesses, livelihoods, and life’s work at this time. Still, like others, the Rosenbaums couldn’t believe that the Bolshevik regime would last. In spite of nationalizations, economic conditions didn’t improve for the poor and working class, and support for Communism was eroding quickly in the city. Armies were massing against Lenin in the south. The Rosenbaums decided to wait it out, believing that the Bolsheviks would be routed, although with each passing week mob justice became more ruthless and food and other necessities more difficult to find.

  The Stoiunin school continued to hold classes. Rand attended until the end of the 1917-18 term. Without Olga, however, she was again alone, with no one to talk to about the excruciatingly painful events going on around her.

  It was at about this time that she began to read the novels of Victor Hugo, the only novelist she ever acknowledged as having influenced her work. Her mother made the introduction; in the evenings, Anna would read aloud from Hugo’s works, in French, to Rand’s grandmother Kaplan, while Rand listened from her bed. Hugo, the foremost Romantic writer of the nineteenth century, was a master of epic melodramas featuring solitary, larger-than-life heroes and psychologically misshapen villains in what were typically scorching critiques of French society and government. The first one of his novels she read was The Man Who Laughs, then Les Misérables. In these and her other favorites, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Ninety-Three, the author excoriated kings and queens, the French Revolution and street violence, while also projecting emotional nobility and human grandeur. His preoccupations could hardly have been more pertinent to Rand’s situation, and his insights must have deepened her understanding of revolution. She relished his intricate plots, inspiring themes, and outsized characters, and she fell in love with one of his most radical inventions: Enjolras, the high-minded, again implacable young revolutionary leader in Les Misérables, who would serve as a model for both the handsome aristocrat Leo Kovalensky and the Communist Party hero Andrei Taganov in We the Living. In each of her published novels except Anthem (1938), she retained traces of the plotting techniques and stylistic sleights of hand she learned from Hugo. Her love of his work stayed with her. At age fifty-seven, after everything else in her life had radically changed, she called him the “greatest novelist in world literature.”

  By late summer of 1918, the Rosenbaums had had enough. Under threat of a new order compelling them to share their living space on less than equal footing with former servants, factory workers, and soldiers; with whole days now spent in search of rationed millet, peas, and cooking oil; and with the terrifying knowledge that what the revolutionaries regarded as their and their neighbors’ “hoarded” savings had become the object of systematic official searches, they gathered their belongings and departed. Still expecting the regime to collapse, they thought they would be away from home for six months; they were gone for three years.

  As We the Living opens in 1922, the Argounov family is wearily returning to a dreary, disease-ridden St. Petersburg from the Crimean peninsula, now also in Bolshevik hands. But in 1918, when the Rosenbaums fled south, the Crimea was a bustling center of White Russian resistance to the Communists and was full of transplanted czarist military officers, aristocrats, statesmen, manufacturers, and merchants from the north. Rand later told a friend that she and her family were forced to walk all the way from Leningrad (as St. Petersburg came to be known in 1924) to Odessa, a journey of nine hundred miles. This is unlikely, especially as she told another friend that the railroad train in which the family traveled broke down in the Ukraine and that they and other passengers hired horse-drawn carts to continue their journey, adding that the carts were robbed by a gang of bandits. In this story, Zinovy managed to safeguard his savings of several thousand rubles by burying them in the straw that lined a cart. It may be that the family was forced to walk after the robbery, though Rand recalled climbing back in the cart, or that the family walked during another leg of the journey and the child recalled the ordeal as being longer than it was.

  In any case, Rand remembered rocky terrain, broken shoes, hunger, darkness, terror, defiance. If she was going to die, she remembered thinking at the time of the robbery, she would die on her own terms, picturing Hugo’s young hero Enjolras. Her last thought would be of his steadfastness and courage, “not of Russia nor the horrors.” Later in life, she would prove herself gifted at focusing on distant ideals in the face of unpleasant realities. Yet another quality comes to light here: a propensity for imagining characters as more real than the people around her. As an adult she would ask friends, “But would you want to meet” the characters in a novel they were reading? If the answer was no, she considered the discussion finished. Fictional heroes and villains lived and breathed for Rand, and her own larger-than-life characters came to define the limits of an imagined world so compelling that many admirers who entered it never left.

  Rand and her parents and sisters lingered briefly in the Ukraine, where a number of Zinovy’s cousins practiced medicine and where Zinovy might have expected to find work. The Bolsheviks were making military inroads there, too, however. So the Rosenbaums moved on, as originally planned, to the Crimea. For the next three years, they lived in Yevpatoria, a resort town near the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula, on the Black Sea. The town stood only one hundred miles from Yalta, where the Nabokovs were staying, but Rand didn’t know this; she believed that Olga and her family had left the country in 1917. Since the Rosenbaums had taken summer vacations on the Black Sea in better days, Yevpatoria may have been familiar to them. Side by side with thousands of other refugees from the Red Terror, they searched for shelter, paid work, and food. They found a small, damp, unheated house in which to live. Zinovy eventually opened a pharmacy, but this was looted and shut down, either by renegade White Russian soldiers, invading Reds, or the staunchly anti-Semitic local Orthodox peasants who rampaged against the Jews whenever the Whites were in retreat. The town changed hands four or five times. Fifty-five years later, Rand remembered the terror of the Red Army and the empty, “smelly,” “Holy Russian” religious bromides of the Whites with almost equal loathing. The family lived “on a battlefield,” she said.

  During the years in Yevpatoria, she and her sisters, Natasha and Nora, attended a private girls’ school. Here, in the last remaining corner of Russia not permanently occupied by Reds, the schools were free of the Communist curriculum that had taken hold elsewhere. Among other subjects, Rand studied math, which she loved, Russian language and literature, which she claimed to have hated, and Aristotelian syllogistic logic, which taught her to prize rigor and strive for consistency. At the time, she recalled, she knew little about Aristotle except that he was supposed to be an archenemy of Plato, whom she took to be a virtuous idealist, as opposed to a vulgar Communistic materi
alist, and so she expected to “be against” Aristotle. In one of her first college courses, she would change her mind about Plato, fall in love with Aristotle, and passionately align herself with Aristotle’s empiricism for the remainder of her life. She also studied political economy, which fired her imagination. The class was her introduction to the Declaration of Independence and America’s constitutional guarantee of individual rights, and these deeply impressed her. Henceforth, the United States would replace Britain as the focus of her hopes and plans. She read Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, a romantic fable about a witty, proud French soldier and poet with a disfiguring nose whose love letters on behalf of his rival, Christian, win the heart of his cousin Roxane; when Roxane discovers who wrote them, she pledges her love to Cyrano, but only as he is dying from a wound. On reading about the trials and triumph of the ugly, honorable misfit, “I cried my eyes out,” Rand said. She learned the play by heart, and it became another of her lifelong literary touchstones.

  There is a picture of Ayn Rand from this period, posing with her high-school graduating class of about twenty somber-looking girls and almost as many teachers, all artfully arranged on a period Turkish rug outdoors, in the schoolyard. Rand’s hair is bobbed and caught in a barrette, and she wears a white broad-collared shirt and skirt, both fresh and crisp. She must have made a special effort to look neat that day, for her usual disarray often caused her mother to complain that she didn’t care how she looked. In the picture, she peers out intently, almost defiantly, toward the camera, while the other girls just stare. This was in the late spring of 1921, and Rand’s class was smaller by a third than it had been six months before. During the previous November, retreating White Russian military officers had evacuated 150,000 soldiers, civilians, and families—anyone who wanted to leave Russia—while the Red Army massed for its final, conclusive assault on the Crimea. The Whites loaded everybody into French and British ships and sailed them across the Black Sea to Constantinople, whence passengers could travel on to Europe. Some of the ships set sail from the docks at Yevpatoria, but the Rosenbaums were left behind. Anna had pleaded with Zinovy to let the family emigrate, but Rand’s father was as certain as Kerensky had been that Communism couldn’t last. One day, he promised, they would reclaim their business and property in St. Petersburg. By spring, the Bolshevik victory was complete and uncontestable; with a few far-flung exceptions, all of Russia was under Red control.