The Communist victory meant that Yevpatoria and nearby towns were overrun by an army of ragged, hungry, illiterate Red soldiers, many of whom had also served in World War I. As a group, they were looking for booty and eager to exact revenge and spread terror—they were a classic mob. There were mock trials, burnings, and hangings, and Rand later recalled that one classmate’s father was summarily and publicly shot. Zinovy’s old-style rubles were now worthless; the Bolsheviks issued their own inflated rubles, which became the legal tender in the south. By 1924, five billion of these rubles would buy what one had bought in 1914. This was a decisive blow in the campaign of economic devastation against the former middle class.
In this setting, the sixteen-year-old Rand composed what she later called her “first adult novel.” It was inspired by Hugo and set in medieval France, where battling groups of feudal lords fought for and against an evil king in an epic civil war. (According to one researcher, the teenaged Rand admired feudalism because it represented “a pyramid of ability,” with noble, if not necessarily gifted, men and women at the top.) She completed about a third of the novel’s planned chapters, then halted—in fact, stopped writing plays and novels altogether. She was aware, she later told a friend, that she was simply too young to write the way she now wanted to write—presumably, with some of the urbanity and passion of Victor Hugo—and that the stories she longed to tell could not be told in Russia. Instead, she made lists of plots and themes for future projects. By age thirty, she said, she intended to be famous.
Rand graduated from secondary school on June 30, 1921. She and her mother, both desperate for work, timidly signed on to teach illiterate Red soldiers to read and write. To Rand’s surprise, she found the men eager to learn and polite in the classroom. She was unusually gifted at teaching, as her friends and followers would later remark with almost universal awe, and she enjoyed making a misunderstood or murky concept exquisitely clear. But by midsummer she and her family no longer had any reason to stay in the Crimea; they had lost their gamble, and their confiscated real estate and remaining relatives were in St. Petersburg. While they struggled to feed themselves, they waited for seats on one of the antiquated trains that were taking Red soldiers, peasants, black marketers, and everyone else who could leave the region north. After weeks of waiting, they found a train and squeezed on.
There’s no better description of the Rosenbaums’ journey home than the opening pages of We the Living. What had formerly been a three-day train trip took two weeks. The third-class compartment the family rode in was packed with men and women who had been waiting trackside, for days or weeks, without a bath or change of clothing. The train was filthy. Everyone was hungry. Scraps of food and the relics of old valuables had to be secreted, out of sight, and guarded. When a few of the passenger cars broke down, the Rosenbaums scrambled for cramped space aboard a boxcar. The teenaged Rand observed every nuance of timidity, pretentiousness, callousness, and greed among her fellow passengers, including her family, and recorded it all with Dostoyevskian precision in her semiautobiographical novel a decade later.
The train stopped in Moscow before completing its journey to St. Petersburg. She briefly left the boxcar and stood in a city square just outside the railroad station. Moscow, which had become Russia’s capital city in March 1918, was enormous, she remembered thinking, and was only one city among hundreds or even thousands in the world. She had something to say to people in all of them, she reflected with a thrill; the audience for her plays and stories would be immense.
By late summer 1921, the permanent population of St. Petersburg was smaller by two-thirds than it had been at the outbreak of the world war. Even so, workers, the unemployed, and roaming hordes of demobilized Red soldiers occupied almost every square foot of habitable housing. Back in their native city, the Rosenbaums settled into a single room of their old apartment on Nevsky Prospekt, now inhabited by a sign painter and his family, who let them use some of their old furniture. There was no electricity or hot water. Nor was there food for those who didn’t work or study, since government-issued ration cards, the only way to lay hands on what meager and often rotten food there was, were distributed in workplaces and schools. Finding work was a priority. Under a brief amnesty for private merchants called the New Economic Policy (NEP), Zinovy obtained a position in a cooperative pharmacy, but such semiprivate businesses were soon closed down and their wares impounded. Like Uncle Vasili in We the Living, he refused to work for the Communists, the only work there was. Later, Rand explained, her father “wouldn’t do anything. To begin with, he wouldn’t have been accepted, as a former owner, into any Soviet job, and he didn’t want to do it. … He was enormously on strike.” Zinovy’s attitude made a strong impression upon Rand; to her it seemed heroic. Similarly, in the 1940s, she began to refer to her husband, the unemployed actor Frank O’Connor, as also being “on strike.” The original title of her third major novel, Atlas Shrugged, was, unmusically, The Strike.
It was Rand’s mother who kept the family financially afloat after returning to St. Petersburg. Anna, the former dentist and literary lady of the house, applied for and got a Soviet teaching certificate in 1921; for many years thereafter, she traveled the city by tram, instructing impoverished workers and their children in reading, writing, and foreign languages. By the mid-1920s, she was earning much-needed money on the side by tutoring and translating politically correct books and magazine articles for the Soviet state publishing house Gossizdat. Once Rand arrived in the United States, she sent her mother American novels to translate; Anna marveled at her daughter’s ability to choose works of proletarian fiction that Gossizdat would readily accept.
Anna was unusually resourceful and seems to have thrived in her new role as the family’s breadwinner. At one point, she wrote to Rand in America, “You and I have our love of work in common.” In a diminishing turnabout, Zinovy was placed in charge of keeping house, waiting in lines for rationed food, and cooking the millet or, in flush times, peas or potatoes that typically made a meal. Some of these were chores that Rand’s husband Frank would also perform.
Rand had left St. Petersburg a girl and had returned a young woman. In August 1921, she was admitted, free of charge, to Petrograd State University as a student in the newly formed Social-Pedagogical Division of the College of Social Sciences. This division combined the old disciplines of history, philology, anthropology, and philosophy under one academic roof. She declared a major in history and a minor in philosophy and began attending classes in October. As a student, as in little else, she benefited from the Bolshevik regime, since Lenin had adopted Kerensky’s policy of offering educational opportunities to Jews and women, while doing away with tuition fees and reducing the full term of study to three years. These changes were meant to help factory workers, but they made it possible for her to get the kind of education, and degree, that her parents could have only dreamed of. By her own lights, she made the most of it, studying as much as she could with the older, classically trained, Western-leaning liberal professors who were slowly being phased out, arrested, and deported. She took ancient, medieval, Western, and Russian history; logic; philosophy of the mind, a forerunner of psychology; French; biology; and historical materialism and the history of socialism, which were required courses. She read Hegel and Marx, Shakespeare, Schiller, and the great proto-Nietzschean novelist Dostoyevsky, whose mystical point of view she said she rejected but whose brilliant integration of plot, theme, and “philosophy of mind” she learned from and found exciting. She later said that Dostoyevsky was the world’s best interpreter of the psychology of evil. He “gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide,” she wrote in 1971. She was lucky to be admitted to the university when she was; by 1924, the year she graduated, a decree was issued barring admission to students from families who had owned property before the revolution or who had employed one or more servants at any time during the last three generations.
Determinism, the irreducible
feature of a Marxist view of history, was on the rise at the university. Rand found the notion offensive, and not merely because “historical necessity” was the battle cry of the Bolsheviks. She recalled sitting outraged through a lecture in which the instructor offered proof that individuals act without free will. If a young man, he said, standing at the doorway of his home, could turn either left or right to reach a destination in the same amount of time, but knew that he would see a pretty waitress in a restaurant if he turned right, he would turn right. He would have no choice; his action would be determined by his nature. Rand thought, If you have a reason for what you do, you are making a choice. Later, she would define free will as the freedom to think or to avoid thinking in any particular situation.
During her stay in the Crimea and as a university student, she grew closer to her silent and usually inexpressive father, who was almost always at home while her mother worked. It was only after she and he began to be allies in opposition to the Bolsheviks, she later said, that she felt real love for him, a love that meant something beyond family affection and abstract respect. She and he shared a disgusted contempt for Communist ideology, which was perhaps best summarized by the slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and their contempt grew deeper and more acrid as “need” was increasingly revealed to be a euphemism for the demands of those in power—those exerting “pull,” as Rand would memorably write in Atlas Shrugged. Somewhat unreasonably, both father and daughter considered Anna much too eager to defend and appease her Communist employers, just as she had once been pleased to emulate the city’s intellectual elite. In fact, Zinovy severely disapproved of his wife’s working for the Communists at all, and Rand’s sister Nora once remarked that Anna was a little “pink.” Young Rand and her father proudly endorsed individualism and free will.
Most important, the father was openly supportive of his daughter’s brilliant analytical intelligence, drive, and vocation as a writer. He must often have encouraged her as he did in the late 1920s, when he wrote to her in America: “You must see clearly that you are not like everybody else and be proud of it. Eschew all doubts and continue firmly and with assurance to walk toward your goal.” She clearly returned his love and admiration. “She spoke about him with more respect than I can recall her ever speaking about anybody,” said a friend who knew Rand in the 1950s.
There was one area of conflict between the girl and her father: He opposed her chosen course of study at the university. Without asking her to give up writing, he wanted her to apply her math training and love of the scientific method to a more remunerative occupation, such as engineering. This would have been an unusual profession for an early-twentieth-century Jewish father to urge on any daughter other than Rand, who was to make it Kira’s frustrated calling in We the Living. Having grown up in the Russian Pale, he was more aware than Anna or the children of the crucial role that work and money played in protecting against the onslaughts of anti-Semitism. As Rand and her sisters grew older, he urged them to choose occupations that would always allow them to earn a living. All three chose to be artists. Natasha studied piano at Petrograd Conservatory, the nation’s most distinguished school of music, along with fellow students Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich and former student Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Anna approved of Natasha’s choice, unlike Rand’s, because music was a properly ladylike career. Nora, the youngest, studied to be an artist, though she later became a teacher like her mother and, finally, a graphic designer. Rand argued with her father that, as a future writer, she had to study history in order “to have a factual knowledge of man’s past” and understand philosophy in order “to achieve an objective definition of my values.” She promised him that she would one day make a living as a writer, and, as always when hard work and force of will were the deciding factors, she was right.
In her first two years at the university, a number of events took place that solidified her “sense of life” and influenced her for years to come. The first was taking a course called Ancient World Views, probably the last class taught by the distinguished professor N. O. Lossky before he was deported. The course surveyed the pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato, and Aristotle. This may sound innocuous, but not for Rand; by now, ideas of every kind and vintage earned her passionate assent or disapproval. In Lossky’s class she was dazzled by Aristotle, particularly his logical starting point of the axiomatic existence of objective reality and his belief in human reason as the only means to understand the world; for him, as for Rand, man was a rational animal. She learned to detest Plato and his mysticism, which is how she regarded the Platonic belief that the observable world is a mere shadow of ideal forms that can’t be seen; she associated this, rightly, with mystical Christianity. And she learned from Lossky an intensely dialectical method of thinking—“thinking in principles,” she called it—which helped her to construct a worldview that was radically individualistic and seemingly Western but in some ways Russian to the core.
Rand described herself in these years as solemn, even grim, and always engaged in serious discussion. She was aware that people often didn’t want to talk to her and that she was sometimes forcing conversations on her family and schoolmates. Where she had once seen laziness, indifference, or shallow-mindedness, however, she now saw envy: she grew convinced that she was actively resented, and not for her faults but for her best qualities, her virtues, as her rebellious heroes Howard Roark and John Galt would also be.
She had no known friends, but she did spend time with two maternal cousins, Vera and Nina Guzarchik, who lived above the Rosenbaum apartment. It was Vera who, while reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, remarked that Rand reminded her of Zarathustra, the German philosopher’s prophetic outlaw hero, or at least that Nietzsche had “beat me to all my ideas,” Rand recalled. The book describes the hero’s journey down a mountainside, after the death of God, to teach what he has learned to the people below. From now on, he tells the jeering masses, human beings will determine their own values and their own destinies, free of superstitious reliance on gods, conventional morality, and faith. Furthermore, people must learn to make way for the exceptional individual, the Superman of whom Zarathustra is the first example; through a “will to power” and a talent for “self-overcoming,” the Superman will establish a new morality of man.
Nietzsche’s work was popular among intellectuals in Russia at the time, especially his descriptions of master and slave psychology and of the absolute right of the superior individual to place himself in opposition to the common herd. The seventeen-year-old Rand immediately seized upon his ideas, including his call to discard old values and create new ones, his condemnation of altruism as a slave morality, and his argument for the inviolate rights of the gifted person, whose only obligation is to refine and use his gifts as he sees fit. One point, in particular, had an immediate influence on her thinking, she recalled. Until reading Nietzsche, she had assumed that in order to defend man against religion, she would have to defend all men, no matter how weak or strong; Zarathustra demonstrated “that it doesn’t have to be collective. In other words, that the species can be vindicated by one man.” She responded to his heightened language, his brilliance, his bold critique of Christianity, and his principled admiration of Jewish thought. From this point on, her major characters would be more or less overtly Nietzschean—and, because of their Superman aura, would often be wrongly seen as fascistic by her critics. It wasn’t until she was writing The Fountainhead that she was able to begin to loosen Nietzsche’s seductive hold on her imagination.
Vera’s younger sister Nina Guzarchik was the leader of a group of intellectual young people who called themselves “Uno Momento” and sometimes gathered for parties in the Guzarchik apartment. At one of these Rand met a handsome, brooding boy with whom she fell in love, the third great event of these years. His name was Lev Bekkerman, and not only did he resemble a fictional character (Cyrus), he would also become one
(Leo Kovalensky, Kira’s dissolute lover in We the Living). An engineering student at St. Petersburg Technical Institute, he was four years older than she was, and, unlike the fictional character Leo, he was Jewish. “The first time I saw him, I remember being very startled by how good-looking he was,” she recalled when she was fifty-five. “It was his looks that I liked enormously.” He had a sharp, intelligent, purposeful-appearing face, a graceful, slender body, a thick shock of hair, and light gray eyes. As with Cyrus, Hugo’s Enjolras, and Prime Minister Kerensky, “the quality I liked about him most was arrogance,” she later said. He was “like some fantastic aristocrat” in his consciousness of his attractiveness to women, his desirability, and his sense of his own worth. She learned that he shared her political views; he had once hidden in his apartment students who were being hunted by the Soviet police, or GPU, an act of bravery that she would later confer on Kira’s cousin Irina Dunaeva in We the Living.
On some of their few dates, they bought cheap seats at operettas in the silver-and-peach grandeur of the Mikhailovsky Theatre, probably including Rand’s lifelong favorite, Emmerich Kálmán’s Die Bajadere (1921). As the two sat “solemn, erect,” the Viennese music seemed to laugh and the settings bring to life a 1920s European bar and the spirit of contemporary German cabaret, as Rand noted in We the Living. Lev Bekkerman was Rand’s first flesh-and-blood infatuation, and she fell “madly and desperately” in love with him.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 6