Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  The love affair didn’t end happily. Rand was open, possibly too open, about her feelings. She pursued him, and he didn’t like it. “I knew he didn’t like it,” she would later say. He continued to see other girls, and after a few weeks, he stopped asking her out. When they met, usually because the resourceful Rand had found out where to find him on a particular evening, he pointedly ignored her. Still, until she left the country in 1926, she continued to see him at occasional social gatherings. In 1924, he contracted tuberculosis and traveled to the Crimea to be treated in a state-run sanatorium, much as We the Living’s Leo would do. In 1933, by which time Rand had established herself as a Hollywood screenwriter and was married, she learned from her cousin Nina that Lev, too, had married, divorced, and married again, each time to an unappealing, frowsy, ordinary woman. She was shocked by this, she said in 1960. “The whole issue [of Lev] … is still an unfinished story in my mind. My only explanation [for his choice of partners] … would be what I wrote about Leo in We the Living, that it was deliberate self-destruction, deliberately consigning himself to mediocrity, because [whatever] higher values [he possessed] were not possible there,” amid Russian Communist repression. In May 1937, during the height of the Stalinist Terror, Lev was put to death under a Soviet statute that mandated the execution of black marketers and perpetrators of terrorist acts against the state; he had been accused of plotting to blow up tanks in the Leningrad factory where he worked. She never learned of his death, but it’s not hard to imagine the fictional Leo Kovalensky ending his life in much the same way, had Rand’s heroine Kira only survived to witness it.

  In a haunting irony, Rand herself might have been present for Lev’s death if, in 1922 or 1923, he had reciprocated her feelings for him; much later she said that she would almost certainly have remained in Russia had her first love loved her, too. “I would have stayed … and I would have died there,” she told a friend.

  Exactly how this early romantic disappointment affected her life and work is hard to gauge. By the time she spoke about it with someone who recorded her remarks, she had been married for thirty years and was engaged with a much younger man in a long-term love affair. But in a letter from 1927, her mother reminded her that during those years she had spent hours in her bedroom, “yelling in despair.” In a chronological list of music she loved, her favorite piece for the year 1924 was “Simple Aveu,” by French composer Francis Thomé, the only melancholy music on the list. Lev’s rejection may help to explain why, after We the Living’s Kira, Rand’s heroines would tend to be romantically and sexually submissive hero-worshipers, while Rand herself remained aggressive in pursuit of anything she wanted, including men.

  Just as she loved military marches and light Italian opera, Rand developed a passion for the elaborately staged Viennese and German operettas that, for a brief period, the Bolshevik government made available and affordable in state-run musical theaters such as the Mikhailovsky. She waited in line for hours each Saturday morning to buy cheap tickets for the back row of the fourth and highest balcony. During her first two years at the university, “I was there every Saturday,” she recalled. But soon an even more alluring opportunity arrived: to see the masterful, thrillingly melodramatic new silent films directed by D. W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Cecil B. DeMille. She and her family had been attending Russian-made movies since 1913. As a nine-or ten-year-old, she had even composed two childish film scenarios, one of them about a woman who has to choose between her husband in prison and her child; in a decision that reverberates eerily down the years, precocious young Rand’s heroine chooses the husband. (The child lived anyway, she said, so there was “a happy ending.”)

  Starting in 1923, however, during the NEP period, sophisticated American and European films began making an appearance in small, inexpensive, privately run theaters on the outskirts of the city. She took full advantage of them, seeing more than one hundred movies, some three or more times, in the years before she emigrated. “It was almost as if I had a private avenue of seeing the world outside,” she later said. She loved the tangled plots, glamorously costumed stars, and exotic settings of movies like Intolerance, Lucrezia Borgia, and The Isle of Lost Ships. Her favorite film was Joe May’s 1921 melodrama The Indian Tomb, starring Conrad Veidt as Prince Ayan, a nefarious Bengali maharaja who bribes a yogi to capture and kill his wife’s lover, a British army officer played by Paul Richter. A British architect (Olaf FØnss) and his wife (Mia May) track Prince Ayan and foil his murderous scheme. The film ends with an elaborate, triumphant chase scene in the Bengal mountains. If this sounds suspiciously like the story line from Maurice Champagne’s The Mysterious Valley, Rand never noted the resemblance and perhaps was never conscious of it.

  Veidt, a German Jew, became her favorite movie actor until she encountered Gary Cooper in the late 1920s. Veidt was a screen idol in Russia, and Rand’s infatuation with him brought out a trait that was present from early childhood: intellectual possessiveness. When people she didn’t know or like spoke admiringly of Veidt, she felt anger, she recalled. She had chosen him; other people weren’t worthy of him. Not for her was “a heart like a pavement, trampled by many feet.”

  Rand’s introduction to American silent films was the fourth defining experience of her university years. There, she got her first glimpse of the New York skyline, which would become for her an emblem of creativity and liberty in the capitalist free world. Although Soviet government censors always added absurd subtitles to the films, she said—turning an ordinary American family dinner scene into a portrait of greed, for example, by labeling it “A capitalist eating well on profits wrung from his starving workers”—she and other Russians understood this to be nonsense, or “applesauce,” as she called it. Her enthusiasm for America was forged in movie theaters. The films she saw inspired her to picture it as “Atlantis”: the ideal existence for intelligent, purposeful, ruggedly individualistic men and, presumably, women. America, she decided, was the place on earth where she would find real people and the country in which she wanted to live and work.

  Meanwhile, in spite of new cinemas and state-sponsored operettas, 1923 and 1924 saw the city under renewed political and economic siege. For the previous two years, Lenin had been preoccupied with quelling far-flung rebellions and a nationwide famine. Now, as he and his deputy Joseph Stalin focused on the cities, the repression grew harsher. Food rations were cut to one thousand calories a day. Diseases of dirt and poverty such as cholera, typhoid, rheumatic fever, and tuberculosis swept the city, exacerbating Rand’s and Anna’s fear of germs. Russia officially became the Soviet Union, and the regime began busily rolling back the NEP—eliminating the jobs it had created and the useful products and services it brought to market—while intensifying its attack on the remnants of the middle class. Workplaces and schools were purged of political undesirables, which meant that becoming an informant against fellow students or workers and attempting to join the Communist Party were among the few strategies to try to stay alive. Candid speech was dangerous and dissent was deadly. The light of academic discourse was quickly going out.

  In 1923 the Rosenbaums found an apartment of their own at 16 Dmitrovski Lane, a few blocks from their prerevolutionary home. Grandfather Berko Kaplan and Rand’s cousin Leonid Konheim joined them there. Though the family had more space, their lot was dreary. In a city festooned with fraying Red banners, they cooked their thousand calories a day on a smoky kerosene stove called a “Primus” and at celebrations ate cakes made of potato peelings, carrot greens, coffee grounds, and acorns. When there was fuel, they read by kerosene. Rand recalled that her one party dress was refashioned from an old summer coat of her mother’s, which Anna must have carefully packed, repacked, and carried to the Crimea and back again.

  There had been a number of purges at the university since Rand arrived there in 1921. In the fall of 1922, for example, her eminent professor N. O. Lossky, along with his wife, his mother-in-law Mme. Stoiunina, and 220 other famous Russian academic
philosophers and intellectuals were arrested for so-called anti-Soviet activity and deported on what came to be known as the “Philosophy Ship.” (On Mme. Stoiunina’s arrest, Rand’s alma mater the Stoiunin school closed its doors forever.) A year later, while she was in her third and final year, the university announced the largest purge yet of “socially undesirable elements” among the students. She was one of four thousand students expelled, a third of the student body, some of whom—“young boys and girls I knew” she later said—were sent off to die in Siberian prison camps. She was officially charged with “not fulfilling academic requirements,” but this was merely code for belonging to a prerevolutionary middle-class family and not being an ardent-enough Communist. (In her first year, she, like Kira, made “all kinds of anti-Soviet remarks” before realizing that she was endangering her family and herself.) The purge and its chilling, academically stifling aftereffects are unforgettably portrayed in We the Living. Rand, however, unlike her heroine Kira, got an unexpected reprieve. When a group of visiting Western scientists heard about the student purge and complained to their Communist hosts, she and other third-year students were reinstated and allowed to graduate.

  She received her diploma on October 13, 1924. Her university records show that she had passing grades in all her subjects. Later, she would claim that she had finished “with highest honors”—an impossibility in a system that had been converted to “pass,” “fail,” and “retake.” Her followers would repeat this story and other questionable anecdotes about her prowess as a student, although scholarship was never her strong suit and by that time she didn’t need anyone to bolster her claim to genius.

  While still at the university, Rand joined local writers’ clubs, but members were supervised and turned out little other than pat political treatises. Still, she constructed outlines for plays and stories and wrote an interesting short novel in this period. The text of the novella seems to be lost, but as she described it in 1960, it involved a meteorological disturbance that causes a gigantic airplane to spin out into space and begin to circle the earth. The passengers are a mixed group of scientists and Communists. Luckily, the plane is loaded with supplies. Using these, the scientists create a self-sustaining miniature economy that benefits all on board, even allowing them to grow food, while also devising a plan to get the airplane back to earth. Then the Communists gain the upper hand. In a chapter called “Humanity in a Teaspoon,” she showed the Communists gradually picking apart and destroying everything the scientists have accomplished. Soon everyone is starving. The Communists beg the story’s hero, a leading scientist, to take charge. He agrees. As the story ends, he begins to re-create his earlier work, with the implication that all will be well and the plane will return to earth. This, of course, echoes the ending of Atlas Shrugged, except that there the novel’s hero, John Galt, refuses to help the socialistic villains and instead flies his plane to a self-sustaining miniature world hidden in the Rocky Mountains; there he waits for the incompetent “looters and moochers” to perish of their own incompetence. Although Rand used many of the same ideas and motifs in both narratives, by the 1950s she appeared to be less hopeful that minds can be changed, villains converted, and mankind in general saved; a sealed world became her only answer.

  It’s remarkable that this story is set aboard an airplane, let alone one that orbits the earth. If Rand’s memory is correct, she wrote it four years before Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The explanation may lie in an influence she never publicly spoke of: the stories and novels of a few then-famous Russian futurist and surrealist writers who lived in St. Petersburg in the early 1920s and made their names by envisioning the utopian, and anti-utopian, potential of the decade’s new machines. Rand’s 1938 novel, Anthem, clearly reflects their influence, and so, perhaps, did this early effort. She almost surely encountered their work, both published and unpublished, in an underground network connected to one of her writers’ clubs.

  Aircraft always fascinated Rand, although until late in her life she was too fearful to fly in a plane. In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart and John Galt both fly solo through Colorado. In a 1969 essay, Rand described watching in “exaltation” as Apollo 11 streaked skyward from Cape Kennedy. And in “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” her famous speech to the 1974 senior class of West Point, she narrates a parable of an astronaut whose spaceship veers off course and crashes on a strange planet. The astronaut, who doesn’t understand his craft or its instruments, merely waits passively, hoping that something will intercede to save him, as aliens approach. The unstated moral: Airplanes, like skyscrapers, are the domain of the intelligent hero.

  While still at the university, she outlined another novel foreshadowing her masterwork, Atlas Shrugged. This novel concerned a beautiful, spirited American heiress who lures Europe’s greatest men to follow her to America. The Europeans are quickly becoming Communists, and the heiress wants to entice all men of ability to withdraw to a better world. A Frenchman is appointed by the Europeans to conquer and collectivize America. Our heroine offers him a million dollars to join her instead; he, in turn, offers her two million to come to work for him. They fall in love. The plot, though complicated, ends in the collapse of the Europeans. The heiress’s assistant in the novel is named Eddie Willers, the name Rand would also give to her heroine Dagny Taggart’s assistant in Atlas Shrugged—where John Galt lures all men of ability to withdraw to his mountain hideout.

  In October 1924, diploma in hand, the nineteen-year-old Rand enrolled in a new performing-arts school called the State Technicum for Screen Arts, founded with Lenin’s explicit support in 1922 as a training camp for aspiring actors and cinematographers. The Bolsheviks viewed motion pictures as a promising new weapon in the international propaganda war between Communism and capitalism, and they offered free tuition to any ideologically qualified student who applied. (Rand probably would not have been admitted had her mother Anna not joined the Communist teachers’ union in February 1923, very likely to Rand’s and Zinovy’s disapproval.) She hoped to learn the techniques of screenwriting, and had a special reason: By now, she was determined to find a way to immigrate to America and work in the new and rapidly growing movie industry. This would be a manageable prelude to writing publishable plays and novels, which she knew would require English-language and literary skills she didn’t yet possess. The only alternative to emigration she could fathom, she later said, was to remain in Russia and oppose Communism by writing satirical films attacking it. She and her mother both foresaw that this road would be short and lead to death. Anna supported her dream of emigration; her father, fearful and perhaps dependent on her intellectual companionship, did not.

  By spring, the way to America found her, through Anna’s relatives in Chicago. In the late 1890s, one of Anna’s aunts, Eva Kaplan, had immigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago with her husband, Harry Portnoy, and their eight children. Eva had borrowed part of the money for the family’s passage from her brother, Rand’s grandfather Berko Kaplan, and felt indebted to him. The Rosenbaums hadn’t heard from the Portnoys during World War I and the Russian Revolution, because mail service from the West had been interrupted. Now they received a letter, and Rand begged Anna to ask Eva’s grown daughters Minna Goldberg, Anna Stone, and Sarah Lipton to sponsor her for a visit to America. The Chicago cousins had brought over other Russian Jews, both inside and outside the family, and they readily agreed and sent the necessary affidavit of support. What’s more, Sarah Lipton owned and operated a Chicago movie theater, and she promised that Rand could work there if she liked. With affidavit in hand, in the spring of 1925 Rand applied for a Soviet passport, with the declared intention of visiting the United States for six months and of returning to Russia to make propaganda films. Luckily, a tiny window of opportunity remained open for Russians to go abroad; within two years, that and almost every other window of escape would slam shut.

  While Rand waited anxiously for passport permission to be granted or denied, she wrote a long ess
ay for the State Technicum Institute on the subject of her favorite movie actress, the Polish-American silent-film star Pola Negri. In the essay, which was discovered in a St. Petersburg library after Rand’s death, she characterized Negri in terms that suited her as well. Whereas “Francesca Bertini is a prizewinning beauty,” she wrote, “Pola Negri is unattractive. Gloria Swanson dazzles the eye with … the originality of her outfits; Pola Negri has no taste in clothing. Mary Pickford conquers hearts with her childlike tenderness …; Pola Negri is a gloomy, intense, cruel woman.” What was the secret of Pola Negri’s success? She was “a proud woman-conqueror.” After a “difficult, joyless childhood,” Rand continued amiably, the actress was “insolent” on screen and in life. Once, when she had been confronted by a Polish border guard who refused to let her pass until she handed over her jewelry, she proved “ready to crush the man who dared to stand in her way.” That Negri had immigrated to America and become one of the earliest foreign-born Hollywood studio stars added to her allure; the dark-eyed actress had “been able to conquer Americans’ cold distrust of Europeans, their patriotism,” wrote the Russian girl who had not yet been to America. In 1925, the essay Pola Negri was published in Moscow as one of a series of pamphlets about popular actors. It was Rand’s first published work.

  She was granted a passport in the fall of 1925. She and her mother sent away for French passenger ships’ brochures, and when the pamphlets arrived the whole family gathered to look at them. Alissa might soon be embarking on an odyssey into this fantastically colorful world of shipboard cafés, well-dressed men and women, laughter and gaiety. Passage was booked for late January; Harry Portnoy, Eva Kaplan’s widowered husband, and his daughter Anna Stone helped to pay the fare. At Anna Rosenbaum’s suggestion, her daughter arranged for English lessons from a British expatriate who had remained in the Russian capital after the revolution, perhaps paying the woman out of her small salary as a part-time tour guide at the Peter and Paul Fortress, a former czarist prison.