Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right Read online

  By any standard, Russian or Jewish, the Rosenbaums were an elite and privileged family. Alisa’s maternal grandparents were so wealthy, the children noted with awe, that when their grandmother needed a tissue she summoned a servant with a button on the wall.3 Alisa and her three sisters grew up with a cook, a governess, a nurse, and tutors. Their mother loved to entertain, and their handsome apartment was filled with relatives and friends drawn to her evening salons. The family spent each summer on the Crimean peninsula, a popular vacation spot for the affluent. When Alisa was nine they journeyed to Austria and Switzerland for six weeks.

  Alisa’s childhood was dominated by her volatile mother. At a young age Alisa found herself ensnared in an intense family rivalry between Anna and her sister’s husband. Both families had three daughters and lived in the same apartment building. Her mother was delighted each time Alisa bested her cousins in reading, writing, or arithmetic, and showed her off before gatherings of friends and relatives. Privately she berated her eldest daughter for failing to make friends. Alisa was a lonely, alienated child. In new situations she was quiet and still, staring out remotely through her large dark eyes. Anna grew increasingly frustrated with Alisa’s withdrawn nature. “Why didn’t I like to play with others? Why didn’t I have any girlfriends? That was kind of the nagging refrain,” Alisa remembered.4 At times Anna’s criticisms erupted into full-blown rage. In a “fit of temperament” she would lash out at her children, on one occasion breaking the legs of Alisa’s favorite doll and on another ripping up a prized photo of Alexander Kerensky. She declared openly that she had never wanted children, hated caring for them, and did so only because it was her duty.

  Zinovy, a taciturn and passive man, did little to balance his mercurial wife. He worked diligently to support his family and retreated in his spare time to games of whist, a popular card game. Despite the clashes with her mother, Alisa knew she was unquestionably the family favorite. Her grandmother doted on her, showering her with trinkets and treats during each visit. Her younger sisters idolized her, and although her father remained in the background, as was customary for fathers in his time, Alisa sensed that he approved of her many accomplishments.

  After extensive tutoring at home, Alisa enrolled in a progressive and academically rigorous gymnasium. During religion classes at her school, the Jewish girls were excused to the back of the room and left to entertain themselves.5 What really set Alisa apart was not her religion, but the same aloof temperament her mother found so troubling. Occasionally she would attract the interest of another girl, but she was never able to maintain a steady friendship. Her basic orientation to the world was simply too different. Alisa was serious and stern, uncomfortable with gossip, games, or the intrigues of popularity. “I would be bashful because I literally didn’t know what to talk to people about,” she recalled. Her classmates were a mystery to Alisa, who “didn’t give the right cues apparently.” Her only recourse was her intelligence. Her high marks at school enabled her to gain the respect, if not the affection, of her peers.6 Alisa’s perspective on her childhood was summarized in a composition she wrote as a young teen: “childhood is the worst period of one’s life.”

  She survived these lonely years by recourse to fantasy, imagining herself akin to Catherine the Great, an outsider in the Russian court who had maneuvered her way to prominence. Like Catherine, Alisa saw herself as “a child of destiny.” “They don’t know it,” she thought, “but it’s up to me to demonstrate it.”7 She escaped into the French children’s magazines her mother proffered to help with her language studies. In their pages Alisa discovered stories rife with beautiful princesses, brave adventurers, and daring warriors. Drawn into an imaginary universe of her own creation she began composing her own dramatic stories, often sitting in the back of her classroom writing instead of attending to the lessons.

  Alisa’s most enthusiastic audience for these early stories were her two sisters. Nora, the youngest, shared her introversion and artistic inclinations. Her specialty was witty caricatures of her family that blended man and beast. Alisa and Nora were inseparable, calling themselves Dact I and Dact II, after the winged dinosaurs of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fantastic adventure story The Lost World.8 The middle sister, Natasha, a skilled pianist, was outgoing and social. Both Nora and Natasha shared a keen appreciation for their elder sister’s creativity, and at bedtime Alisa regaled them with her latest tales.

  As the turmoil of Russia’s revolutionary years closed in around the Rosenbaums, the family was forced to forgo the luxuries that had marked Alisa’s childhood. Trips abroad and summer vacations receded into the distant past. Watching the disintegration of St. Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd, Anna convinced Zinovy they must relocate to Crimea. There, in czarist territory, he was able to open another shop, and the family’s situation stabilized briefly. Alisa, entering her teenage years, enrolled at the local school, where her superior city education made her an immediate star.

  But Crimea was a short-lived refuge. Red and White Russians battled for control of the region, and the chaos spilled into Yevpatoria, where the Rosenbaums lived. Communist soldiers rampaged through the town, once again robbing Zinovy. Piece by piece the family sold Anna’s jewelry. Like a good peasant daughter, Alisa was put to work. She took a job teaching soldiers how to read.

  In the middle of these bleak years Alisa unexpectedly broke through to her distant father. The connection was politics. Although forbidden to read the newspapers or talk about politics, she had followed the news of the Revolution with great interest. When Zinovy announced his departure for a political meeting one evening, Alisa boldly asked to accompany him. Surprised yet pleased, Zinovy agreed to take her, and afterward the two had their first real conversation. He listened to Alisa respectfully and offered his own opinions.

  Zinovy was an anti-Communist and, as the mature Rand phrased it, “pro-individualist.” So was she. In her adventure stories heroic resisters struggling against the Soviet regime now replaced knights and princesses. She filled her diary with invective against the Communists, further bolstered by her father’s position. Their new connection was a source of great joy for Alisa, who remembered it was “only after we began to be political allies that I really felt a real love for him. . . . ” She also discovered that her father had an “enormous approval of my intelligence,” which further confirmed her emerging sense of self.9

  As in Petrograd, she remained unpopular with her classmates. They were eager to ask for her help on school assignments, but Alisa was not included in parties or invited on dates. Underneath their rejection Alisa sensed a certain resentment. Did her classmates dislike her because she was smarter? Were they penalizing her for her virtues? It was the first glimmer of an idea that would surface later, in her fiction. “I think that is what is the matter with my relationships,” she began to believe, but worried this was “too easy” an explanation.10

  Most likely, her classmates simply found Alisa abrasive and argumentative. She had an admitted tendency to force conversations, a violent intensity to her beliefs, an unfortunate inability to stop herself from arguing. But from her perspective, their jealousy had forced her into a lonely exile. Alisa was starting to understand herself as a heroine unfairly punished for what was best in her. Later she would come to see envy and resentment as fundamental social and political problems.

  Turning to her interior world, Alisa became concerned not only with what she thought but how she thought. In her preteen years she had taken her family’s casual attitude toward religion a step farther, deciding that she was an atheist. Now she discovered the two corollaries of her unbelief: logic and reason. When a teacher introduced the class to Aristotle and syllogisms it was “as if a light bulb went off.” Consistency was the principle that grabbed her attention, not surprising given her unpredictable and frightening life. Consistency as Alisa understood it was the road to truth, the means to prevail in the heated arguments she loved, the one method to determine the validity of her thoughts.11


  Three years after leaving Petrograd, in 1921, the Rosenbaums returned. There was nowhere left to go, for Crimea and the rest of the country had fallen to the Communists. Anna had begged Zinovy to leave Russia, to flee with his family across the Black Sea, but for once he stood firm against her. The decision to return was not wise. Their apartment and adjoining property had been given to other families, although the Rosenbaums were able to secure a few rooms in the building Zinovy had once owned outright.

  Years later Alisa described in her fiction the grim disappointment of her family’s return to Petrograd: “Their new home had no front entrance. It had no electrical connections; the plumbing was out of order; they had to carry water in pails from the floor below. Yellow stains spread over the ceilings, bearing witness to past rains.” All trappings of luxury and higher culture had vanished. Instead of monogrammed silver, spoons were of heavy tin. There was no crystal or silver, and “rusty nails on the walls showed the places where old paintings had hung.”12 At parties hostesses could offer their guests only dubious delicacies, such as potato skin cookies and tea with saccharine tablets instead of sugar.

  Under the Soviet New Economic Plan Zinovy was able to briefly reopen his shop with several partners, but it was again confiscated. After this latest insult Zinovy made one last, futile stand: he refused to work. Alisa silently admired her father’s principles. To her his abdication was not self-destruction but self-preservation. His refusal to work for an exploitive system would structure the basic premise of her last novel, Atlas Shrugged. But with survival at stake it was no time for principles, or for bourgeois propriety. Anna found work teaching languages in a school, becoming her family’s main source of support. But her teacher’s salary was not enough for a family of five, and starvation stalked the Rosenbaums.

  Even with money it would have been difficult to find enough to eat, for 1921–22 was the year of the Russian famine, during which five million Russians starved to death. In the city limited food supplies were parceled out to a subdued population through ration cards. Millet, acorns, and mush became mainstays of the family diet. Anna struggled to cook palatable meals on the Primus, a rudimentary Soviet stove that belched smoke throughout their living area. In later years Alisa remembered these bleak times vividly. She told friends she wrapped newspapers around her feet in lieu of shoes and recalled how she had begged her mother for a last dried pea to stave off her hunger.

  Living under such dire circumstances, the Rosenbaums continued to prize education and culture. Alisa, now a full-time university student, was not asked to work. When her parents scraped together enough money to pay her streetcar fare she pocketed the money and used it to buy tickets to the theater. Musicals and operettas replaced fiction as her favorite narcotic.

  At Petrograd State University Alisa was immune to the passions of revolutionary politics, inured against any radicalism by the travails her family was enduring. When she matriculated at age sixteen the entire Soviet higher education system was in flux. The Bolsheviks had liberalized admission policies and made tuition free, creating a flood of new students, including women and Jews, whose entrance had previously been restricted. Alisa was among the first class of women admitted to the university. Alongside these freedoms the Bolsheviks dismissed counterrevolutionary professors, harassed those who remained, and instituted Marxist courses on political economy and historical materialism. Students and professors alike protested the new conformity. In her first year Alisa was particularly outspoken. Then the purges began. Anticommunist professors and students disappeared, never to be heard from again. Alisa herself was briefly expelled when all students of bourgeois background were dismissed from the university. (The policy was later reversed and she returned.) Acutely aware of the dangers she faced, Alisa became quiet and careful with her words.

  Alisa’s education was heavily colored by Marxism. In her later writing she satirized the pabulum students were fed in books like The ABC of Communism and The Spirit of the Collective. By the time she graduated the school had been renamed Leningrad State University (and Petrograd had become Leningrad). Like the city itself, the university had fallen into disrepair. There were few textbooks or school supplies, and lecture halls and professors’ offices were cold enough to freeze ink. Ongoing reorganization and reform meant that departments and graduation requirements were constantly changing. During her three years at the university Alisa gravitated to smaller seminar-style classes, skipping the large lectures that were heavy on Communist ideology. Most of her coursework was in history, but she also enrolled in classes in French, biology, history of worldviews, psychology, and logic. Her degree was granted by the interdisciplinary Department of Social Pedagogy.13

  Alisa was skeptical of the education she received at the university, and it appears to have influenced her primarily in its form rather than its content. Her time at the University of Leningrad taught her that all ideas had an ultimate political valence. Communist authorities scrutinized every professor and course for counterrevolutionary ideas. The most innocuous statement could be traced back to its roots and identified as being either for or against the Soviet system. Even history, a subject Alisa chose because it was relatively free of Marxism, could be twisted and framed to reflect the glories of Bolshevism. Years later she considered herself an authority on propaganda, based on her university experience. “I was trained in it by experts,” she explained to a friend.14

  The university also shaped Alisa’s understanding of intellectual life, primarily by exposing her to formal philosophy. Russian philosophy was synoptic and systemic, an approach that may have stimulated her later interest in creating an integrated philosophical system.15 In her classes she heard about Plato and Herbert Spencer and studied the works of Aristotle for the first time. There was also a strong Russian tradition of pursuing philosophical inquiry outside university settings, and that was how she encountered Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who quickly became her favorite. A cousin taunted her with a book by Nietzsche, “who beat you to all your ideas.”16 Reading outside of her classes she devoured his works.

  Alisa’s first love when she left university was not philosophy, however, but the silver screen. The Russian movie industry, long dormant during the chaos of war and revolution, began to revive in the early 1920s. Under the New Economic Plan Soviet authorities allowed the import of foreign films and the Commissariat of Education began supporting Russian film production. Hoping to become a screenwriter, Alisa enrolled in the new State Institute for Cinematography after receiving her undergraduate degree. Movies became her obsession. In 1924 she viewed forty-seven movies; the next year she watched 117. In a movie diary she ranked each film she saw on a scale of one to five, noted its major stars, and started a list of her favorite artists. The movies even inspired her first published works, a pamphlet about the actress Pola Negri and a booklet titled Hollywood: American Movie City. In these early works she wrote knowledgably about major directors, artists, and films and explained the studio system, the way directors worked, even the use of specially trained animals.17

  In the movies Alisa glimpsed America: an ideal world, a place as different from Russia as she could imagine. America had glamour, excitement, romance, a lush banquet of material goods. She described Hollywood in reverent tones: “People, for whom 24 hours is not enough time in a day, stream in a constant wave over its boulevards, smooth as marble. It is difficult for them to talk with one another, because the noise of automobiles drowns out their voices. Shining, elegant Fords and Rolls-Royce’s fly, flickering, as the frames of one continuous movie reel. And the sun strikes the blazing windows of enormous, snow white studios. Every night an electric glow rises over the city.”18

  Her interest in America surged when the family received an unexpected letter from Chicago. Almost thirty years earlier Harry Portnoy, one of Anna’s relatives, had emigrated to America, and her family had helped pay the passage. Now one of Harry’s children, Sara Lipski, wrote inquiring about the Rosenbaums, for they had heard nothin
g during the wartime years. Alisa saw her chance. Using her connections to the Portnoys she could obtain a visa to visit the United States; once there she could find a way to stay forever. She begged her mother to ask their relatives for help. Her parents agreed to the idea, perhaps worried that their outspoken daughter would never survive in the shifting political climate.

  Or perhaps they agreed because Alisa’s unhappiness was palpable. Amid the privations of Petrograd she had made a life for herself, even attracting an attentive suitor, a neighbor her family referred to as Seriozha. But daily life continually disappointed. Film school seemed a road to nowhere, for Alisa knew that as a Russian screenwriter she would be expected to write Soviet propaganda, to support a system she loathed. Seriozha was little comfort. The two had met when their families rented adjacent cabins one summer for a brief vacation. Back in Leningrad Alisa continued to accept his overtures, but her heart lay with the memory of another man. Her first adolescent crush had been on the darkly attractive Lev, whom she met through a cousin. Years later his memory lingered as the character Leo in We the Living: “He was tall; his collar was raised; a cap was pulled over his eyes. His mouth, calm, severe, contemptuous, was that of an ancient chieftain who could order men to die, and his eyes were such as could watch it.”19 Fascinated by the intense young Alisa, Lev for a time became a regular visitor to the Rosenbaum household. But he had no genuine interest in a romance, soon abandoning her for other pursuits. Alisa was crushed. Lev symbolized all the lost possibility of her life in Russia.

  As she listened to her beloved eldest daughter shouting with despair behind her bedroom door, Anna knew she must get Alisa out of Russia.20 It took months to lay the groundwork. The first step was English lessons. Next Anna, Natasha, and Nora began a new round of fervent Communist activity intended to prove the family’s loyalty to the Revolution, even as Anna began securing the permits for Alisa’s escape. The Rosenbaums claimed that Alisa intended to study American movies and return to help launch the Russian film industry, a lie made plausible by her enrollment at the film institute and the fact that her relatives owned a theater. All of Anna’s Chicago relatives, the Portnoy, Lipski, Satrin, and Goldberg families, pledged their support.