Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [16]
In February 1917, the month of Rand’s twelfth birthday, statues and symbols of Peter still stood everywhere among the domed churches, granite palaces, and broad squares of St. Petersburg. But the capital’s neoclassical architecture could not mask a society in tatters. This was the third long winter of World War I, and the coldest winter on record in many years. Temperatures stood at twenty or thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit for days at a time. The war was going badly. Six million Russians had been killed, captured, maimed, or wounded. Lacking uniforms, guns, ammunition, and rations, thousands of deserters poured into the city, looking for food and work. Even there, shortages of food and fuel were reaching a crisis point, especially for the lower and working classes, who lived on bread and stood in bread lines for hours, sometimes only to be turned away empty-handed. Because the nation’s railway system had long since broken down under the strain of troop transport, grain lay rotting in the southern provinces. Crime was rampant; curfews were set, but prostitutes, robbers, and murderers prowled Nevsky Prospekt after dark, making it unsafe for the Rosenbaums and other families to venture out.
Meanwhile, in the south and the Pale of Settlement, anti-Semitic bloodshed was on the rise. Czarist “Black Hundreds” groups roamed the countryside, spreading rumors that Yiddish-speaking spies and Jewish profiteering were responsible for war losses and shortages of goods. As the Russian army retreated from the advancing Germans, Russian troops were ordered to round up residents of Jewish villages in the Pale and herd them, under the lash, eastward to the Ukraine or Siberia. Many of these villages, including Brest, where the Rosenbaums’ extended family lived, welcomed temporary German occupation as “salvation.”
But scapegoating of Jews could no longer head off a political showdown. Given the nation’s battlefield losses, Czar Nicholas II, Peter’s great-great-great-great-grandson, was widely viewed as militarily and mentally incompetent, possibly traitorous, even insane. Revolution was in the air; the only question was whether it would be a relatively democratic revolution or one made brutal and tyrannical by the Bolsheviks.
The comfortably middle-class Rosenbaums probably didn’t go cold or hungry in the early months of 1917, though in years to come they would, but privation was all around them. For this reason and others, it was natural that Anna, Zinovy, and their daughters were hoping for a democratic change of government, as were most Russian Jews. For the first time in three hundred years, the reign of the Romanovs was poised to end. St. Petersburg’s European-educated liberal elite—a category that included many of Rand’s teachers as well as the father of a new friend she made that winter—were ready to take the reins of government. For in spite of the terrible hardships of war, the Bolsheviks had gained only a small, if concentrated, following among urban workers and the nation’s land-hungry former serfs and peasants. To the Rosenbaums’ relief and joy, the reform-minded liberal intelligentsia, whom Anna so admired, were leading the call for the czar to share power or step down.
Rand, at twelve, was just entering adolescence. Short for her age and squarely built, she was highly animated when excited and became fidgety, standoffish, and sullen when her family’s conversation turned from ideas and significant events to small talk. She already wore a look of luminous penetration in her large, dark, exquisite eyes. Stimulated by outward events and impatient to grow up, she assigned herself a new task: to examine her own ideas and beliefs just as rigorously as she examined those of others. This is what I think, she remembered saying to herself. Why do I think it? If her answer didn’t measure up—if it was based on what others believed or on a mistake in logic—out went the idea.
Later, after achieving fame as a novelist and a largely self-taught metaphysician,