Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [18]
Though political change was in the air, it came as a shock to almost everyone when, during the final week of February 1917, history galloped past its gatekeepers to a point of no return.
The February 1917, or “liberal,” Russian Revolution began with a shortage of bread. On February 23, several St. Petersburg bakeries ran out of flour and closed their doors. That afternoon a planned International Women’s Day march turned into a bread riot. The next day, male workers left their factories and joined the women in the streets. Before long, one hundred thousand hungry, war-weary workers, students, and soldiers collected at points outside the city and marched down Nevsky Prospekt, recklessly shouting “Down with the czar!” As in 1905, the Rosenbaums heard the insurrection from their windows; Rand later said that she and her sisters stood on their apartment balcony and watched as a line of mounted Cossacks fired warning shots above the crowd. Unlike in 1905, however, the czar didn’t react quickly or decisively. By February 28, his St. Petersburg garrison, haphazardly led and sympathizing with the protesters, turned their guns on their commanders. The next day, thousands of munitions workers armed themselves for combat. That’s when the Duma demanded, and got, the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. On March 3, Nicholas’s younger brother Mikhail ceded his right of succession, quietly signing an abdication letter written by Olga’s father. The Duma immediately installed a liberal Provisional Government, with V. D. Nabokov as its chancellor and Aleksandr Kerensky as its minister of justice, soon to be prime minister. For a brief period, the dashing and rhetorically gifted Kerensky became Ayn Rand’s second hero, after Cyrus.
All Russia cheered the fall of the czar. In the streets, shops, and cafés of St. Petersburg, people spoke jubilantly of coming political freedoms, economic revival, and an end to the war. Much later, Rand would remember this as a period of unparalleled excitement, hope, and happiness, both for her and for the country. It was the only time in her life, she said, when she was “synchronized with history.”
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