Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [19]
Amid a tangle of plots and subplots, Scott proposes that capitalism (as represented by Isaac) and character (which charming Rebecca has in spades) will be the defining values of the coming modern world. But the heraldic universe of Ivanhoe is not yet ready for modernity, and the hero finally spurns the beautiful Rebecca in favor of Rowena. Rand never remarked on this turn of the plot in a favorite novel, but the rejection of a superior girl for an insipid one and the second-class status of Jews were all too familiar to her. Robin Hood also makes an appearance in the book as the altruistic spokesman for popular resentment against the Norman nobles. This was probably Rand’s first encounter with the legendary English outlaw who takes from the rich and gives to the poor—which also happened to be the stated objective of the Bolsheviks. For Rand, Robin Hood immediately became a villain, a symbol of the cowardly, destructive idea that “need, not achievement, is the source of rights,” as she wrote in 1964. Readers of Atlas Shrugged remember the character of Ragnar Danneskjöld, an anti-Robin Hood who takes back from the poor and gives back to the rich.
When Rand returned to school that fall, the city’s mood had darkened. The Provisional Government’s first official act had been to confer equal rights on Jews, an unpopular move with most Russians. While the government also rapidly granted basic freedoms of speech, press, and assembly to the people at large, the lower classes were unmoved by abstract freedoms; they wanted bread, fuel, land, and jobs with a living wage. These were not forthcoming. In fact, shortages were such that the government began to ration bread.
Equally important, Kerensky didn’t end the war; through a blizzard of speeches, he tried to rally the army for a push to victory. This shifted popular sentiment leftward. In legislative elections in September, the Bolshevik candidates, running on a promise to end the war, nationalize factories, and confiscate landowners’ fields, made gains. Unfortunately, this didn’t alarm Kerensky. In early October, when V. D. Nabokov asked him whether an armed Bolshevik attack on the new government was now possible, the prime minister answered that he hoped so; he was sure his troops could defeat the radicals once and for all.
Then, to worldwide dismay, on October 25, 1917, Lenin and his Bolshevik followers struck. Simply by occupying a few key buildings, cutting telephone lines, and winning over a handful of strategically placed soldiers, they gained control of the capital and overthrew Russia’s fragile republican government. A bloody civil war for command of the rest of the empire followed, but this one-day coup was the unspectacular beginning of the dictatorship of the proletariat, whose ensuing brutalities Rand would one day brilliantly detail in fictional form. Kerensky, who fled the country, spent the rest of his life explaining why he shouldn’t be blamed for the failure of his nation’s single great moment of political opportunity. Russian parliamentary democracy had lasted exactly eight months.
Rand kept a diary during this period, where she wrote down her ideals and, on her thirteenth birthday, noted her decision to be an atheist. Later, she remembered her reasoning this way: Since no one had ever been able to prove that God exists, God was obviously an invention, and even if God did exist and was perfect, as reputed, then man would necessarily have to be imperfect