Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [24]
Rand graduated from secondary school on June 30, 1921. She and her mother, both desperate for work, timidly signed on to teach illiterate Red soldiers to read and write. To Rand’s surprise, she found the men eager to learn and polite in the classroom. She was unusually gifted at teaching, as her friends and followers would later remark with almost universal awe, and she enjoyed making a misunderstood or murky concept exquisitely clear. But by midsummer she and her family no longer had any reason to stay in the Crimea; they had lost their gamble, and their confiscated real estate and remaining relatives were in St. Petersburg. While they struggled to feed themselves, they waited for seats on one of the antiquated trains that were taking Red soldiers, peasants, black marketers, and everyone else who could leave the region north. After weeks of waiting, they found a train and squeezed on.
There’s no better description of the Rosenbaums’ journey home than the opening pages of We the Living. What had formerly been a three-day train trip took two weeks. The third-class compartment the family rode in was packed with men and women who had been waiting trackside, for days or weeks, without a bath or change of clothing. The train was filthy. Everyone was hungry. Scraps of food and the relics of old valuables had to be secreted, out of sight, and guarded. When a few of the passenger cars broke down, the Rosenbaums scrambled for cramped space aboard a boxcar. The teenaged Rand observed every nuance of timidity, pretentiousness, callousness, and greed among her fellow passengers, including her family, and recorded it all with Dostoyevskian precision in her semiautobiographical novel a decade later.
The train stopped in Moscow before completing its journey to St. Petersburg. She briefly left the boxcar and stood in a city square just outside the railroad station. Moscow, which had become Russia’s capital city in March 1918, was enormous, she remembered thinking, and was only one city among hundreds or even thousands in the world. She had something to say to people in all of them, she reflected with a thrill; the audience for her plays and stories would be immense.
By late summer 1921, the permanent population of St. Petersburg was smaller by two-thirds than it had been at the outbreak of the world war. Even so, workers, the unemployed, and roaming hordes of demobilized Red soldiers occupied almost every square foot of habitable housing. Back in their native city, the Rosenbaums settled into a single room of their old apartment on Nevsky Prospekt, now inhabited by a sign painter and his family, who let them use some of their old furniture. There was no electricity or hot water. Nor was there food for those who didn’t work or study, since government-issued ration cards, the only way to lay hands on what meager and often rotten food there was, were distributed in workplaces and schools. Finding work was a priority. Under a brief amnesty for private merchants called the New Economic Policy (NEP), Zinovy obtained a position in a cooperative pharmacy, but such semiprivate businesses were soon closed down and their wares impounded. Like Uncle Vasili in We the Living, he refused to work for the Communists, the only work there was. Later, Rand explained, her father “wouldn’t do anything. To begin with, he wouldn’t have been accepted, as a former owner, into any Soviet job, and he didn’t want to do it. … He was enormously on strike.” Zinovy’s attitude made a strong impression upon Rand; to her it seemed heroic. Similarly, in the 1940s, she began to refer to her husband, the unemployed actor Frank O’Connor, as also being “on strike.” The original title of her third major novel, Atlas Shrugged, was, unmusically, The Strike.
It was Rand’s mother who kept the family financially afloat after returning to St. Petersburg. Anna, the former dentist and