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By Root 1776 0

York Town Hall Club on “Whitewashed Russia,” where she asked the audience to imagine being ruled by a group of men who have not been elected and cannot be recalled, who control all public information, who distribute all food, housing, and employment. They cannot be criticized; they dispatch political adversaries to dungeons or death without a trial or hearing. They claim that individual rights do not exist. Would her listeners wish to live under the thumb of these “two million snow-white [Stalinist] angels,” as she characterized the Left’s view of them? She gave dozens of radio and print interviews in which she described her bourgeois Russian background, elaborated on her hatred of the Bolsheviks, and mentioned the approximate date and circumstances of her escape to the United States. In one New York newspaper interview in late spring, titled “Only High ‘Ransom’ for Passports Opens [Soviet] Border, Says Miss Rand,” the interviewer observed that the Russian-born author, whose first remark was, “If the [Soviet] borders were ever opened there would be a migration like that of the early Middle Ages,” was also known as Mrs. Frank O’Connor. A picture of the author and her husband seated in their living room appeared above the text of the interview, with a caption explaining that they lived in an apartment on Park Avenue.

At the same time, Rand was making a determined effort to rescue her parents from their life of hardship in Russia. Although the Rosenbaums no longer remained in danger of starving, they, like much of the rest of Soviet Russia, had settled into an underfed, fearful, precarious, and dreary routine that she considered inhuman. She appears to have been deeply in earnest about bringing them to America. Since becoming a citizen herself in March 1931, she had kept up an intermittent correspondence with the U.S. State Department and other agencies, in hopes of obtaining immigration visas for all four members of her family, but she and O’Connor were thwarted by the requirement that they show sufficient income to get an affidavit of support. Now they had the income, from her royalties.

There is a mystery here. Even as she renewed her efforts to get her family out of Russia, she was publicly presenting herself as an anti-Communist activist. That she wasn’t aware that Soviet agents might be watching her—and might easily confirm that Alissa Rosenbaum, Mrs. Frank O’Connor, and Ayn Rand were different names for the same woman—is hard to believe. She took normal, recommended precautions, such as using only her legal, married name in government correspondence and not sending her parents a copy of her book. But in the 1930s, there was a Soviet government agency whose specific job it was to read correspondence from abroad, and Russian agents at home and in the United States and Europe were notorious for their ruthlessness and skill in tracking and spying on Russian émigrés. Her Chicago relatives were sure that she was conscious of the risk she took in publishing We the Living and in giving interviews. Said Fern Brown’s cousin Roger Salamon, “The fact that [her parents] never came out of Russia was due to We the Living. My grandmother [Sarah Lipton] and mother [Beatrice Collier, daughter of Sarah Lipton and her second or third husband, Harry Collier] used to talk about it. She had an agenda, and if she wanted to do it, she did it.” Perhaps the task of “telling it to the world,” though more impersonal, was more compelling. That she later felt uneasy about the danger in which she may have placed her family can be guessed from the fact that, in 1961, she told her friend Barbara Branden that she had never revealed her new name to her family in Russia. “She lied,” said Branden. After her death, hundreds of letters from her parents and sisters were discovered among her papers, many mentioning her pseudonym and applauding the soon-to-be-famous “Ayn Rand.”

By this time, Nora had fallen in love with an engineer named Fedor Drobyshev and was married and teaching in a Soviet school. Natasha no longer wanted to come to America. But Anna and