By late summer of 1918, the Rosenbaums had had enough. Under threat of a new order compelling them to share their living space on less than equal footing with former servants, factory workers, and soldiers; with whole days now spent in search of rationed millet, peas, and cooking oil; and with the terrifying knowledge that what the revolutionaries regarded as their and their neighbors’ “hoarded” savings had become the object of systematic official searches, they gathered their belongings and departed. Still expecting the regime to collapse, they thought they would be away from home for six months; they were gone for three years.
As We the Living opens in 1922, the Argounov family is wearily returning to a dreary, disease-ridden St. Petersburg from the Crimean peninsula, now also in Bolshevik hands. But in 1918, when the Rosenbaums fled south, the Crimea was a bustling center of White Russian resistance to the Communists and was full of transplanted czarist military officers, aristocrats, statesmen, manufacturers, and merchants from the north. Rand later told a friend that she and her family were forced to walk all the way from Leningrad (as St. Petersburg came to be known in 1924) to Odessa, a journey of nine hundred miles. This is unlikely, especially as she told another friend that the railroad train in which the family traveled broke down in the Ukraine and that they and other passengers hired horse-drawn carts to continue their journey, adding that the carts were robbed by a gang of bandits. In this story, Zinovy managed to safeguard his savings of several thousand rubles by burying them in the straw that lined a cart. It may be that the family was forced to walk after the robbery, though Rand recalled climbing back in the cart, or that the family walked during another leg of the journey and the child recalled the ordeal as being longer than it was.
In any case, Rand remembered rocky terrain, broken shoes, hunger, darkness, terror, defiance. If she was going to die, she remembered thinking at the time of the robbery, she would die on her own terms, picturing Hugo’s young hero Enjolras. Her last thought would be of his steadfastness and courage, “not of Russia nor the horrors.” Later in life, she would prove herself gifted at focusing on distant ideals in the face of unpleasant realities. Yet another quality comes to light here: a propensity for imagining characters as more real than the people around her. As an adult she would ask friends, “But would you want to meet” the characters in a novel they were reading? If the answer was no, she considered the discussion finished. Fictional heroes and villains lived and breathed for Rand, and her own larger-than-life characters came to define the limits of an imagined world so compelling that many admirers who entered it never left.
Rand and her parents and sisters lingered briefly in the Ukraine, where a number of Zinovy’s cousins practiced medicine and where Zinovy might have expected to find work. The Bolsheviks were making military inroads there, too, however. So the Rosenbaums moved on, as originally planned, to the Crimea. For the next three years, they lived in Yevpatoria, a resort town near the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula, on the Black Sea. The town stood only one hundred miles from Yalta, where the Nabokovs were staying, but Rand didn’t know this; she believed that Olga and her family had left the country in 1917. Since the Rosenbaums had taken summer vacations on the Black Sea in better days, Yevpatoria may have been familiar to them. Side by side with thousands of other refugees from the Red Terror, they searched for shelter, paid work, and food. They found a small, damp, unheated house in which to live. Zinovy eventually opened a pharmacy, but this was looted and shut down, either by renegade White Russian soldiers, invading Reds, or the staunchly anti-Semitic local Orthodox peasants who rampaged against the Jews whenever the Whites were in retreat. The town changed hands four or five times. Fifty-five years later, Rand remembered the terror of the Red Army and the empty, “smelly,” “Holy Russian” religious bromides of the Whites with almost equal loathing. The family lived “on a battlefield,” she said.
During the years in Yevpatoria, she and her sisters, Natasha and Nora, attended a private girls’ school. Here, in the last remaining corner of Russia not permanently occupied by Reds, the schools were free of the Communist curriculum that had taken hold elsewhere. Among other subjects, Rand studied math, which she loved, Russian language and literature, which she claimed to have hated, and Aristotelian syllogistic logic, which taught her to prize rigor and strive for consistency. At the time, she recalled, she knew little about Aristotle except that he was supposed to be an archenemy of Plato, whom she took to be a virtuous idealist, as opposed to a vulgar Communistic materialist, and so she expected to “be against” Aristotle. In one of her first college courses, she would change her mind about Plato, fall in love with Aristotle, and passionately align herself with Aristotle’s empiricism for the remainder of her life. She also studied political economy, which fired her imagination. The class was her introduction to the Declaration of Independence and America’s constitutional guarantee of individual rights, and these deeply impressed her. Henceforth, the United States would replace Britain as the focus of her hopes and plans. She read Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, a romantic fable about a witty, proud French soldier and poet with a disfiguring nose whose love letters on behalf of his rival, Christian, win the heart of his cousin Roxane; when Roxane discovers who wrote them, she pledges her love to Cyrano, but only as he is dying from a wound. On reading about the trials and triumph of the ugly, honorable misfit, “I cried my eyes out,” Rand said. She learned the play by heart, and it became another of her lifelong literary touchstones.
There is a picture of Ayn Rand from this period, posing with her high-school graduating class of about twenty somber-looking girls and almost as many teachers, all artfully arranged on a period Turkish rug outdoors, in the schoolyard. Rand’s hair is bobbed and caught in a barrette, and she wears a white broad-collared shirt and skirt, both fresh and crisp. She must have made a special effort to look neat that day, for her usual disarray often caused her mother to complain that she didn’t care how she looked. In the picture, she peers out intently, almost defiantly, toward the camera, while the other girls just stare. This was in the late spring of 1921, and Rand’s class was smaller by a third than it had been six months before. During the previous November, retreating White Russian military officers had evacuated 150,000 soldiers, civilians, and families—anyone who wanted to leave Russia—while the Red Army massed for its final, conclusive assault on the Crimea. The Whites loaded everybody into French and British ships and sailed them across the Black Sea to Constantinople, whence passengers could travel on to Europe. Some of the ships set sail from the docks at Yevpatoria, but the Rosenbaums were left behind. Anna had pleaded with Zinovy to let the family emigrate, but Rand’s father was as certain as Kerensky had been that Communism couldn’t last. One day, he promised, they would reclaim their business and property in St. Petersburg. By spring, the Bolshevik victory was complete and uncontestable; with a few far-flung exceptions, all of Russia was under Red control.
The Communist victory meant that Yevpatoria and nearby towns were overrun by an army of ragged, hungry, illiterate Red soldiers, many of whom had also served in World War I. As a group, they were looking for booty and eager to exact revenge and spread terror—they were a classic mob. There were mock trials, burnings, and hangings, and Rand later recalled that one classmate’s father was summarily and publicly shot. Zinovy’s old-style rubles were now worthless; the Bolsheviks issued their own inflated rubles, which became the legal tender in the south. By 1924, five billion of these rubles would buy what one had bought in 1914. This was a decisive blow in the campaign of economic devastation against the former middle class.