In this setting, the sixteen-year-old Rand composed what she later called her “first adult novel.” It was inspired by Hugo and set in medieval France, where battling groups of feudal lords fought for and against an evil king in an epic civil war. (According to one researcher, the teenaged Rand admired feudalism because it represented “a pyramid of ability,” with noble, if not necessarily gifted, men and women at the top.) She completed about a third of the novel’s planned chapters, then halted—in fact, stopped writing plays and novels altogether. She was aware, she later told a friend, that she was simply too young to write the way she now wanted to write—presumably, with some of the urbanity and passion of Victor Hugo—and that the stories she longed to tell could not be told in Russia. Instead, she made lists of plots and themes for future projects. By age thirty, she said, she intended to be famous.
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 literary lady of the house, applied for and got a Soviet teaching certificate in 1921; for many years thereafter, she traveled the city by tram, instructing impoverished workers and their children in reading, writing, and foreign languages. By the mid-1920s, she was earning much-needed money on the side by tutoring and translating politically correct books and magazine articles for the Soviet state publishing house Gossizdat. Once Rand arrived in the United States, she sent her mother American novels to translate; Anna marveled at her daughter’s ability to choose works of proletarian fiction that Gossizdat would readily accept.
Anna was unusually resourceful and seems to have thrived in her new role as the family’s breadwinner. At one point, she wrote to Rand in America, “You and I have our love of work in common.” In a diminishing turnabout, Zinovy was placed in charge of keeping house, waiting in lines for rationed food, and cooking the millet or, in flush times, peas or potatoes that typically made a meal. Some of these were chores that Rand’s husband Frank would also perform.
Rand had left St. Petersburg a girl and had returned a young woman. In August 1921, she was admitted, free of charge, to Petrograd State University as a student in the newly formed Social-Pedagogical Division of the College of Social Sciences. This division combined the old disciplines of history, philology, anthropology, and philosophy under one academic roof. She declared a major in history and a minor in philosophy and began attending classes in October. As a student, as in little else, she benefited from the Bolshevik regime, since Lenin had adopted Kerensky’s policy of offering educational opportunities to Jews and women, while doing away with tuition fees and reducing the full term of study to three years. These changes were meant to help factory workers, but they made it possible for her to get the kind of education, and degree, that her parents could have only dreamed of. By her own lights, she made the most of it, studying as much as she could with the older, classically trained, Western-leaning liberal professors who were slowly being phased out, arrested, and deported. She took ancient, medieval, Western, and Russian history; logic; philosophy of the mind, a forerunner of psychology; French; biology; and historical materialism and the history of socialism, which were required courses. She read Hegel and Marx, Shakespeare, Schiller, and the great proto-Nietzschean novelist Dostoyevsky, whose mystical point of view she said she rejected but whose brilliant integration of plot, theme, and “philosophy of mind” she learned from and found exciting. She later said that Dostoyevsky was the world’s best interpreter of the psychology of evil. He “gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide,” she wrote in 1971. She was lucky to be admitted to the university when she was; by 1924, the year she graduated, a decree was issued barring admission to students from families who had owned property before the revolution or who had employed one or more servants at any time during the last three generations.