Rand’s introduction to American silent films was the fourth defining experience of her university years. There, she got her first glimpse of the New York skyline, which would become for her an emblem of creativity and liberty in the capitalist free world. Although Soviet government censors always added absurd subtitles to the films, she said—turning an ordinary American family dinner scene into a portrait of greed, for example, by labeling it “A capitalist eating well on profits wrung from his starving workers”—she and other Russians understood this to be nonsense, or “applesauce,” as she called it. Her enthusiasm for America was forged in movie theaters. The films she saw inspired her to picture it as “Atlantis”: the ideal existence for intelligent, purposeful, ruggedly individualistic men and, presumably, women. America, she decided, was the place on earth where she would find real people and the country in which she wanted to live and work.
Meanwhile, in spite of new cinemas and state-sponsored operettas, 1923 and 1924 saw the city under renewed political and economic siege. For the previous two years, Lenin had been preoccupied with quelling far-flung rebellions and a nationwide famine. Now, as he and his deputy Joseph Stalin focused on the cities, the repression grew harsher. Food rations were cut to one thousand calories a day. Diseases of dirt and poverty such as cholera, typhoid, rheumatic fever, and tuberculosis swept the city, exacerbating Rand’s and Anna’s fear of germs. Russia officially became the Soviet Union, and the regime began busily rolling back the NEP—eliminating the jobs it had created and the useful products and services it brought to market—while intensifying its attack on the remnants of the middle class. Workplaces and schools were purged of political undesirables, which meant that becoming an informant against fellow students or workers and attempting to join the Communist Party were among the few strategies to try to stay alive. Candid speech was dangerous and dissent was deadly. The light of academic discourse was quickly going out.
In 1923 the Rosenbaums found an apartment of their own at 16 Dmitrovski Lane, a few blocks from their prerevolutionary home. Grandfather Berko Kaplan and Rand’s cousin Leonid Konheim joined them there. Though the family had more space, their lot was dreary. In a city festooned with fraying Red banners, they cooked their thousand calories a day on a smoky kerosene stove called a “Primus” and at celebrations ate cakes made of potato peelings, carrot greens, coffee grounds, and acorns. When there was fuel, they read by kerosene. Rand recalled that her one party dress was refashioned from an old summer coat of her mother’s, which Anna must have carefully packed, repacked, and carried to the Crimea and back again.
There had been a number of purges at the university since Rand arrived there in 1921. In the fall of 1922, for example, her eminent professor N. O. Lossky, along with his wife, his mother-in-law Mme. Stoiunina, and 220 other famous Russian academic philosophers and intellectuals were arrested for so-called anti-Soviet activity and deported on what came to be known as the “Philosophy Ship.” (On Mme. Stoiunina’s arrest, Rand’s alma mater the Stoiunin school closed its doors forever.) A year later, while she was in her third and final year, the university announced the largest purge yet of “socially undesirable elements” among the students. She was one of four thousand students expelled, a third of the student body, some of whom—“young boys and girls I knew” she later said—were sent off to die in Siberian prison camps. She was officially charged with “not fulfilling academic requirements,” but this was merely code for belonging to a prerevolutionary middle-class family and not being an ardent-enough Communist. (In her first year, she, like Kira, made “all kinds of anti-Soviet remarks” before realizing that she was endangering her family and herself.) The purge and its chilling, academically stifling aftereffects are unforgettably portrayed in We the Living. Rand, however, unlike her heroine Kira, got an unexpected reprieve. When a group of visiting Western scientists heard about the student purge and complained to their Communist hosts, she and other third-year students were reinstated and allowed to graduate.
She received her diploma on October 13, 1924. Her university records show that she had passing grades in all her subjects. Later, she would claim that she had finished “with highest honors”—an impossibility in a system that had been converted to “pass,” “fail,” and “retake.” Her followers would repeat this story and other questionable anecdotes about her prowess as a student, although scholarship was never her strong suit and by that time she didn’t need anyone to bolster her claim to genius.
While still at the university, Rand joined local writers’ clubs, but members were supervised and turned out little other than pat political treatises. Still, she constructed outlines for plays and stories and wrote an interesting short novel in this period. The text of the novella seems to be lost, but as she described it in 1960, it involved a meteorological disturbance that causes a gigantic airplane to spin out into space and begin to circle the earth. The passengers are a mixed group of scientists and Communists. Luckily, the plane is loaded with supplies. Using these, the scientists create a self-sustaining miniature economy that benefits all on board, even allowing them to grow food, while also devising a plan to get the airplane back to earth. Then the Communists gain the upper hand. In a chapter called “Humanity in a Teaspoon,” she showed the Communists gradually picking apart and destroying everything the scientists have accomplished. Soon everyone is starving. The Communists beg the story’s hero, a leading scientist, to take charge. He agrees. As the story ends, he begins to re-create his earlier work, with the implication that all will be well and the plane will return to earth. This, of course, echoes the ending of Atlas Shrugged, except that there the novel’s hero, John Galt, refuses to help the socialistic villains and instead flies his plane to a self-sustaining miniature world hidden in the Rocky Mountains; there he waits for the incompetent “looters and moochers” to perish of their own incompetence. Although Rand used many of the same ideas and motifs in both narratives, by the 1950s she appeared to be less hopeful that minds can be changed, villains converted, and mankind in general saved; a sealed world became her only answer.
It’s remarkable that this story is set aboard an airplane, let alone one that orbits the earth. If Rand’s memory is correct, she wrote it four years before Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The explanation may lie in an influence she never publicly spoke of: the stories and novels of a few then-famous Russian futurist and surrealist writers who lived in St. Petersburg in the early 1920s and made their names by envisioning the utopian, and anti-utopian, potential of the decade’s new machines. Rand’s 1938 novel, Anthem, clearly reflects their influence, and so, perhaps, did this early effort. She almost surely encountered their work, both published and unpublished, in an underground network connected to one of her writers’ clubs.
Aircraft always fascinated Rand, although until late in her life she was too fearful to fly in a plane. In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart and John Galt both fly solo through Colorado. In a 1969 essay, Rand described watching in “exaltation” as Apollo 11 streaked skyward from Cape Kennedy. And in “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” her famous speech to the 1974 senior class of West Point, she narrates a parable of an astronaut whose spaceship veers off course and crashes on a strange planet. The astronaut, who doesn’t understand his craft or its instruments, merely waits passively, hoping that something will intercede to save him, as aliens approach. The unstated moraclass="underline" Airplanes, like skyscrapers, are the domain of the intelligent hero.