Peter’s project failed to Westernize Russia. Although generations of inhabitants of St. Petersburg, including Rand, learned to value Western attitudes and culture, Ukrainians, Turkmen, Mongols, and Russian yeomen and peasants remained uneducated and stubbornly provincial. An intractable tendency lay embedded deep in Russia’s heart: to hold fast to its semi-Asiatic, feudal, Byzantine Christian, anti-Western past. For the most part, Peter’s city remained an island of Western values in a sea of illiteracy, abject poverty, and daunting superstition. This was the Russia that Ayn Rand hated and that the Bolshevik Revolution would appeal to with promises of potatoes, collective power, and revenge.
In February 1917, the month of Rand’s twelfth birthday, statues and symbols of Peter still stood everywhere among the domed churches, granite palaces, and broad squares of St. Petersburg. But the capital’s neoclassical architecture could not mask a society in tatters. This was the third long winter of World War I, and the coldest winter on record in many years. Temperatures stood at twenty or thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit for days at a time. The war was going badly. Six million Russians had been killed, captured, maimed, or wounded. Lacking uniforms, guns, ammunition, and rations, thousands of deserters poured into the city, looking for food and work. Even there, shortages of food and fuel were reaching a crisis point, especially for the lower and working classes, who lived on bread and stood in bread lines for hours, sometimes only to be turned away empty-handed. Because the nation’s railway system had long since broken down under the strain of troop transport, grain lay rotting in the southern provinces. Crime was rampant; curfews were set, but prostitutes, robbers, and murderers prowled Nevsky Prospekt after dark, making it unsafe for the Rosenbaums and other families to venture out.
Meanwhile, in the south and the Pale of Settlement, anti-Semitic bloodshed was on the rise. Czarist “Black Hundreds” groups roamed the countryside, spreading rumors that Yiddish-speaking spies and Jewish profiteering were responsible for war losses and shortages of goods. As the Russian army retreated from the advancing Germans, Russian troops were ordered to round up residents of Jewish villages in the Pale and herd them, under the lash, eastward to the Ukraine or Siberia. Many of these villages, including Brest, where the Rosenbaums’ extended family lived, welcomed temporary German occupation as “salvation.”
But scapegoating of Jews could no longer head off a political showdown. Given the nation’s battlefield losses, Czar Nicholas II, Peter’s great-great-great-great-grandson, was widely viewed as militarily and mentally incompetent, possibly traitorous, even insane. Revolution was in the air; the only question was whether it would be a relatively democratic revolution or one made brutal and tyrannical by the Bolsheviks.
The comfortably middle-class Rosenbaums probably didn’t go cold or hungry in the early months of 1917, though in years to come they would, but privation was all around them. For this reason and others, it was natural that Anna, Zinovy, and their daughters were hoping for a democratic change of government, as were most Russian Jews. For the first time in three hundred years, the reign of the Romanovs was poised to end. St. Petersburg’s European-educated liberal elite—a category that included many of Rand’s teachers as well as the father of a new friend she made that winter—were ready to take the reins of government. For in spite of the terrible hardships of war, the Bolsheviks had gained only a small, if concentrated, following among urban workers and the nation’s land-hungry former serfs and peasants. To the Rosenbaums’ relief and joy, the reform-minded liberal intelligentsia, whom Anna so admired, were leading the call for the czar to share power or step down.
Rand, at twelve, was just entering adolescence. Short for her age and squarely built, she was highly animated when excited and became fidgety, standoffish, and sullen when her family’s conversation turned from ideas and significant events to small talk. She already wore a look of luminous penetration in her large, dark, exquisite eyes. Stimulated by outward events and impatient to grow up, she assigned herself a new task: to examine her own ideas and beliefs just as rigorously as she examined those of others. This is what I think, she remembered saying to herself. Why do I think it? If her answer didn’t measure up—if it was based on what others believed or on a mistake in logic—out went the idea.
Later, after achieving fame as a novelist and a largely self-taught metaphysician, she called such thinking “pre-philosophy.” The job of the adolescent, she explained, is to integrate the likes and dislikes of childhood into a coherent if subconscious “sense of life,” which she defined as an implicit appraisal of the nature of the world. Is the world understandable or incoherent? Do people have the power of choice, or are they servants of destiny? Can a person achieve his goals, or is he helpless against the designs of an all-powerful God or a malevolent universe? Depending on how the child answers, he will become a self-assured creator or a passive social parasite. That Rand answered her questions with such an insistent affirmative, and devoted so many years to proving that lack of credence in the power and efficacy of individual will equals moral cowardice, provides a clue as to just how great she felt were the obstacles to having “what I want” as a child. Russian tradition and her family provided some of the resistance. The politics of the Russian Revolution produced the rest.
Now in her third year at the Stoiunin school, she got one thing she wanted very much: her first close friend, a slightly older girl named Olga Nabokov. Olga, also a student at the school, was one of five children of a wealthy and distinguished family that was known throughout Russia and Europe even before Olga’s older brother, Vladimir, began to publish poems and novels, including, in English, Lolita. Olga’s mother was a cultured heiress. Her grandfather had been the minister of justice under Czar Alexander III, and though a gentile, was asked to resign partly because of his outspoken advocacy of political rights for Jews. Olga’s father, V. D. Nabokov, was a jurist and a statesman, a member of the Russian army’s General Staff, and a founder of the Constitutional Democratic Party, which favored a parliamentary form of government and emancipation of the Jews. In 1917, he had a bird’s-eye view of the unfolding revolutionary drama from his ranking seat on the Duma, St. Petersburg’s on-again, off-again national legislative assembly whose power the czar periodically stripped away and then restored. In February 1917, the Duma was in session.
Olga had been a member of Rand’s class since 1915, but the girls seem to have become well acquainted only in their third tumultuous year. Olga lived with her family in a massive Florentine-style pink-granite mansion on Morskaya Street, not far from the czar’s Winter Palace and about a mile from the Rosenbaums’ store and apartment. To Rand and her mother and sisters, the Nabokovs’ glittering life, seen up close, must have been a revelation. In their mansion and at their estate at nearby Vyra, Olga and her siblings were looked after by footmen, coachmen, chauffeurs, a concierge, cooks, maids, butlers, governesses, and tutors. Many of Russia’s most admired poets and statesmen came and went as family friends. According to Helene Nabokov Sikorski, Olga’s younger sister, Rand paid many visits to the family home in 1917. Rand appears to have been thinking of the Nabokovs when, in We the Living, she gave Kira Argounova, her semiautobiographical heroine, a prerevolutionary home that was a “vast” … “stately granite mansion” … where, at night, “a maid in black fastened the clasps of [Kira’s mother’s] diamond necklaces” in preparation for parties “in sparkling ballrooms.” The fictional Argounovas’ former summer estate, set amid acres of well-tended gardens, near a fashionable resort, recalls the Nabokovs as well.