Barbara Branden - The Passion of Ayn Rand

Since she was bored by the children she met, by her lessons, without friends except for her cousin Nina, indifferent to most of the activities and duties of childhood, it seems evident that it was only the richness and color of Alice's inner life, her writing, her reading, her newborn thoughts about the world, that absorbed and delighted the young girl. Her life was an inner life, as it would remain.

Alice did make one girlfriend, also a classmate, shortly after the February revolution. The girl was a sister of Vladimir Nabokov; her father was a cabinet minister in the Kerensky government. "She was very interested in politics, as was I, and this brought us together. It was a friendship based on conscious common interest. Earlier, when there were no specified common values, I was never able to be interested in anyone or to interest anyone. I was incapable of a personal, non-ideological friendship. As you know," she said smilingly in middle age, "I still am." The two girls discussed their ideas on the revolution — the Nabokov girl defended constitutional monarchy, but Alice believed in a republic, in the rule of law. They exchanged political pamphlets which were sold on the streets of Petrograd but which were forbidden by their parents; they read the pamphlets secretly, and discussed them. The friendship lasted only a short time. The girl's father, realizing that conditions were getting worse and that it was dangerous to remain, left Russia with his family at the end of the year. Alice never saw her friend again. 5

By the fall of 1918, the position of the Rosenbaum family, as ex-bourgeoisie, was becoming increasingly precarious. Their savings were running out, and there was little food or fuel in the city. No one could be sure whether or not he would eat the next day. A citizen accused of hoarding sour cream was lynched by his hungry fellow citizens. During a single month, there were more than fifteen thousand reported burglaries in Petrograd, more than nine thousand holdups of shops, and a hundred and fifty murders. Rumors were spreading through the appalled city about the brutal slaying of the Romanovs. The Czar, the Czarina, and all of their children had been shot by order of the Bolsheviks — then their dead bodies had been dismembered, then burned, then dissolved in sulfuric acid.

In the South and in the Ukraine, newly mobilized White armies were locked in civil war with the Communist Red armies; parts of the country, including sections of the Crimea, were in the hands of the Whites. Desperately seeking refuge from the growing Communist tyranny, Anna Rosenbaum decided that the family must leave Petrograd and journey to the Crimea. Travel permits were difficult to obtain, but with the appropriate bribery and with a doctor's certificate saying that the health of Nora, Alice's youngest sister — who twice had had pneumonia — required that she go south, the family obtained the documents permitting them to leave the shattered city they once had loved.

5 I corresponded with Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Vladimir, in an effort to locate and talk to his aunt. I learned from him that his father had had two sisters, one of whom had died; the other one, whom he was kind enough to question for me, had no memory of Alice Rosenbaum; Alice's young friend must have been the deceased sister.

In the fall of 1918, Alice and her family set out for what they hoped would be a haven in the Crimea.

As they rode to the train station, Alice could not avoid seeing the political posters that papered the city's buildings and back fences. The posters, crudely and roughly drawn, contained virulent characterizations of the regime's class enemies and expressions of class hatred — linked with exhortations for the people to brush their teeth and with denunciations of illiteracy. As an adult, recalling those posters, Alice shuddered with the same revulsion she had felt then as she spoke of the artists who had created the posters. With few exceptions, Russia's artists had flocked to join the Communist revolution; trains and riverboats over much of the country were splashed with their posters and their slogans, and in Petrograd an orchestra, its instruments consisting of factory steam whistles, played symphonies to the glory of the revolution. "It seemed to me a desecration that anyone sane could sanction communism, but it was almost physically sickening that artists — who are supposed to know and to express the highest possibilities of human existence — could give their talents to an ideology dedicated to the destruction of the best in man."

Because of the difficulty of travel in a country whose railroads were falling apart or were seized by deserting soldiers, and where roving bandits threatened the safety of passengers, the Rosenbaum family spent the winter months in the Ukraine. It was a tense, unhappy period, made bearable only by the news of White Army victories in the Crimea. In early spring, they headed south. When they reached the Crimean peninsula, they boarded a train which was to take them to their destination in a small, remote town.

On the evening of the second day, the train jerked to an unscheduled halt. The track ahead had been blown up, perhaps by Reds, perhaps by Whites, perhaps by bandits; no one knew. They knew only that they were stranded in the dark midst of an empty countryside, miles from Odessa, the nearest city, and that no one could guess when the train might again be able to move. Some of the passengers chose to remain in a nearby village; others, Alice's family among them, hired local peasants with horse-drawn carts to take them to Odessa. Alice threw her suitcase into an open cart and climbed behind the peasant driver to sit on the thin straw covering the wooden floor. The carts proceeded slowly, moving fearfully through uninhabited plains, bumping jerkily over the frozen ground. Suddenly, by the head of the horse drawing Alice's cart, a shot rang through the night — and an angry voice ordered: "Halt!" A group of armed, ragged men, wearing the uniforms of ex-soldiers, emerged from the darkness and commanded the terrified passengers to step down and hand over their money. If anyone tried to hide his money, the gang leader warned, he would be shot instantly. The passengers handed over their money, as the bandits quickly searched the wagons. Fronz gave his wallet to one of the bandits; it contained eight rubles; he had hidden several thousand rubles in the straw of his cart. The passengers were ordered to stand with their backs to the bandits. An elderly woman screamed out that they all would be shot, she wept and made the sign of the cross.

The possibility of death had never before been real to Alice; it was real now. Standing with the other passengers, her back to the bandits' guns, her body trembling under her rough sweater and old black skirt, the night stretching bleakly around her, she wondered if she would die. If it is the end — she thought — still, I have had something great in my life. I have had the image of Enjolras. If I'm going to be shot, I'll think of him at the last, I'll think of how he faced death. I want to die as well as he did. I want to be worthy of him. I want to die in my kind of world.

After what seemed an eternity of time, the passengers were ordered back into their carts, and allowed to continue their journey. It was early morning when they saw the buildings of Odessa in the distance.

When the family had settled in the Crimean town — in the tiny, damp house, with inadequate heating and tattered old furniture, which was all they could find in an area bursting with refugees from communism, and all they could afford — Fronz Rosenbaum opened a still tinier chemist shop. For a time, he eked out a meager living, and the family began to think that the future once again might hold some measure of hope. In the building that housed the precarious government, the Russian Imperial flag flew proudly, and the peeling walls held pictures of the dead Czar Nicholas.