Barbara Branden - The Passion of Ayn Rand

In school, Alice's class was beginning to read Russian classics. It was "torture" for Alice, it was "sheer official boredom!" The sole pleasure of her class assignments was that, in presenting her own views, she felt like a crusader. In her middle years, she smiled with affection as she spoke of the child who had felt, as she gravely presented her views: "'Thus spake little Alice'... I felt that I was now naming the truth, and I was proud that I was able to do it."

She came to believe that one of the reasons adults were so impressed with the young girl — and perhaps one of the reasons other children kept a careful distance — was the precocity of her articulateness. She could never recall a time when she had had difficulty expressing what she thought or, when necessary, defending it. None of her acquaintances of later years, who unanimously spoke with deep respect of the quality of her mind and her astonishing ability to present complex intellectual issues in terms intelligible to the least knowledgeable of her listeners, ever doubted the validity of her memory.

She was no more than ten years old, she would recall, when she concluded, in conscious terms, not only that the realm of ideas was important, but that it was her realm to deal with. One day, her mother showed her an article in a Petrograd newspaper — it did not involve politics and so was not forbidden — that Anna thought would be instructive for the young girl. It was an interview with a woman who was a specialist in education; she declared that the purpose of education was to provide children with their ideals. "If a child does not acquire ideals from school, he will never acquire them," the woman wrote. Alice felt a "violent, outraged anger," an anger so intense that she never forgot the episode. "At that age," she later said, "I had a value-world of my own, it mainly took the form of the stories I was writing, I felt that what 1 valued or wanted was superior to what others valued or wanted, and school bored me, especially in the value realm. I did not share their values. I did not learn my values from school. I thought 'Wait until I grow up and I'll show those people, and I'll denounce this particular woman. If I don't agree, it's my job to fight it.'" Ideas were important, fighting for the "right ideas" was important, and so was denouncing the "wrong ideas."

Mystified, Alice observed that the other girls in her class found it difficult to form opinions of what they were reading and observing and to articulate whatever opinions they did form. Several of them came to her to ask how she could do it so easily. Alice wondered, "with an edge of contempt," why anyone would find it difficult. One read, one observed, one thought, one arrived at conclusions, and one expressed them.

"Contempt" is a curiously adult reaction to find in a child. But when Ayn Rand spoke of her childhood, it is a term that she used again and again to describe her feelings toward most of the people around her. It is a term that — accompanied by a dismissive wave of her hand and a grimace of distaste — dotted her conversations throughout her adult years.

In childhood, and all of her life, it appears that her most intense scorn was reserved for women. That scorn was evident in her recollections of childhood, and, equally, it is the impression of many of the people who knew her in later years. Even before adolescence, she was what she later called "an anti-feminist. I regarded man as a superior value." In her writing during that period, what interested her was to create a conflict for a hero, a conflict aimed at the achievement of some serious purpose; in her stories, it was the man, not the woman, who represented the qualities of struggle and purpose. "I would not have said that it was improper for a woman, I would have been extremely indignant at any touch of the idea that woman's place is in the home or 'young ladies should be young ladies'... I was always in favor of tomboys, and of intellectual equality, but women as such didn't interest me."

The human qualities she cared about were, she believed, specifically masculine attributes; above all, purposefulness and strength. She would later insist that she had never regretted being a woman, but "it was hero worship from the first." And she would later define femininity as "hero worship." Man, she would say, is defined by his relationship to reality; woman — by her relationship to man. Far into old age, she would comment about herself proudly, "I'm a hero worshipper."

It was in the winter of 1916 that Alice's absorption in her inner life was interrupted. The world was beginning to knock loudly at her door, and she turned from reading and writing to admit it. For the first time, a keen interest in politics, which she was never to lose, began to take shape.

Petrograd was disintegrating. Almost a million troops had deserted the front; despairing, angry, and hungry, they headed for home, looting and destroying everything in their path and clogging the starving, inflation-ravaged cities, vainly looking for work. In towns, countrysides, and cities, the muttering against the Czar's conduct of the war grew loud. Petrograd's bread lines lengthened as the bitterly cold winter passed. Mass strikes, accompanied by outbreaks of violence, became daily occurrences. Crime became a plague, and no one was secure in his home. There was little heat in the city, and in their kitchens, people were burning furniture for fuel. The great city was dying, with only it’s terrible flailing agony as a sign of life. Throughout Petrograd — throughout Russia — the muttering began to grow to a furious bellow.

On the day of Alice's twelfth birthday, in February of 1917, the temperature stood at 35 degrees below zero. Demonstrators clogged the broad avenues of the city, shouting "Down with the monarchy!" Speakers stood at every street corner, handing out pamphlets and cursing the war. In the capital of a country that had a centuries-long heritage of revolution, an enraged population once more was moving to reclaim that heritage.

But this time, the revolution was virtually bloodless. Alice witnessed its beginning. She stood on the balcony of her apartment as a huge crowd gathered on the square below, shouting anti-Czarist slogans. A unit of the National Guard appeared and ordered the crowd to disperse. The crowd screamed its defiance — the soldiers raised their rifles and Alice heard the first shots of the Russian Revolution. Unwillingly, the crowd scattered. But the next day, the protestors returned in still-greater numbers: the soldiers who had fired upon them had now joined the revolution. Throughout the city, exultant crowds took over the public buildings and the courts. Fires blazed in the streets like beacons of hope.

By the end of February, political power had passed to the Duma in a revolution created by Russian citizens — by workers, by students, by the middle class, and by sympathetic soldiers. The Czar abdicated; the immeasurable power of the Romanovs was no more. Alexander Kerensky, a young lawyer with bristling hair, a powerful voice, and a gift for bold and effective oratory, became Prime Minister.

There were wild celebrations in Petrograd. But amid the cheers and the celebrations, an ominous note was sounding. Bolshevik revolutionaries were returning to Petrograd from exile. Molotov returned, and Trotsky, and a young party member named Stalin. At the railroad station, Lenin was welcomed by cheering Bolshevik crowds; his return was made possible by Germany, eager to see a Bolshevik government that would sue for a separate peace. In The World Crisis, Winston Churchill was to write: "The German leaders turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia."

It is rare that history is so obliging as to present us with a morality play in the form of events that scream out their meaning — scream out the moral significance of the philosophical premises and world views responsible for those events. But for Alice Rosenbaum, the terrible years that lay ahead sometimes seemed precisely such a morality play.