Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (20 page)

This tale was but another symbolic way for Rand to say that
statism
and
religion
are at war with the sovereign
individual
. The King, a symbol of statism, is no different from the Priest, a symbol of religion; both are fundamentally opposed to the independent Viking who refuses to worship either.

Rand wrote
We the Living
, originally entitled,
Air Tight: A Novel of Red Russia
, between 1930 and 1933, “to get Russia out of her system.”
¹⁵
Far simpler in its structure than her later novels,
We the Living
offered, in Rand’s view, the most classic plot progression of any of her works. Moreover, it was, Rand said, the closest to an autobiography that she would ever write.
¹⁶
Despite differences between Rand and the main character, Kira Argounova, Kira is clearly a stand-in for Rand. In fact, throughout her fiction, it was never Rand’s custom to distance herself from the views of her central protagonists. In this sense, they are all Rand.

Kira is a young engineering student enrolled at Petrograd University. The novel chronicles her personal struggle under the harsh conditions of Soviet dictatorship. The plot centers on a fatal romantic triangle between Kira and the two men who love her. Kira falls in love with a counterrevolutionary, Leo Kovalensky. When Leo develops tuberculosis, Kira becomes the mistress of a heroic communist revolutionary, Andrei Taganov, in order to gain access to food and money for Leo’s welfare.

Andrei is a virtuous, if misguided, character—much more admirable than Leo, Kira’s true love. Andrei epitomizes the idealism of the revolution, refusing to be corrupted by the growing tyranny of the regime. But the regime
is
corrupt, and it gradually destroys the best of its citizens. In the end, Kira is alienated from both men. Leo becomes a self-destructive alcoholic, and Andrei, confronting the utter bankruptcy of his ideals, commits suicide. With nothing left for her in Russia, Kira attempts to escape across the border, but is shot by the border patrol and left to bleed to death in the snow. In a last shining moment, she sees that “Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.”
¹⁷

In
We the Living
, Kira, unlike Rand herself, did not escape
communism
. Rand wanted to show how dictatorship thwarts escape, crushes values, crushes life itself. Escape from such a system is a fluke, in Rand’s view.
Totalitarianism
necessarily perpetuates an “airtight” environment of brutality and repression; spiritual and physical death are its
essential
by-products.
¹⁸

A “NIETZSCHEAN” PHASE?

In 1936,
We the Living
was issued by Macmillan in a limited edition of three thousand copies. It was not reissued until 1959, after Rand had established herself as a best-selling author. In the second edition, Rand made several revisions, which she described as “editorial line-changes.” In the original edition, Rand claimed that her writing “reflected the transitional state of a mind thinking no longer in Russian, but not yet fully in English.”
¹⁹
Hence, she wished to correct “awkward” and “confusing” formulations.

However, a number of scholars have reviewed Rand’s modifications and concluded that these were not strictly linguistic. The most compelling case is offered by
Ronald Merrill
, who argues that Rand excised those references in the first edition which implied an endorsement of Nietzsche’s ethical principles, that the weak may be sacrificed for the sake of the strong. The second edition reflects the attitudes of the more mature Rand.
²⁰

In the first edition, there is a scene in which Kira and Andrei debate the meaning of communism. Andrei assumes that Kira admires the communist ideal, but rejects its methods. But she surprises him. She states: “I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one’s right, one shouldn’t wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them. Except that I don’t know, however, whether I’d include blood in my methods.”
²¹

Andrei retorts, “Why not? Anyone can sacrifice his own life for an idea. How many know the devotion that makes you capable of sacrificing other lives? Horrible, isn’t it?”

“Not at all,” Kira answers. “Admirable. If you’re right. But are you right?” In the second edition, Rand has removed this entire exchange. Kira merely states, “I loathe your ideals.” She keeps her own counsel concerning his methods.

The conversation between these two characters continues in the first edition, when Kira argues that there are things which are sacred to the individual that cannot be touched by the state or the collective. Andrei rejects Kira’s claims, declaring “that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of the few.” Kira answers:

“
You can! You must. When those few are the best.
Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it? What is the people but
millions of puny, shrivelled, helpless souls
that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their mildewed brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who
are
life? I loathe your ideals because
I know no worse injustice than justice for all. Because men are not born equal and I don’t see why one should want to make them equal.
And because I loathe most of them.” [Emphasis added except in fifth sentence.]

In the revised edition, Kira states:

“
Can you sacrifice the few
?
When those few are the best
? Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but
millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls
that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who
are
life? I loathe your ideals because
I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can’t treat them as if they were.
And because I loathe most of them.” [Emphasis added except in the fourth sentence.]

In the original passage, Kira has contempt for the masses and is inclined to see them destroyed. In response to Andrei, Kira shows an unquestioning resolve to side with the exalted few in any conflict with the “puny, shrivelled, helpless” masses. She rejects the credo of “justice for all” when it becomes a euphemism for any attempt to make all human beings metaphysically equal.

In the comparable passage from the 1959 revised edition, Kira expresses a similar contempt for the masses. But here, Kira’s language is less vitriolic. She answers Andrei with a question, not a protest. She rejects those who would attempt to achieve metaphysical
egalitarianism
through the injustice of granting values to those who have no right to them. Yet in
both
editions of the novel, Kira follows her exchange with Andrei by stating: “I don’t want to fight for the people, I don’t want to fight against the people, I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone—to live!” Even
Ronald Merrill
agrees that in this belief, Rand’s Kira has moved away from a stark
“Nietzschean”
ethos. Merrill argues that Kira’s sentiment foreshadows Rand’s mature
Objectivist
position. In fact, Merrill believes that Rand’s conception of egoism developed largely as a reaction to the Nietzschean orientation of her youth.

Stephen Hicks
, in a review of Merrill’s book, argues that Merrill’s conclusion is premature, since only a full disclosure of Rand’s early
journals
will settle the issue of her alleged Nietzschean phase. Rand finished her novel in 1933, and published it in 1936. Hicks argues correctly that there is evidence in one of her published journal entries that Rand rejected the “Nietzschean” ethos as early as 1934. In this entry, foreshadowing the character of Gail Wynand in
The Fountainhead
, Rand condemns those who would achieve power through the masses. If Rand had rejected
Nietzsche
in 1934, it is likely that she would have revised those passages which could have been interpreted as Nietzschean, before the book was actually published.
²²

Hicks states further that Rand may have allowed Andrei to set the terms of the debate, much as the communist state sets the terms for each of the characters in
We the
Living
.
Rand had not yet constructed a full theoretical response to the ethics of
altruism
, and Kira reflects this void. Having fully developed her own rational egoist ethic in later years, it may have been easier for Rand to eliminate the ambiguous passages, rather than to have provided a full philosophical explanation of their actual meaning.
²³

There may be some merit to Merrill’s contention that Rand went through a “Nietzschean” phase, but I tend to agree with Hicks that the evidence for such a provocative thesis is inconclusive. However, there are two important issues which must be emphasized because they shed much light on Rand’s attitudes toward the Nietzschean worldview:

First, in my discussion of the
Silver Age
of
Russian philosophy
, it was clear that Russian writers had stressed the Dionysian aspects of
Nietzsche’s
thought. Rand was probably exposed to this particular interpretation of Nietzsche from a very early age. Though Rand was most impressed by Nietzsche’s critique of altruism and Christianity, she concretized his grand,
abstract metaphors with her own images. Despite her initial attraction to Nietzsche’s work, Rand necessarily rejected his Dionysian impulses. And though she continued to draw from Nietzschean imagery as late as
The Fountainhead
, she was probably already moving
away
from Nietzsche as early as her student years.

Second, and more important, Rand was moving
toward
a nondualistic philosophical framework. While she was exploring the philosophic identity of
religion
and
communism
, she was also beginning to see that both forces perpetuated a social
dualism
that forced the
individual
to choose between two sides of the same false coin.

In the religious realm, the fraud was obvious to Rand. For instance, in 1934 she wrote a play,
Ideal
, which depicted religion as causing hypocrisy and opposing integrity. Religion, for Rand, divorces ideals from life on earth, by viewing “this world [as] of no consequence.” An evangelist in
Ideal
proclaims: “Whatever beauty [the world] offers us is here only that we may sacrifice it—for the greater beauty beyond.”
²⁴
Religion tells people that beauty is unreachable and that nobility emerges from the
sacrifice
, not the achievement, of
values
.
²⁵
It condemns people for not achieving unreachable ideals, ideals they do not really wish to attain because their very realization would demand self-annihilation.

This recognition of religion as a source of social dualism reappears in Rand’s
journal
entries during this same period. Rand argued that religion engenders a metaphysical split between this world and the next, between human existence on earth and an illusory life after death.
²⁶
In Rand’s view, religion declares war on the human ability to think, and it is consequently “the root of all human lying and the only excuse for suffering.” It fragments living and thinking, and sees “ideals as something quite abstract and detached from one’s everyday life. The ability of
living
and
thinking
quite differently, in other words eliminating thinking from your actual life” (2).

It is for this
reason
that Rand saw “
Faith as the worst curse of mankind
, as the exact antithesis and enemy of
thought.
” But at this point in her intellectual development, Rand was not certain about why people have abdicated the use of logical reasoning in the governance of their lives. She asked if reason is impossible to individuals, or if individuals have merely been taught that it is futile. If people have been taught such, then “the teacher is the church.” Rand hoped “to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.”
²⁷

Just as religion was a source of social
dualism
, so too was
statism
. The theme of
We the Living
, according to Rand, was the “
individual
against the
State” (
New Intellectual
, 60). Rand did not believe that there was a necessary incompatibility between the individual and all forms of government. She was not an anarchist; she rejected neither government per se, nor truly
human
social relationships. What she opposed was
statism
in all its incarnations.

Communism
both constituted and perpetuated a social dichotomy between the individual and the masses. Under communism, the masses are collectively organized by the coercive state. In such a system, the individual has no alternative but
conflict
with the society at large. Hence, it is quite possible that in the early edition of the novel, Kira’s call to sacrifice the masses for the sake of the few is the only alternative she can advocate
within
the context of communism, which sacrifices the few for the sake of the many. Just as religion pits thinking against living, communism pits the individual against the community. Within this context, Kira is forced to choose between two poles of a deadly duality. When she is able to remove herself briefly from this context, she exclaims that indeed, she does not wish to fight for or against the people. She wants only “to be left alone.”

Like Rand, Kira lived in a society which had no developed concept of the individual.
The Russian language does not even have a word for
“
privacy
.
”
²⁸
This peculiarity of Russian might have motivated Rand to write, several years later, in
The Fountainhead
: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy” (684). Russian religious and political culture did not recognize the sphere of the private. Kira knew that it was “an old and ugly fact that the masses exist and make their existence felt.” But under communism, “they make it felt with particular ugliness” (
We the Living
, 49). She protests to Andrei, that it is “a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven, and then not to dream of it, but to demand it” (107).