Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (15 page)

All of these significant intellectual events took place in Alissa Rosenbaum’s world of 1917–18, the very period in which she probably can be placed at the Stoiunin Gymnasium, with its rich, college-preparatory program. Alissa’s presence in this school has some importance.
Maria Nikolaievna Stoiunina
and
Vladimir Stoiunin
, the founders of the famous
gymnasium, were the parents of
N. O. Lossky
’s wife. As his in-laws, they invited Lossky to teach at the gymnasium. He taught both logic and psychology to select classes of young women from 1898 through 1922. Usually, Lossky gave instructions to the graduating class, those who were at least seventeen, but it is not impossible that Alissa could have learned of the great Lossky while at the Stoiunin Gymnasium. It is not impossible that she could have enrolled in one of his college preparatory courses. It is certainly possible that in her typically disciplined manner, Alissa was charting a future
educational
direction which would include further study with the distinguished Lossky at Petrograd University.

THE CRIMEAN GYMNASIUM

Unfortunately, however, Alissa was living during a time when goals were not easily realized. In the aftermath of the October revolution, the
Rosenbaum
family was terrorized by the Bolsheviks.
Zinovy
’s pharmacy was nationalized, and his family’s situation grew worse by the day. Their savings dwindled. They had little to eat. The political climate in Petrograd was grave. With no end to food and fuel shortages, street violence, and sabotage, the Rosenbaum family, like the Nabokov family before them, fled to the Crimea.

Alissa continued her studies in the fall of 1918, while in the Crimea. Crimean schools were still beyond the ideological control of the Bolsheviks. Many of the instructors in Alissa’s gymnasium were “old-fashioned, pro-Czarist ladies,” who kept teaching despite the rise of communism (B. Branden 1986, 32). By this time, Alissa was expanding upon her own learning methods. Those principles, which seemed self-evident to her, were subjected to a more rigorous process of understanding and analysis. Barbara Branden writes that despite Alissa’s “remarkable memory, memory never was the tool she employed for learning” (ibid.). She was taught to use both inductive and deductive methods of analysis.

Following the pedagogical impulses of her mother Anna, Alissa tutored her classmates in geometry. Her
mathematics
teacher hoped she would become a professional mathematician. Though Alissa broadened her study of mathematics and logic, she knew that the study of pure method would not be sufficient. Always suspicious of the purely abstract, she exhibited a continuing desire to merge the theoretical and the practical, the technical and the artistic. She sought out the classics of foreign
literature
, works by Rostand, Hugo, and Sienkiewicz. She even enrolled in American history classes, an odd elective for a Russian. It was during this same period that
Alissa became an
atheist
. Much like the victorious Bolsheviks, Alissa saw the concept of
God
as rationally unprovable and deeply degrading.
¹⁶
But unlike the Russian Marxists, Alissa rejected both the God of Christianity and the equally mystical, collectivist, God-state of the Communists.

In the spring of 1921, as the Red Army solidified control of the Crimea, Alissa graduated from high school. In dire financial straits, Alissa and her mother Anna began teaching illiterate Red Army soldiers to read and write (B. Branden 1986, 38).

As material conditions grew worse in the Crimea,
Zinovy
decided to return to
Petrograd
with his family. It was a fateful decision, for instead of seeking exile from Russia, the Rosenbaums returned to a city firmly under Red control. Although Alissa would eventually emigrate to the United States, her mother and father would later be denied permission to leave the Soviet Union and would die during the siege of
Leningrad
(125, 375).

A REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION

Petrograd was a city that Alissa had loved. As she later wrote in
We the Living
:
¹⁷
“It was St. Petersburg; the war made it Petrograd; the
revolution
made it Leningrad” (226). In her first novel, Rand wrote of Petrograd as a tribute to human achievement, even as she hinted at an underlying tragedy:

Cities grow like forests, like weeds. Petrograd did not grow. It was born finished and complete. Petrograd is not acquainted with nature. It was the work of man.… Petrograd’s grandeur is unmarred, its squalor unrelieved. Its facets are cut clearly, sharply; they are deliberate, perfect with the straight-forward perfection of man’s work.… Petrograd did not rise. It came to be at the height. It was commanded to command. It was a capital before its first stone was laid. It was a monument to the spirit of man. (229)

But Petrograd had changed, and its revolutionary transformation was no less visible in the area of university instruction. The Red government introduced sweeping
educational
reforms that reflected the changes that had taken place in the character of society.

In the days immediately following the Revolution, freedom of expression in the arts lasted for a while.
Lenin
was even prepared to allow the dissemination of works with which he disagreed. By 1918, a group of writers, poets, and artists had formed the
Proletkult
(Proletarian Cultural Movement) to encourage workers to develop a distinctively “proletarian
culture
.”

These agencies sought to attract people of pure proletarian class origins. In the beginning, they operated three hundred literary workshops with an enrollment of 84,000. At its peak in 1921, membership reached 500,000. But by 1922, following Lenin’s denunciations, the number of agencies had dwindled.
¹⁸
The organization was effectively disbanded in 1923, its functions gradually absorbed by the trade unions and the
“Commissariat of Enlightenment.”
¹⁹

Lenin himself was rather suspicious of the
Proletkult
for two major reasons: First, it was a non-Party organ. Second, it advocated the creation of a new “pure” proletarian culture by suppressing every last remnant of traditional aristocratic and bourgeois culture. Lenin believed that such an ahistorical state-of-nature would be illusory; the
Proletkult
did not recognize the new society’s need to appropriate significant aspects of the existing culture.
²⁰
Though many bourgeois cultural trends were renounced as counterrevolutionary, it was clear that the new regime could not survive without absorbing some of the very values and institutions it abhorred. In the universities, this meant that many of the “old guard” or “bourgeois specialists” had to be employed during the transition to socialism—as long as they remained politically neutral (Fitzpatrick 1979, 3).

Though the Bolsheviks closed the ecclesiastical schools in 1917–18 (Zernov 1963, 206), many of the remaining religious and Idealist professors retained their university positions. A number of thinkers of the religious renaissance, such as Berdyaev and Bely, continued to deliver public lectures on theology, philosophy, and ethics (McClelland 1989, 261). Gradually, the regime began to establish its own network of ideological agencies. Philosophy was subordinated to social science. A national Philosophical Institute was created in the Academy of Sciences, on a level with the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of the Central Government, and under the supervision of the state authorities.

The Bolsheviks also began to formulate new principles of educational and arts policy set forth by
Narkompros
, the Commissariat of Enlightenment. Narkompros was headed by
Anatoly V. Lunacharsky
between 1917 and 1929. During the early years, distinct schools of thought united by their progressive and
Marxist
orientation, coexisted within Narkompros. The most progressive of these schools was the Petrograders. These anti-authoritarian educators advocated so-called activity methods of teaching, which included pupil-participation and informal student-teacher relationships within a less traditional, nonscholastic curriculum. Many hoped to integrate a Marxist emphasis on the polytechnical school (Fitzpatrick 1970, 29). The Petrograd educators were influenced heavily by Deweyite progressivism (30). But despite their best efforts, many academic
institutions were not willing to cooperate with Narkompros. They wished to function with full autonomy, having struggled to attain such independence for many years in their opposition to czarist control. Narkompros asserted that it would defend the independence of scholarship, but in practice it aimed to limit the influence of professors who were anti-Bolshevik and non-Marxist (68). Apparently, in defending “Enlightenment,” “autonomy,” and “progressive
education
,” the Commissariat had become adept at using euphemisms to conceal its growing domination of intellectual life.

In actuality, the regime viewed academic freedom as a “bourgeois prejudice” (Sorokin [1924] 1950, 246–47). Private publishing houses were closing, hurt primarily by paper shortages. Initially, Petrograd seemed to escape the more severe
censorship
measures being implemented in Moscow. Despite its intention to preserve the utility of the “old guard,” while promoting the values of the new, the regime began to destroy a whole generation of intellectuals.

With the coming of the
New Economic Policy
(NEP) in 1921, the state simultaneously acted to check any revival of “bourgeois” values. The sovietization of Russian intellectual life meant greater administrative control over the universities through Narkompros, the trade unions, and the Communist Party organs (McClelland 1989, 261). During the early 1920s, however, academic institutions “underwent a period of wild experimentation and extreme anarchy.” Many of the older professors could not adapt to progressive methods; many of the newer professors lacked academic expertise. Indeed, the effects were disastrous for both instructors and pupils.
²¹

In a far-reaching reorganization of university structure, Narkompros united the existing schools of history, philology, and law under a social science college, or
fakul’tet obshchestvennykh nauk
, within each university (Fitzpatrick 1979, 68). The new social science program aimed to introduce concepts of Marxist methodology and scientific socialism. Though the non-Marxist professors resented these innovations, they were not required to demonstrate proficiency in Marxist studies. In fact, many of them continued to teach courses that had a subtle anti-Soviet bias. A continued shortage of Marxist teachers led the Central Committee to abolish many of the social science colleges that had been established, though Petrograd University was unaffected by this policy change (69–71).

The Narkompros policy innovations fundamentally altered the organization of the university. The original university structure contained three major colleges (Kline, 20 October 1992C):

1. The
istoriko-filologicheskii fakul
’
tet
, or College of History and Philology, broadly defined to include philosophy.

2. The
fiziko-matematicheskii fakul
’
tet
, or College of Mathematics and Physics, which included geology, chemistry, and other hard sciences.

3. The
iuridicheskii fakul
’
tet
, or law school.

The new university structure placed the College of History and Philology under the social science banner. A leftist academician,
N. Ya. Marr
, brought to the newly organized social science college a greater emphasis on ethnology and linguistics studies. Archaeology and anthropology were also included. The law school was officially dissolved since it lacked Marxist professors. It continued to function unofficially, under the title of “former law department,” until its reestablishment in the autumn of 1926. Later, the economics department was absorbed by the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, and the social-pedagogical department was made part of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute (Fitzpatrick 1979, 72–73).

Within the social science colleges, the regime did not require the teaching of atheism, but instruction did have to be nonreligious. Marxist studies and politically correct textbooks were hastily introduced in the early 1920s. There was an emphasis within these Marxist courses on political economy and historical materialism. Students in the engineering schools and universities were required to spend four hours per week on these subjects.
²²
Petrograd University did not establish an official course on Party history and Leninism until the mid-1920s, when it was renamed Leningrad University.

There were other innovations.
Lunacharsky
required that students of proletarian descent graduate without examination. Special classes were organized for their instruction, but many of these pupils were ridiculed by established academics as “zero students” (Sorokin [1924] 1950, 226–27). The Soviets also lifted admission restrictions on women and Jews as early as 1918, and abolished tuition, all in an effort to democratize the student body.
²³
There was less emphasis on scheduled classes, periodic examinations, homework, and discipline. Without preparation or proper orientation to new pedagogical techniques, teachers were encouraged to adopt the “laboratory” and “project” methods (Shteppa 1962, 29). The chaotic results were predictable. In any event, most changes in academic policy were somewhat beside the point; the cataclysmic conditions throughout Petrograd had dramatically affected the quality of university life. As
James McClelland
(1989) writes:

The period from the fall of 1918 to the spring of 1921 was one of terrible material deprivation in central Russia and chaos, bloodshed, and fighting on the periphery. Universities and institutes remained open, but despite an initial flood on students taking advantage of the
new open admissions policy, the number of those actively attending lectures soon dwindled to an abnormally low level. Some professors remained at their posts throughout the period, while many others fled, either in search of warmth and food or out of political sympathy for the Whites. (258)