Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (16 page)

There was one final innovation introduced into
Petrograd University
. Effective at the beginning of the academic year 1920–21, the length of a university
education
was reduced from five years to three.

As a young woman of sixteen, Alissa Rosenbaum took advantage of the new educational reforms. She did not have to face the institutional bias against women and Jews. She entered the university on 2 October 1921, in the three-year course of the
obshchestvenno-pedagogicheskoe otdelenie
, the Department of Social Pedagogy, which contained the historical and philosophical disciplines and was designed presumably to prepare students for careers as teachers of the social sciences.
²⁴

Nearly three years later, in May 1924, and two months prior to her graduation, the student
purges
began. The authorities began ruthlessly to expel and exile those students who could not prove their proletarian class background. A regime that had ostensibly dedicated itself to the democratization of education was now creating new distinctions and privileges. But the purge commission decided to pass over those students who were on the verge of graduating. Had the traditional five-year program still been in effect, Alissa would not have been a graduating senior, and as the daughter of a “petit-bourgeois” pharmacist, she would have been expelled, or worse. She later remarked that it was “sheer accident that I escaped that purge.”
²⁵

MAJORING IN HISTORY

Alissa was disgusted by the “mystical chaos” of Russian academic
philosophy
. She was uninterested in the study of Russian literature. She decided to major in
history
.
²⁶
She later wrote that her systematic study of history in college was crucial “in order to have a factual knowledge of men’s past.” She minored in philosophy, “in order to achieve an objective definition of my values.” Ultimately, Alissa discovered that she could learn history, but that philosophy “had to be done by me.”
²⁷

University life in those years was primitive. The school lacked heat and light. Reports of death by starvation, disease, and suicide proliferated. Students and professors met for lectures and discussions in cold classrooms, dormitories, and auditoriums illuminated by flickering candles (McClelland
1989, 260–61). For a period, some lectures were scheduled in the evening because professors were engaged in compulsory manual labor during the day, and students were struggling to earn a living (Sorokin [1924] 1950, 223).

Alissa’s university had become an intellectual battleground between the “old guard” and their Soviet antagonists. The
social
science college was, by far, the most conflict-ridden of the newly established schools. Older professors were the targets of growing academic repression (Fitzpatrick 1979, 68). The Party had allowed many of these professors to continue with their “bourgeois-objectivist” scholarship, but this period of coexistence between these groups ended once and for all in 1928–29, when many established scholars were purged from the Academy of Science for attempting to block the election of communist scholars. Many historians were arrested, exiled, or executed.
²⁸

In the early 1920s, the study of
history
was slowly supplemented by courses designed to increase
politgramota
or political literacy. Social science curriculums in the pedagogical institutes were modified to include new
Marxist
subjects and requirements. Hence, many of the history courses Alissa took initially were probably condensed to include themes in political economy, dialectical method, and historical materialism (Shteppa 1962, 29, 36). Among these courses were specific “Soviet subjects.”
Rand
recollected in 1971 that the ideological conditioning prevalent in U.S.
educational
institutions was mild in comparison to the ideological bludgeoning she had experienced (Rand 1971T). She proudly proclaimed that though there were only a very few good professors still actually teaching during this period, she remained stalwart and unaffected by the propaganda to which she was subjected (Rand 1974aT).

In
We the Living
, Kira, Rand’s fictional alter ego, is compelled to take Marxist lectures and courses not unlike those Rand herself had probably attended. These included courses on the history of communist philosophy and the doctrine of historical materialism. Rand lists lectures with titles such as
“Marxism,”
“Proletarian Women and Illiteracy,” “The Spirit of the Collective,” “Proletarian Electrification,” “The Doom of Capitalism,” “The Red Peasant,” “The ABC of Communism,” “Comrade Lenin and Comrade Marx,” and “Marxism and
Collectivism
,” and Komsomol discussions on the problems with the
New Economic Policy
(134). The endless attacks on
individualism
that Alissa Rosenbaum heard in lectures of this type led her to formulate a futuristic vision in which the word “I” is lost to a collectivistic world. This was the basis of her poetic novelette,
Anthem
, written in 1937.
²⁹

The predominance of propaganda in many of her courses did not make a high-quality
education
impossible. In retrospect, Rand recognized that it was under the Soviet educational system that she developed her method of “thinking in principles.” She stated that she “learned in reverse.”
The system generated within her a deeply critical outlook which she carried into her adulthood. She grasped: “No matter what you are taught, listen to it critically, whether you agree or not. And if you disagree, formulate your reasons.… Under the Soviets … I learned a great deal, but only in that way.”
³⁰

Though
Marxism
had been a serious presence in her
history
and social science courses, it did not have a monopoly on the curriculum during this period. Most of the historians in the department were non-Marxist scholars who taught from texts that featured diverse historical methodologies.
³¹
Yet between 1919 and 1925, general approaches to ancient, medieval, and modern history were underemphasized, and studies of “socioeconomic formations” became more prominent. Marxist historiography in the study of antiquity was evident in such works as
A. I. Tiumenev
’s
Essays on the Socioeconomic History of Ancient Greece
, published in three volumes between 1920 and 1923. Tiumenev’s books greatly influenced academic scholarship and university teaching during this period. In 1923, Tiumenev also authored
Did Capitalism Exist in Ancient Greece
? In that same year,
V. S. Sergeev
’s
History of Rome
appeared.

By contrast, several major works in medieval and early modern history were used that had a distinctly “bourgeois” orientation. Included in the history curriculum were such books as
P. Vinogradov
’s
Book of Readings on the History of the Middle Ages
,
D. N. Egorov’s
anthology
The Middle Ages through Their Monuments
, and
D. M. Petrushevsky
’s
Essays on Medieval Society and State
and
Essays on the Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe.
The Soviets criticized Petrushevsky’s works for having little relation to established Marxist doctrine. In time, the curriculum was supplemented by texts that were much closer to the new spirit of Marxist historiography, including works by
N. M. Pakul
and
I. I. Semenov
on the Dutch and English revolutions (Shteppa 1962, 36–38).

General Russian history was taught with the assistance of S. I. Kovalev’s
General History Course.
However, the most important textbook in this period was written by
M. N. Pokrovsky
. Pokrovsky, in league with Lunacharsky and Krupskaya, formed part of the Bolshevik triumvirate in charge of
Narkompros
, between 1918 and 1929.
³²
His
Russian History in Briefest Outline
(
Russkaia istoriia v samom szhatom ocherke
), published in 1923, was a very popular text that earned Lenin’s praise. Pokrovsky’s history was profoundly Marxist in its orientation, containing much important material.

Thus, although Alissa was probably exposed to a variety of historical perspectives, her course of study was moving gradually in the direction of Marxist historiography. Even if she had rejected the materialist bias of the Marxist texts, she was learning typically
dialectical
modes of historical inquiry, which emphasized the interconnections between economic, political,
social, and intellectual factors. However, as the scholarly atmosphere was chilled by Soviet repression, it is quite probable that most of Alissa’s teachers in the last year of her university education were at least
pro forma
Marxists, if not dogmatic Marxist-
Leninists
(Kline, 28 February 1992C).

Still, during the early Soviet period most of Petrograd’s historians were non-Marxist in their political orientation. Unfortunately, an exhaustive search of the Leningrad archives by the university archivists,
N. T. Dering
and L. V.
Guseva
, did not uncover any specific information on Alissa Rosenbaum’s coursework, grades, or teachers.
³³
Yet it is clear that Alissa would have encountered a history department dominated by some of the finest Russian scholars of the twentieth century.
³⁴
Among them were:

  •  
L. S. Berg
, the author of
Theories of Evolution.
Berg’s quasi-teleological approach emphasized that evolutionary changes had definite direction.

  •  
Nikolai Ivanovich Kareev
, who taught courses on the French Revolution, and authored a number of theoretical works attacking Marxism. Though Lenin had criticized him sharply, he was not dismissed in the early Soviet period.

  •  
E. V. Tarle
, who taught a Marxist historiography and surpassed even Kareev in importance in Petrograd’s history department.

  •  
Sergei Fyodorovich Platonov
, who specialized in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian history and taught at Petrograd through 1925. Platonov offered a conservative-monarchist historical interpretation.
³⁵

Pitirim Sorokin
, who received his doctorate from Petrograd University in 1922, also taught in the College of Social Sciences and in the Sociological Institute as a sociologist-historian. In later years, as a renowned Harvard sociologist, Sorokin spearheaded “creative altruism” as a means of conquering the human “predatory instincts” he had witnessed in the Soviet Union. Perhaps remembering him from Petrograd, Rand later derided Sorokin as “a thoroughly Russian mystic-altruist.”
³⁶

The Petrograd history department was also graced by the presence of the renowned
Ivan Mikhailovich Grevs
. Grevs was a specialist in medieval European history. He taught on the fathers of the Latin Church and the medieval humanists (including Dante and Petrarch). Grevs pioneered the seminar system and field trips in Russian higher education. He was a leading advocate for higher education for women.

Perhaps the most important historian in the department at this time was
L. P. Karsavin
, who was a student of Grevs (Zenkovsky 1953, 843). Until 1922, Karsavin was the chair of the department. As a
history
major, Alissa would have met with Karsavin in some formal or informal capacity, either as his student, or in search of course-selection advice and general
curriculum guidance.
³⁷
Karsavin was well known in Petrograd intellectual circles. Along with Platonov, Tarle, and Grevs, Karsavin gave regular talks in public forums, such as the Petrograd House of Scholars, the House of Literary Men, and the Theological Institute. He also participated in the workers’ council of faculty members as a representative from the university, lecturing at gatherings of Red Army soldiers and workers’ clubs (Shteppa 1962, 24–28). Like his colleague, N. O. Lossky, Karsavin advocated a
philosophy
of history that was conjoined to a general
Christian
worldview (Copleston 1988, 56). As a historian of the Church, he specialized in the theology and mysticism of the Middle Ages. He was a speculative and religious thinker in the tradition of Solovyov. He built his system on a religious metaphysic (Lossky 1951, 299). Karsavin applied the doctrine of the coincidence of opposites to the issue of the Trinity. Like Hegel, he saw historical development as holistic and organismic, an immanent process of becoming. As Lossky explains, in Karsavin’s system,

The development of the subject is the transition from one of its aspects to another, conditioned by the
dialectical
nature of the subject himself and not by impacts from without. Karsavin rejects external relations in the domain of historical being. Every historical individual (a person, a family, a nation, etc.) is in his view the world-whole itself in some one of its unique and unrepeatable aspects; thus, the domain of historical being consists of subjects that interpenetrate one another and nevertheless develop freely, since each of them contains everything in an embryonic form, and there are no external relations before them. (307)

Karsavin and many of the other distinguished historians who taught at Petrograd perpetuated the Russian yearning for synthesis. Whether she was reading her Marxist texts or attending the lectures of her non-Marxist professors, Alissa Rosenbaum was fully exposed to the dialectical methods distinctive to Russian thought and scholarship.

MINORING IN PHILOSOPHY

In addition to her studies in history, Alissa enrolled in several
philosophy
and
literature
courses surveying the works of
Schiller
,
Shakespeare
, and
Dostoyevsky
. She would recollect for Barbara Branden (1986) a special admiration for Dostoyevsky’s brilliant literary technique: “For a long time, I studied his plots carefully, to see how he integrated his plots to his ideas.
I identified, in his work, what kind of events express what kind of theme, and why. He was very valuable for my subconscious integration concerning plot and theme” (45).