Category: Fiction

I think I read or heard that Rand wanted to write the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for Communism with “We The Living”. That is, a work of fiction that would convince people of the underlying irrationality and injustice of the system of Communism. This would be similar to how it’s said “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” moved people towards the abolitionist position and against slavery.

Ayn Rand certainly portrays the monstrousness of Communism with her novel, but there will always be a certain element of the left that will say that the Soviet Union was a perversion of “true communism”. (Rand had a great retort for that, from her later novel “Atlas Shrugged”. To paraphrase her: Leftists always say their gang will do it better.)

To what extent is what happens in “We The Living”, and what happened in the Soviet Union, a “feature” of Communism rather than a “bug”? In other words, to what extent are the social and personal tragedies that occur in the novel a logical consequence of Marxist/Communist ideas that would happen no matter who was in charge?

Marxist Psychology/Mindset

Throughout the novel, Rand illustrates the “Marxist mindset”. I’ll note two examples of that here. First is the tendency towards a sort of “inconsolable rage” that you often see on the left. An early scene from the novel really resonated with me. It is an attitude you see on college campuses and amongst black “civil rights activists”. It is an unquenchable rage that seems all consuming for these people. They can’t ever let something go, and everything is blown out of proportion:

“The woman in the red kerchief opened a package and produced a piece of dried fish, and said to the upper berth: ‘Kindly take your boots away, citizen. I’m eating.’

The boots did not move. A voice answered: ‘You don’t eat with your nose.’

       The woman bit into the fish and her elbow poked furiously into the fur coat of her neighbor, and she said: ‘Sure, no consideration for us proletarians. It’s not like as if I had a fur coat on. Only I wouldn’t be eating dried fish then. I’d be eating white bread.’

       ‘White bread?’ The lady in the fur coat was frightened.

       ‘Why citizen, who ever heard of white bread? Why, I have a nephew in the Red Army, citizen, and ….and, why, I wouldn’t dream of white bread!’

       ‘No? I bet you wouldn’t eat dry fish, though. Want a piece?’

       ‘Why…why, yes, thank you, citizen. I’m a little hungry and…’

       ‘So? You are? I know you bourgeois. You’re only too glad to get the last bite out of a toiler’s mouth. But not out of my mouth, you don’t!’” (We The Living, Ayn Rand, Chapter 1, Part 1)

Notice how the woman with the fur coat could do nothing to console or placate the woman with the dried fish. First, her accoster criticizes the woman for having a fur coat. Then she says the woman in the fur coat is too good to eat dried fish like her. Then, when the woman in the fur coat says she will eat some of the dried fish, the proletarian woman becomes enraged for trying to take her dried fish. The lower-class woman is so filled with hatred and vitriol, she is inconsolable. Marxist thinking leaves people without the mental capacity to engage in logical thinking, with nothing but their rage remaining. I could imagine this scene playing out exactly the same between a black person berating a white person today on public transportation, after the left has imposed an egalitarian dictatorship on America -complete with reparations.

In fact, this sort of inconsolable rage is consistently excused and even promoted as a legal defense by the modern left. In 1993, Colin Ferguson, a black, boarded a subway train and killed 6 people and injured 19 with a handgun. His lawyers wanted to use a “black rage” defense, in which Ferguson was supposedly so traumatized by “racism” from society at large, that he was entitled to kill white people with impunity, or with a lesser degree of punishment than if he were white and murdered 6 people. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,980835,00.html

The scene on the train from “We The Living” reminds me of a recording I saw a few years back of Muslim and Marxist-thinking students who expressed the same inconsolable rage towards Chelsey Clinton after a shooting of Muslims in New Zealand. From 2:00 minutes to about 3:12 minutes, you can see this confrontation in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOkpBiINKRU

No matter what Miss Clinton tried to say in this video, the far-leftists berating her continued. Their rage was unquenchable. People like this in any sort of position of authority over the lives of white non-Muslims would be the worst sort of tyrants. Its why they’re willing to strap bombs on their chests and blow up innocent people in public spaces.

Prior to the shooting in New Zealand, Chelsea Clinton had criticized US Congress person Ilhan Omar for anti-Semitic remarks. The Muslim female in the video thought this meant Chelsea Clinton was somehow responsible for encouraging the shooting of Muslims that occurred in New Zealand. (Oddly, this Muslim female berating her doesn’t seem particularly devout. She’s not covering her head, which makes me think she’s more neo-Marxist than Muslim.)

I find this incident particularly notable because this was Chelsea Clinton, who presumably holds the same left-wing politics as her parents. The Clintons and their kind have done nothing but encourage the destruction of Western Civilization, but apparently not fast enough for the likes of the students in this video.

It’s not like these student activists were confronting someone like me. I actually think Muslims should stop being Muslim, and embrace secularism. I don’t view them as a racial group, since religion is chosen. Muslims merit discrimination by me for embracing an irrational philosophy. (Although I don’t advocate the use of physical force against someone merely for holding a particular set of ideas.)

Both the Muslim female verbally excoriating Chelsea Clinton and the proletarian woman eating the dried fish in “We The Living” harken back to the character of Madame Defarge from Charles Dicken’s novel “A Tale of Two Cities”.   It’s someone who has emptied their soul of anything but a sense of grievance and rage at the “oppressor class”, that supposedly has caused all the ills and problems of their life. All that is left for such a person is a desire for score-settling for, mostly-imagined, slights.

Another illustration of the “Marxist Mindset” illustrated in “We the Living” is the Marxist view of ideas and truth. Marxists do not believe in objectivity. “Objective thought” is just the thinking of those who are in power.

For Marx, at least when it comes to normative concepts like “law”, “morality” and “government”, there is no such thing as “objectivity” -of “true” and “false”.  All ideas are just a product of one’s “material conditions”:

“But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto; emphasis added.)

Recognizing this feature of communism, Rand included a subplot in which Marisha Lavrova comes and takes over one of the two rooms in Kira’s and Leo’s apartment. According to the law, since Kira and Leo aren’t married, they are each entitled to a room. However, Marisha is a member of the Communist Party, and her father was a factory worker before the revolution. When Kira and Leo take Marisha to court the following scene occurs:

“Kira and Leo appealed the case to the People’s Court. They sat in a bare room that smelt of sweat and of an unswept floor. Lenin and Karl Marx, without frames, bigger than life-size, looked at them from the wall….

              The president magistrate yawned and asked Kira: ‘What’s your social position, citizen?’

              ‘Student.’

              ‘Employed?’

              ‘No.’

              ‘Member of a Trade Union?’

              ‘No.’

              The Upravdom testified that although Citizen Argounova and Citizen Kovalensky were not in the state of legal matrimony, their relations were those of ‘sexual intimacy’…

              ‘Who was your father, Citizen Argounova?’

              ‘Alexandar Argounov.’

              ‘The former textile manufacturer and factory owner?’

              ‘Yes.’

              ‘I see. Who was your father, Citizen Kovalensky?’

              ‘Admiral Kovalensky.’

              ‘Executed for counter-revolutionary activities?’

              ‘Executed -yes.’

              ‘Who was your father, Citzen Lavrova?’ [Marisha’s father]

              ‘Factory worker, Comrade Judge. Exiled to Siberia by the Czar in 1913. My mother’s a peasant, from the plow.’

              ‘It is the verdict of the People’s Court that the room in question rightfully belongs to Citizen Lavrova.’

              ‘Is this a court of justice or a musical comedy?’ Leo asked.

              The presiding magistrate turned to him solemnly: ‘So-called impartial justice, citizen, is a bourgeois prejudice. This is a court of class justice. It is our official attitude and platform. Next case!’” (We The Living, Ayn Rand, Chapter 14, Part 1)

Substitute “class justice” in the above quote with “social justice”, and I think this is where our own legal system is headed. It won’t be long now before being black, or gay, or a member of some other “oppressed group” is more important than any written law. (See my discussion of the use of “black rage” as a defense above.)

Rand had the judge in this scene acting strictly in accordance with the ideas of Marx, as discussed in the passage above from the “Communist Manifesto”.

Marx views the contents of the human mind, our ideas, as nothing but a sort of rationalization for advancing our class. For instance, when addressing some of the criticisms of communism, Marx notes that:

“The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Why does Marx dismiss philosophical and “ideological” criticisms of his viewpoint? Because all philosophy and ideology is nothing but rationalization for him. There is no such thing as “objectivity” for Marx and Engels:

“Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

The predominate ideas of a society are nothing but the “ideas of the ruling class”:

“What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto, emphasis added.)

Education of children is premised on the idea that some ideas are true, while others are false. It is also based in the belief that some concepts will help you to live your life better. You learn how to read because literacy is better than being illiterate. It allows for greater communication and easier learning. You learn arithmetic to keep a budget of your spending, and to determine quantities more quickly than you could through simple counting. You learn calculus to be able to determine the instantaneous velocity of a rocket to put satellites into orbit for tracking the weather. Etc., etc. But for Marx, all education is nothing but a perpetuation of the system of exploitation by the “bourgeoisie”:

“And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto; emphasis added.)

Rand recognized that the Soviets viewed education as nothing but another means of propaganda because “truth”, as such, does not exist. She includes a scene where the new, Soviet education system is discussed. Kira’s mother has begun working at a Soviet public school (which are the only schools). She discusses how children are being taught under the Soviets:

“…what did they do in the old days? The children had to memorize mechanically so many dry, disjointed subjects -history, physics, arithmetic -with no connection between them at all. What do we do now? We have the complex method. Take last week ,for instance. Our subject was Factory. So every teacher had to build his course around that central subject. In the history class they taught the growth and development of factories; in the physics class they taught all about machinery; the arithmetic teacher gave them problems about production and consumption; in the art class they drew factory interiors. And in my class -we made overalls and blouses. Don’t you see the advantage of the method? The indelible impression it will leave in the children’s minds? Overalls and blouses -practical, concrete, instead of teaching them a lot of dry, theoretical seams and stitches.” (We The Living, Ayn Rand, Chapter 3, Part 2)

Schools under the control of Marxists no longer teach concepts and abstract thinking. The goal of education becomes the destruction of the “oppressor class”, however that is defined. Since all past thinking and ideas are “infected” with “counter-revolutionary” ideas to the Marxist, all thinking should stop.

Injustice To The Individual

The biggest injustice perpetrated by the Soviet state in the novel seems to be this: Attributing to children the status of their parents.

For instance, Kira and Leo were kicked out of school because of who their parents were. About halfway through the novel, all college students had to fill out a questionnaire:

“Newspapers roared over the country like trumpets: ‘Science is a weapon of the class struggle! Proletarian schools are for the Proletariat! We shall not educate our class enemies!’

There were those who were careful not to let these trumpets be heard too loudly across the border.

Kira received her questionnaire at the Institute, and Leo -his at the University. They sat silently at their dinner table, filling out the answers. They did not each [sic] much dinner that night. When they signed the questionnaires, they knew they had signed the death warrant of their future; but they did not say it aloud and they did not look at each other.

The main questions were:

Who were your parents?

What was your father’s occupation prior to the year 1917?

What was your father’s occupation from the year 1917 to the year 1921?

What is your father’s occupation now?

What is your mother’s occupation?

What did you do during the civil war?

What did your father do during the civil war?

Are you a Trade Union member?

Are you a member of the All-Union Communist Party?

Any attempt to give a false answer was futile: the answers were to be investigated by the Purging Committee and the G.P.U. A false answer was to be punished by arrest, imprisonment or any penalty up to the supreme one.” (We The Living, Ayn Rand, Chapter 16, Part 1)

Let’s assume, just for a moment, and purely for the sake of argument, that the Communists were correct about needing to institute socialism in Russia. The children of former “class enemies” had nothing to do with the previous system. Children were being punished for nothing more than who their parents were. This “sins of the father visited on the son” attitude is at odds with fundamental concepts of justice in the Western world.

Discrimination against particular, individual, persons simply because they come from a particular class or group will strike almost everyone as unfair.

We see this again when it comes to Leo being unable to get medical treatment under socialized medicine in the novel. In response to Kira begging for medical treatment for Leo, a commissar responds with: “’One hundred thousand workers died in the civil war. Why -in the face of the Union of Socialists Soviet Republics- can’t one aristocrat die?’” (We The Living, Ayn Rand, Chapter 16, Part 1)

Some might respond that while this treatment of the children of the bourgeoisie was unfair under the Soviet Union, “their gang would do better”. I disagree. I think this is a necessary consequence of this system.

Specifically, I think the refusal to provide education or medical care under a Marxist/Communist state like the Soviet Union is a necessary consequence of a socialist economy. Basic Economic theory teaches that if all goods and services are made free, then demand will exceed supply. (Effectively, making medical care or education free is a price ceiling set at zero, which causes shortages. https://fee.org/articles/price-controls-and-shortages/)

Since demand exceeds supply, rationing is necessary. How would a Marxist/Communist state decide who gets what? For instance, there is limited medical care, so who would it make sense to give that medical care to, according to a Marxist? Obviously, supporters of the Marxist/Communist state would get preference. The people in whose name they fight, the proletariat, would get preference. Former aristocrats/bourgeois and their children would be left to die.

Another fundamental feature of a Marxist/Communist state illustrated in “We The Living” is the refusal to let dissenters leave. Why is this? Why not just let Kira and Leo leave, as they try to do at the beginning of the novel?

A mass exodus of their “class enemies” would also be unacceptable to the leaders of a Communist state because, at a minimum, they would say bad things about where they had left. This would undermine support and legitimacy abroad, at a minimum, and might even lead to invasion and military conflict.

So, the Marxist/Communist state cannot let their “class enemies” live within their system, because that would be a threat to the system, and they cannot let them leave, because that would also be a threat to the system. Slowly killing off dissenters through things like denying healthcare to the bourgeoisie would be the, not entirely intentional, but logical, solution. Turning the entire country into a death camp for those against the revolution becomes the Communist ‘final solution’, almost by default.

This can be seen a couple of times with actual historical events after revolutions. For instance, during the French revolution, the nobles had to be systematically murdered by guillotine en masse because they might lead a counter-revolution, whether from within France, or from abroad.

In July of 1918, the former Tsar and his family, including children, were murdered by Bolsheviks and members of the Soviet Secret Police. There is not 100% agreement on why the order to murder them was given, but some historians believe Soviet officials were concerned that if the Romanovs were allowed to go to England, as was suggested at one point, they might serve as a rallying point for counter-revolution. The Bolsheviks couldn’t let them stay in Russia for the same reasons. The only answer was to murder the Tsar and his whole family. That was a logical consequence of Marxist/Communist ideology.

Rand Believed The Soviet Union Would Ultimately Fail

For Rand, society is nothing but a number of individuals. Therefore, if the individual is destroyed under Communism, then that will mean any Communist society would ultimately fail.

Rand recognized at least as far back as when she wrote “We The Living” that the Soviet Union would not last. This is evident in several scenes in her novel. For instance, when Kira hears the “Internationale” being sung she says the following:

“Everyone had to rise when the ‘Internationale’ was played.

Kira stood smiling at the music. ‘This is the first beautiful thing I’ve noticed about the revolution.’ she said to her neighbor.

‘Be careful,’ the freckled girl whispered, glancing around nervously, ‘someone will hear you.’

‘When this is all over,’ said Kira. ‘when the traces of their republic are disinfected from history -what a glorious funeral march this will make!‘” (We The Living, Ayn Rand)

Rand did not see the Soviet Union as a real threat to the West:

“‘They’re not very close, and they can’t see very well. They see a big shadow rising. They think it’s a huge beast. They’re too far to see that its soft and brownish and fuzzy. You know, fuzzy, a  glistening sort of fuzz. They don’t know that it’s made of cockroaches. Little, glossy, brown cockroaches, packed tight, one on the other, into a huge wall. Little cockroaches that keep silent and wiggle their whiskers….

’…don’t let them know that yours is not an army of heroes, nor even of fiends, but of shriveled bookkeepers with a rupture who’ve learned to be arrogant. Don’t let them know that you’re not to be shot, but to be disinfected. Don’t let them know that you’re not to be fought with cannons, but with carbolic acid!’” (Pg. 373, We The Living, Ayn Rand, Comrade Stepan Timoshenko.)

Did Ayn Rand See Her Escape From Russia as a “Fluke”?

Given how all of the protagonists from “We The Living” are ultimately killed, in one way or another, an interesting question has arisen in my mind.

Rand believed that fiction writing, and art in general, was a “…selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.” (“Art and Cognition”, The Romantic Manifesto, Rand http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/art.html)

When she showed Kira, Andrei, and Leo being killed either physically or spiritually in the novel, it reflects her belief that anyone who wants to live cannot do so under Communism. They will ultimately be destroyed. Kira has to die in the end of the novel because that is the logical end of communism.

However, Rand did, in fact, escape the Soviet Union. She applied for a visa, and was granted permission to leave Russia in her early twenties. She came to the United States, and never returned.

The conclusion I draw from what happened in her own personal life, versus what happens to the characters in her novel, is that Ayn Rand must have viewed her own escape as a pure fluke. Random luck that you cannot count on with any kind of regularity. Rand thought that the vast majority of people like her would die, either physically like Kira and Andrei, or “spiritually”, like Leo.

How did this affect Ayn Rand’s actions during the rest of her life in America? She was passionately, and tirelessly devoted to opposing collectivism throughout her life. Was this at least partly a function of wanting to speak for the countless others who were permanently silenced by the Soviet Union?

 

Earlier in 2022, I re-read Ayn Rand’s novel, “We the Living”. I was motivated, in part, by the war in Ukraine. I thought the novel might provide some insight into the Russian mind.

While reading it, I took fairly extensive notes on my phone, and by writing in the margins of the paper-back copy of the novel. Over time, I’d like to write a series of blog posts on various topics about it.

This first blog post is about several things that seemed slightly incongruous with Ayn Rand’s later writing and novels. Whether these can be reconciled with her later writing is an open question in my mind. Certainly, someone can change their mind on various issues, and I do not consider these things to be glaring contradictions with the fundamentals of her philosophy. It’s more like, when I re-read these things in “We The Living” this year, my “eyebrows went up” a bit.

Before I begin the current post, I want to put in a bit of a disclaimer: It’s entirely possible I’m misinterpreting what she is saying in various parts of the novel. In the context of a work of fiction or art, I believe “artistic license” can be proper, and that can explain some, or all, of this.

Any References to page numbers are to The Signet paper back, 1996 edition of “We The Living”, ISBN number 0-451-18784-9

“Rulers and Ruled”

At points in “We The Living”, I got the impression that Rand almost thought that there were “rulers” and “ruled” in the world. In other words, the sort of idea that there are people who are there to initiate physical force in order to keep other people in line. This would certainly be contrary to her later writings, especially in “Atlas Shrugged”, but also in such essays as “Man’s Rights” and “The Nature of Government”.

The best example of this is early in the novel, when some background information about the female protagonist, Kira is being given. There is some narrative and brief flashbacks giving an explanation of how Kira would have reactions to things and situations that her family regarded as “strange” or “abnormal”. For instance, it says that she “…seldom visited museums…” (Pg. 47), but when she would see construction, particularly of bridges she “…was certain to stop and stand watching, for hours…”(Pg. 47) Another such “incongruous feeling” Kira had is the following:

“When Galina Petrovna took her children to see a sad play depicting the sorrow of the serfs whom Czar Alexander II had magnanimously freed, Lydia [Kira’s very religious sister] sobbed over the plight of the humble kindly peasants cringing under a whip, while Kira sat tense, erect, eyes dark in ecstasy, watching the whip cracking expertly in the hand of a tall, young overseer.” (Pg. 47-48)

The scene involves Kira going with her family to see a play about the suffering of the serfs. These were people tied to the land, and required to work. They were little better than slaves. The only real difference being that the serfs could not be sold to another master, they belonged to whoever owned the land. Russia was one of the last countries to free the serfs, in 1861 under Tsar Alexander II.  https://www.historytoday.com/archive/emancipation-russian-serfs-1861

Kira seems to have a sexual reaction to seeing this scene in the play. First, it’s noted that the person handling the whip is a “…tall, young overseer…”, who is presumably male. Additionally, Rand uses the word “ecstasy” to describe Kira’s reaction to this scene. Technically, I think “ecstasy” just means great happiness, but the use of that word combined with the fact that we are talking about a teenage girl watching a tall, young man, suggests sexual attraction to me. More specifically, it seems like she is sexually attracted to not just the young man, but his actions -in watching the whip crack expertly.

I think this scene could be interpreted in one of two ways. First, it could be seen as Kira likes the idea that the serfs were being kept in line with physical force, the whip, by a good-looking young man. Second, it could just be that she is sexually attracted to the display of skill by the young man, in using the whip, not necessarily what he is using the whip on. (In this case, people.) This second interpretation takes into account the early scenes described just before it, in which Kira liked to watch road and bridge construction, and (presumably) liked watching the men displaying skill at construction, too. This second interpretation lines up better with Rand’s overall views on the role of productivity in life, as shown in her later writing.  That said, I’m not 100% sure from the context that Ayn Rand didn’t mean my first interpretation: that Kira seems to believe that the serfs were not capable of following rules or law without being kept in line without some physical force being initiated against them, such as a whip. That is, that there are some people who are meant to be ruled.

Another example of this “rulers and ruled” attitude is when Rand describes Kira’s attitude about physical labor:

“From somewhere in the aristocratic Middle Ages, Kira had inherited the conviction that labor and effort were ignoble.” (Pg. 49)

First, I thought this was an interesting way to phrase this. How, exactly, does one “inherit” a conviction? Does Rand mean she got this idea from her parents? It doesn’t seem so, because the earlier discussion of Kira’s background seems to show that she is very different from her family, and misunderstood by them. Is Rand speaking of genetic determinism here? Did Kira somehow get this attitude or idea from her genes? Or, is this just a way of saying Kira had, at some point, adopted an attitude from the Middle Ages that was still common, especially in Russia at that time? Second, how, exactly, does Kira think that labor and effort are “ignoble”, and how does that comport with Rand’s later views on productivity? I think what is meant here is that Kira thought that manual labor is ignoble, since the novel goes on from that scene to say that “…she had chosen a future of the hardest work and most demanding effort…” by choosing to be an engineer. (Pg. 50)  Clearly, this idea, as understood by Rand’s later writings, would not be correct. Even very intellectually simplistic labor requires some degree of mental effort.

This attitude on work seems almost “Platonic” to me:

“…the ideally just city outlined in the Republic, Plato proposed a system of labor specialization, according to which individuals are assigned to one of three economic strata, based on their inborn abilities: the laboring or mercantile class, a class of auxiliaries charged with keeping the peace and defending the city, or the ruling class of ‘philosopher-kings’.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/work-labor/

My understanding of Plato, and the Ancient Greeks in general, is they believed that there were some people born to do the manual labor, usually slaves, while there were others who were born to do the thinking. These are Plato’s “philosopher-kings”. Rand clearly and explicitly repudiated this notion in her later writings. See, for instance, the story of Robert Stadler, in Atlas Shrugged.    This is why, like I said earlier, my “eyebrows went up”, metaphorically speaking , when I read this.

Abortion in “We The Living”

Perhaps because of what was going on in the courts and politically in 2022, I noted that the subject of abortion comes up a couple of times in “We The Living”. As far as I can remember, the topic never comes up in either “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged”. The context in which she brought it up in “We The Living” left me wondering why Ayn Rand included this in the novel. For Ayn Rand, nothing in her fiction is an accident:

“Since art is a selective re-creation and since events are the building blocks of a novel, a writer who fails to exercise selectivity in regard to events defaults on the most important aspect of his art.

…A plot is a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax. The word ‘purposeful’ in this definition has two applications: it applies to the author and to the characters of a novel. It demands that the author devise a logical structure of events….a sequence in which nothing is irrelevant, arbitrary or accidental…” (“Basic Principles of Literature”, The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand)

Operating on the above quote, I assume that having abortion come up in the novel is not “arbitrary” or “accidental” on the part of Rand. She had a purpose there.

There are two ways abortion comes into the novel. (I’m not sure which occurs first now.) First, Kira and Leo get a neighbor living in their house assigned to them. This is a girl about Kira’s age, who is attending another local university. Her name is Marina Lavrova, and she is introduced at Page 177 in the book I was reading. (Signet paperback, 1996 edition of “We The Living”, ISBN number 0-451-18784-9 )

Marina Lavrova’s nickname is “Marisha”, and that is how she is described throughout the rest of the book. She would go on to marry Kira’s cousin, Victor. Marisha is a card-carrying member of the Communist youth group, the Komsomol.   Furthermore, her father has good “working class credentials”, having been a factory worker before the revolution, and having served time in the Tsar’s prison system for political agitation. Victor, Kira’s cousin had noticed that Kira and Leo had two rooms, and had told Marisha about it. At that time, Victor is trying to get into the Communist Party, and uses Marisha as a stepping-stone to that end. (Which is also why he marries her.) Although the law allowed Kira and Leo to have two rooms because they are not married, Marisha uses her Communist party card to overrule the law, and moves into the extra room.

Since they are living in such close proximity to one another, Kira knows some fairly intimate details about Marisha’s life. For instance, Kira notes that young men are staying overnight with Marisha, and that she is presumably sleeping with them. After some time passes, Marisha comes to Kira and asks her about how to get an abortion:

“Marisha came in when Kira was alone. Her little pouting mouth was swollen: ‘Citizen Argounova, what do you use to keep from having children?’

Kira looked at her, startled.

‘I’m afraid I’m in trouble,’ Marisha wailed. ‘It’s that damn louse Aleshka Ralenko. Said I’d be bourgeois if I didn’t let him…Said he’d be careful. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?’

Kira said she didn’t know.” (Pg. 183)

A couple of pages later, a scene occurs in which Kira tells a sick Marisha to clean the bathroom, indicating that she must have taken some sort of medication to induce abortion, or has otherwise obtained an abortion:

“’Citizen Lavrova, will you please clean the bathroom? There’s blood all over the floor.’

‘Leave me alone. I’m sick. Clean it yourself, if you’re so damn bourgeois about your bathroom.’

Marisha slammed the door, then opened it again, cautiously: ‘Citizen Argounova, you won’t tell your cousin [Victor] on me, will you? He doesn’t know about…my trouble. He’s -a gentleman.” (Pg. 185)

The second way abortion is brought up in “We The Living” is through the character of Vava Milovskaia, specifically, her father. Vava is introduced at Page 79, when she comes to visit Kira’s cousins and their parents, Vasili Ivanovich Dunaev and Maria Petrova. (Kira’s Aunt and Uncle, by way of her mother, who is the sister of Maria.) Kira is also visiting the Dunaev’s when Vava arrives to see Victor, who she is in love with. Unlike everyone else, Vava is wearing expensive clothing, and jewelry. Although Vava’s family is not in the Communist Party, her father is a medical doctor. It is explained in the book that, at that time, Doctors were still allowed to operate privately, and make money because a doctor was not viewed as “exploiting labor”. Basically, doctors can do their work without the need of any employees, and they are making money only through their own labor, and not by directing the work of others. (Don’t bother trying to make sense out of Marxist ideas.)

At Chapter 12, starting on Page 151, Kira goes to a party thrown by Vava at her parent’s house. During the course of the party, it is noted that Vava lives in (comparative) opulence. How was this possible?

“He was a doctor who specialized in gynecology. He had not been successful before the revolution; after the revolution, two facts had helped his rise: the fact that, as a doctor, he belonged to the ‘Free Professions’ and was not considered an exploiter, and the fact that he performed certain not strictly legal operations. Within a couple of years he had found himself suddenly the most prosperous member of his former circle and of many circles above.” (Pg. 158)

Since he’s a gynecologist, I’m certain the “not strictly legal operations” are abortions. Abortions were legalized in 1920 in Russia. The novel starts in 1922, so abortion was legal by then. However, Stalin again made abortion illegal in 1936.  (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-01-04/stalins-abortion-ban-soviet-union )  I would assume that Rand meant that Vava’s father had performed the “not strictly legal” abortions prior to legalization in 1920. This makes sense in light of the last sentence in the above quote, which implies that at least “a couple of years” had passed since he started performing illegal abortions, and that he had passed other people in wealth, over the years, as a result.

In both of these situations, abortion seems to be presented in a somewhat negative light.

Take the story of Marisha and her abortion. For Rand, all choices in a work of art have a purpose. Nothing is without a reason in a novel. So what was her reason for having Marisha get pregnant accidentally and then have to get an abortion? She didn’t have Kira, the protagonist, get pregnant, although Kira was also living with and having sex with Leo by this point on, presumably, a regular basis.

Was Rand saying here that communism encourages abortion/promiscuity? This seems like a possibility, since Marisha was pressured into having sex when she wasn’t ready. Aleshka Ralenko, the guy Marisha was sleeping with, said she’d be “bourgeois” if she didn’t let him penetrate her vaginally. Maybe Rand just wanted to show how someone uses Marxist rhetoric to rationalize getting what they want, such as convincing a girl to have sex when she isn’t ready?

I would assume the difference between Kira and Marisha is that the former was ready for sex and took responsibility for it. (This also raises another interesting question. There was no birth control pill at that time, so what were Kira and Leo using for birth control? Condoms? Diaphragm? Pull out method?) Marisha, on the other hand, was not ready for sex, and wasn’t using anything to prevent Aleshka from ejaculating into her.

It’s also possible Ayn Rand included the story of Marisha’s abortion to give some background information on her, since she eventually marries Victor, who doesn’t really love her, and she has an unhappy marriage.  I could also see the scene between Kira and Marisha as just a way to have the two women grow closer together. Initially they do not like each other, but after this, Marisha and Kira seem on friendlier terms. By page 250 (Chapter 1 of Part II), the two young women smoke cigarettes together and enjoy friendly chit-chat.  Marisha is one of only three Communists in the novel that Ayn Rand portrays in a fairly sympathetic manner -the other two being Andrei and Stepan Timoshinko. Also, interestingly, all three are either dead or miserable by the end. (Marisha survives, but is in a loveless marriage and very unhappy.)

I cannot help but get the impression that Ayn Rand is saying with the story of Marisha and the story of Vava’s gynecologist father that communism causes abortion. Given her later, express views on abortion, this seems incongruous.   Is it possible Ayn Rand changed her view on abortion from the time that she wrote “We The Living?” The situations in which abortion come up in the novel seem to me, morally ambiguous at best. For instance, Vava’s father seems to take a certain joy in being able to “lord it over” the people who used to be wealthier and of a better social status than him. At the party Kira attends at Vava’s house, the point of view switches to the doctor’s perspective:

“…he relished the feeling of a patron and benefactor to the children of those before whom he had bowed in the old days, the children of the industrial magnate Argounov [Kira’s father], of Admiral Kovalensky [Leo’s father]. He made a mental note to donate some more to the Red Air Fleet in the morning.” (Pg. 158)

These are not good or admirable feelings he is having. (Or, at least, they are very mixed.) He isn’t just enjoying his success. He’s enjoying the fact that people that were once above him are now below him. Furthermore, he is going to donate money to the Soviet state, which he regards as having brought him into his new position and power. He not only benefited from the Bolshevik revolution, but he is glad it happened, and supports the system.

In summary, the way this issue is presented in “We The Living” leaves a “question mark” in my mind, that I do not currently know the answer to.

Kira’s Speech About Andrei, Life, and Atheism

The final “incongruity” that I noted in “We the Living” was Kira’s speech to Andrei about atheism and life:

“Do you believe in God, Andrei?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. But that’s a favorite question of mine. An upside-down question, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I asked people whether they believed in life, they’d never understand what I meant. It’s a bad question. It can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God. And if they say they do -then, I know they don’t believe in life.”

“Why?”

“Because, you see, God -whatever anyone chooses to call God -is one’s highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It’s 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.”

“You’re a strange girl.”

“You see, you and I, we believe in life. But you want to fight for it, to kill for it, even to die -for life. I only want to live it.” (Pg. 117)

Most of this quote is “spot on” with the rest of Ayn Rand’s later, express philosophy. The last two sentences seem more difficult to reconcile. Here, Kira is speaking of Andrei, who is the “good communist” in the novel. (Incidentally, Andrei is my favorite character from the novel. I can completely relate to the unrequited love he suffers from, as most men probably can.) Rand thought communism, and the people who preached it, were anti-life:

“‘You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder—the mystics’ scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live, but their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape.’ …‘You who’ve never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided idealists’—may the God you invented forgive you!—they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.’… ‘Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice….’” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

I heard a recording of Ayn Rand where she said there was no such thing as an “honest communist”, and in answering a follow up question, that she “stretched the truth” with Andrei in “We The Living” for purposes of fiction. (I think this is fine, since I believe in “artistic license”, as I said.)  She said something about Andrei growing up poor and in a backwards country, which somewhat excused it, but basically didn’t think such a person could exist in real life.

It’s possible Kira was just talking about Andrei, in particular, and not communists in general, but that could be misconstrued, pretty easily, to seem to say something positive about communism. I will say that in the wider context of the novel, that is not what was meant. For instance, Rand also has the following earlier exchange between Kira and Andrei:

“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods.” (Andrei)

“I loathe your ideals.” (Kira) (Pg. 89)

Ayn Rand already had deep, philosophical, disagreements with the fundamental morality of communism, and not just with some of its nastier practices. She clearly already understood that the issue was deeper than politics, and reached down to morality. Nonetheless, given Rand’s staunch anticommunism, I wonder if she ever regretted including a description of a communist as “believing in life”, as Kira claimed in the above quote?

These were the three things that raised questions in my mind because they are not obviously reconcilable, to me, with some things that Rand wrote later. But, keep in mind that I’m just some guy on the Internet, with no special knowledge of literature, Ayn Rand, or of fiction writing, so I’d love to hear from someone else who has thought about any of this.