Kira’s Family

We the Living is not a novel that creates false hopes. The people with the highest love for life—characters such as Kira, Leo, and Andrei—are smothered under the totalitarian state, while ruthless mediocrities rise to prominence. But the society of We the Living does not consist solely of magnificent heroes and consciously heinous villains. Countless people of less exalted status spend their lives trying to cope with inhuman circumstances, struggling to achieve the physical and psychological values needed for a truly human existence. Characters such as Galina, Alexander, Lydia, and Vasili illustrate the deep impact of collectivism on millions of heretofore unacknowledged victims. We the Living is their story, too.

This chapter will consider the place of certain minor characters—in particular, Galina in comparison to Lydia, and Alexander in comparison to Vasili—in the society of We the Living. In re-creating the stifling effects of that society on those characters, the novel presents a consistent point of view about the need for freedom by human beings, and the obsessive aim of tyrants to squelch any semblance of freedom wherever it appears. This allows us to consider the economic, intellectual, and moral aspects of the conflict between collectivism and human life. We the Living is focused on a political theme—the individual versus the state—but in developing that theme the novel never loses sight of the effects of collectivist conditions on real people. Nor does it ever let us forget that those effects are universal, applicable to all men, everywhere.

As complete persons, Ayn Rand’s characters are embodied with a full range of thoughts, values, and emotions. But each character is motivated by certain basic premises, the specific ideas and values that lie at the core of his soul and that he has accepted over years. These ideas unite each character into a comprehensive whole, dictating why he speaks and acts as he does. As Ayn Rand taught in her fiction writing seminars, “Good characterization is not a matter of giving a character a single attribute or making him monotonous. It is a matter of integrating his every particular aspect to the total, the focus of integration being his basic premises.”¹ We know what makes a character tick when we understand the premises that motivate his actions.

In turn, we know what makes a society tick when we understand the dominant premises accepted by the individuals that constitute it. Ayn Rand’s concern to comprehensively re-create totalitarian social conditions places important demands on how she draws those individuals. As each character is tightly integrated by the fundamental ideas he accepts and practices, so the society is integrated by the dominant ideas that are practiced in it. Ayn Rand’s portrayal of that society is comprehensive precisely because she creates characters that exhaust the possibilities of thought and action open to people in that society. A reader who ignores the minor characters in We the Living will fail to grasp the nature of the individual’s struggle to attain the values he needs to live, the depths of the collectivist attack on those values, and the richness of the author’s systematic dissection of the totalitarian universe.

At the opening of the novel Kira and her immediate family—her mother Galina, her father Alexander, and her sister Lydia—are returning to Petrograd from the Crimea. They anticipate seeing Kira’s aunt Maria, uncle Vasili, and cousins Victor, Irina, and Acia. Although these characters are part of the backdrop against which the tragedy of Kira, Leo, and Andrei takes place, each is also a distinct person whom the reader can isolate from the background and consider as an individual. This characterization is achieved through precisely formulated dialogue and tightly controlled action that reveal the fine nuances differentiating the fundamental premises held by the characters.

How do the members of Kira’s family reveal these premises? Kira, Galina, Alexander, and Lydia offer unique perspectives on events. They often see the same things from the same vantage point, whether riding in the same rail car, standing on the same street corner or living in the same apartment. Yet they react differently to what they experience, often not even focusing on the same aspects of the scene. When the characters are placed side by side, a reader can clearly comprehend how each is motivated to think and act as he does.

Consider the first glimpses of Kira’s family, as they set off by train from the Crimea:

When they were in the train and the wheels screeched and tore forward for the first time, in that first jerk towards Petrograd, they looked at one another, but said nothing. Galina Petrovna was thinking of their mansion on Kamenostrovsky and whether they could get it back; Lydia was thinking of the old church where she had knelt every Easter of her childhood, and that she would visit it on her first day in Petrograd; Alexander Dimitrievitch was not thinking; Kira remembered suddenly that when she went to the theatre, her favorite moment was the one when the lights went out and the curtain shivered before rising; and she wondered why she was thinking of that moment. (23)

These inner states reveal what each character thinks is important about his return to Petrograd. Galina Petrovna’s concern for their material things, Lydia’s desire to pray, Alexander Dimitrievitch’s lack of thought about anything, and Kira’s anticipation of the rising theater curtain imply fundamental differences in their approaches to the world.

It is important to stress that Ayn Rand’s characters are not always aware of their own basic ideas and thought processes. Like many real people, a character may be a type who goes through life on autopilot, without examining the fundamental ideas that he has accepted and that shape his life. The premises that motivate a person’s conscious thoughts and actions are often held only subconsciously. “Subconsciously” here means that the ideas are not in conscious focus and have not been explicitly evaluated, but are rather stored in the mind in an implicit form. Uncritical acceptance and practice have allowed these unexamined ideas to become automatic in the character’s thinking. This is not determinism, but rather the recognition that fundamental ideas are important to a person’s mental functioning. For example, Lydia’s first thoughts are of prayer and the church. She has deeply accepted traditional religious teachings, and they dominate her thinking. These are the ideas she uses to evaluate the world. As the crisis around her deepens, she strengthens her own dependence upon these ideas without ever questioning what they really mean.

In the scene above, none of the characters knows why this particular thought happens to come to mind. It simply rises up into conscious awareness. Only Kira is aware of this issue; only she “wondered why she was thinking of that moment.” She is aware of her own thoughts and that there is a reason why she thinks as she does, even though she does not follow through on her own question. Likewise, a reader who wishes to understand these characters must follow Kira’s lead and ask continually: “What motivated the character to think, speak, or act as he did?”

The crisp dialogue between Kira and her family as they arrive in Petrograd is further evidence for the basic premises motivating them:

“Well,” said Alexander Dimitrievitch, “we’re back.”

“Isn’t it wonderful!” said Kira.

“Mud, as ever,” said Lydia.

“We’ll have to take a cab. Such an expense!” said Galina Petrovna. (31)

Other conversations underscore the motivations that lie behind such responses. For instance, as Kira and her family stand on a street corner in Petrograd, Lydia wonders about what the years have done to their relatives the Dunaevs. Galina worries about their fortune. Alexander says it makes no difference. Kira watches the streets (32–33).

Such dialogue is neither arbitrary nor unimportant. Each character is revealing a consistent approach to the scene before him. In essence, Alexander expresses no interest in the present and no expectations for the future; he is simply here, a hapless victim of the communists. Lydia sees only the mud and trials in this world and awaits the solace of kneeling in the church. Galina remains concerned with her past and present wealth. Kira is enraptured with the wonders in the city spread before her. Each character exposes his deep-seated evaluations of the world, and each will follow a direction set by those evaluations in order to cope with what is to come.

Further analysis of these characters may begin with Kira. In contrast to her mother and sister, Kira is not the kind of person who puts her mind into the service of the mundane. Her vision is not of kerosene stoves and stale bread, but of big cities, epic stories, and lavish artistic productions. She pays no attention to the revolution. She notices neither what she eats nor what she wears. She wishes to learn engineering in order to build great bridges, not to serve society. When her aunt Maria tells her that she should become a typist in order to get lard, sugar, and a chance at high office, her uncle Vasili perceptively replies: “Hell, you can’t make a drayhorse out of a racing steed” (36, 39, 41, 135). Kira is a racing steed not only because of her unwillingness to compromise her exalted view of life in order to obtain a bag of sugar, but because she wants to make her values real through hard, honest work. Engineering is the only profession “for which I don’t have to learn any lies” (41–42).

Kira’s approach to routine tasks reflects her basic joy in being alive. She has blisters from carrying packages into their new apartment, but her sense of the gaiety of life shines in contrast with Lydia’s pain:

skipping briskly over the steps, sliding down the banister, she met Lydia, climbing up slowly, heavily, clutching the bundles to her breast, panting and sighing bitterly, steam blowing from her mouth with every word: “Our Lord in Heaven! . . . Saint Mother of God!” (52–53)

Kira, of course, is the major foil to her family, as she is to everyone else in the book. On the train to Petrograd a series of conversations by unidentified passengers about matters of immediate survival—dried fish, sunflower seed oil, acorns, and coffee grounds—leads to this exchange between Kira, Lydia, and Galina:

“Citizens,” Lydia asked boldly, “do they have ice-cream in Petrograd? I haven’t tasted it in five years. Real ice-cream, cold, so cold it takes your breath away . . .”

“Yes,” said Kira, “so cold it takes your breath away, but then you can walk faster, and there are lights, a long line of lights, moving you as you walk.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Lydia.

“Why, about Petrograd.” Kira looked at her, surprised. “I thought you were talking about Petrograd, and how cold it was there, weren’t you?”

“We were not. You were off—as usual.”

“I was thinking about the streets. The streets of a big city, where so much is possible and so many things can happen to you.”

Galina Petrovna remarked dryly: “You’re saying that quite happily, aren’t you? I should think we’d all be quite tired of ‘things happening,’ by now. Haven’t you had enough happen to you with the revolution, and all?”

“Oh, yes,” said Kira indifferently, “the revolution.” (24–25)

Kira and her family exhibit diametrically opposite approaches to reality. Like most people in the novel, Kira’s family remains anchored to the commonplace, short-range concerns of life. But Kira is literally unable to force herself to remain oriented to the prosaic; her family has to remind her to do routine tasks like getting bread. She maintains a life-saving contempt for the immediate actions needed to survive and a profound love for the highest values possible to her. She carries in her both “the conviction that labor and effort were ignoble” and a desire for “a future of the hardest work and most demanding effort” (49–50). She is able to ignore the revolution when it is not of immediate concern to her, but she faces it head-on when it affects her values. For instance, on a physical level she understands immediately the consequences of Leo’s food speculations (283). Intellectually, she also understands and rejects the ideals of the revolution in her first discussion with Andrei (88–91). Her proper place is not looking down at soup on a stove but rather up at a construction site—or at a hero, like Leo. Kira’s rapture toward the sublime is a central issue that makes compromise between her and the people around her impossible.

But this distinction between Kira and everyone else is not sufficient to explain the motivations of the others. The members of her family are individuals, and they have accepted subtly different ideas and ways of thinking. To grasp the nuances of difference between the other members of Kira’s family, the reader must understand the different layers of characterization provided by the author.

On the surface, Galina Petrovna and her daughter Lydia often express similar values. During their trip back to Petrograd they both make the sign of the cross when they find a place in a boxcar (28). Both react passionately to Chopin (93). They remain united in their opposition to declining standards of morality, specifically against “Pagans” and Kira’s living with Leo (115, 132). Lydia, like the masses crowding the churches, prayed for Russia and for the fear in her heart, and Galina also hoped that God would forgive and lead them (146–47). Clearly the two women share strong moral, religious, and aesthetic values that are expressed in terms of standards taken from a dying old world.²

However, important differences between them are evident. Galina is concerned primarily with practical material issues, while Lydia is rather more taken with matters of the “spirit.” Once Lydia understands that material prosperity is gone forever, her early attempts to show off her wealth and social position give way to a stronger commitment to religious idealism. Lydia’s view of morality is more solidly anchored in orthodox religion than is her mother’s; she accepts the mystical tradition that Holy Mother Russia will be saved by divine intervention:

. . . spiritual consolation. I know. It has been revealed to me. There are secrets beyond our mortal minds. Holy Russia’s salvation will come from faith. It has been predicted. Through patience and long suffering we shall redeem our sins. . . . (272–73)

Lydia’s premise of salvation through faith provides her with consolation, a sense of moral rightness and hope for the future. As time passes the power of this idea intensifies in her soul, and becomes her dominant means of dealing with life.

In contrast, Galina will turn from the promise of the church to the promises of the communist revolution. The seeds of her attitude toward the communists began to sprout at the first family get-together at the Dunaev apartment: Galina was aghast at the suggestion that Alexander should take a Soviet job, but she smiled in admiration at Victor’s claim to be turning the situation to his own benefit (38). She sees Victor as practical, like herself, and amenable to the “new realities” of the day. The next time she sees Victor she speaks to him positively of the New Economic Policy reforms (57). She also shows an early willingness to accept revolutionary bromides, if they seem to serve her advantage. In her first meeting with Andrei she blurts out that she was glad her daughter will get to hear “a real proletarian opera in one of our grand Red theatres” (96). She later protects herself by assimilating into the Soviet system. She teaches sewing to children while mouthing slogans that preach the value of work in creating a new future (163).

At first Galina repeats these slogans without any implication that she believes them, as a pragmatic means to self-protection but also to express her concern for material wealth. Repetition and practice eventually strengthen these slogans in her mind; she begins to use them automatically as means to cope with the world. She eventually changes her mind about Alexander’s working for the Soviets, pressuring him to take a state job and belittling him when his job is not as important as her own (272). The earlier implication that she does not think he is “practical” has become full-fledged contempt for his inability to advance in the world of the Soviets; in accepting the ideals of revolution she rejects her own husband and the values they once shared. By dint of repetition she replaces the ineffectual traditional and religious symbols in her mind with bromides that can rise up in her with genuine fervor when she needs them.

Lydia avoids a turn to communism by continually reinforcing her religious ideas and practices, specifically her prayers and her focus on icons. But Galina openly invites the proletarian revolution into her mind. Eventually she will blame Kira’s supposed unhappiness on Kira’s inability to appreciate what the communists have done for her. Ayn Rand again places Kira’s family side by side, and their responses reveal their core premises:

“Still thinking of your engineering, aren’t you?” asked Lydia.

“Sometimes . . .” Kira whispered.

“I can’t understand what’s wrong with you, Kira,” Galina Petrovna boomed. “You’re never satisfied. You have a perfectly good job, easy and well-paid, and you mope over some childish idea of yours. Excursion guides, like pedagogues, are considered no less important than engineers, these days. It is quite an honorary and responsible position, and contributes a great deal to social construction—and isn’t it more fascinating to build with living minds and ideologies rather than with bricks and steel?”

“It’s your own fault, Kira,” said Lydia. “You’ll always be unhappy since you refuse the consolation of faith.”

“What’s the use, Kira?” said Alexander Dimitrievitch.

“Who said anything about being unhappy?” Kira asked loudly. . . .

“Kira has always been unmanageable,” said Galina Petrovna, “but one would think that these are the times to make one come down to earth.” (273)

The contrast between Lydia’s faith in traditional religion and Galina’s faith in working for the state is heightened by the claims each makes to attain the “consolation of faith” and to “come down to earth.” What follows is an elaboration of these premises: Lydia relates an omen that includes a vision of a tree that appears as a white chalice, while Galina speaks glowingly of her communist nephew Victor’s “practical” abilities in “modern reality.”

Galina’s slogans and Lydia’s prayers reach their logical ends in the final scenes between Kira, Lydia, and Galina. In preparation for a play her club is putting on, Galina speaks feverishly by telephone to a comrade, “Now when we present Lord Chamberlain crushing the British Proletariat . . .” (446). The concern in her soul to be “practical” and “accommodating” has reduced her life to impassioned espousal of party propaganda and feverish running between meetings and club events. Her physical actions now center on party activities as her thoughts center on revolutionary bromides. Given her private chiding of Kira, it has become apparent that she sincerely believes that working for the party can bring some measure of prosperity and happiness: “There is a chance for everyone in this new country of ours” (448). In contrast, Lydia tells Kira that she has been to see a holy man who will redeem Russia through suffering and patience (445–47). On the face of it, Galina has rejected the spiritual in favor of the material; Lydia has deserted the material for the spiritual. Each woman moves toward the world of her ideals.

Galina’s pragmatic materialism may seem to differ fundamentally from Lydia’s religious idealism. But at a deeper level the motivations of Galina and Lydia are closely related. This similarity is in one sense implied by their common rejection of Kira’s values. But also, despite communism’s materialism and atheism, the ease with which the tradition-minded Galina accepted communist ideals suggests that the differences between the two women are not fundamental. At age fifteen Lydia had fallen in love with St. Francis of Assisi, a medieval ascetic who “talked to the birds and helped the poor, and she dreamed of entering a convent” (49). He pursued poverty now with the promise of heaven later. Lydia accepts that impoverished work on behalf of the poor is necessary to complete the promise of redemption. Failure is due to self-interested sinners. Galina has rather come to believe that communism’s promises can be fulfilled by slavish work in service to poverty in Russia, and that failure is due to self-interested anti-revolutionary speculators. Lydia accepts that virtue is found in the poor; Galina claims it by serving the proletariat. Lydia glorifies ascetic holy men; Galina glorifies poor farmers. Lydia’s faith is in impending salvation from God; Galina awaits it from the proletarian revolution.

Ultimately Lydia and Galina embody the same basic premises. Service to the proletariat and service to paupers are both, after all, service to the poor; hatred of self-interested speculators and hatred of self-interested sinners are both hatred of self-interest; and faith in the proletarian revolution and faith in God are both faith. That communism promises prosperity on earth for the grandchildren of the poor while religion promises otherworldly heaven for today’s needy is a difference in degree, not in kind. Christianity promised that the meek shall inherit the earth; the Internationale says that those who were nothing shall be all (73), as Andrei told starving Kira that “every little figure will grow” (189). Orthodox religion and Marxism share complementary views of material wealth, human action, and the future. In We the Living, the alleged conflict between religion and communism is shown to be a shadow war between allies who share the same fundamental ideals and are united against the same enemies.

We the Living’s views of communism and religion, as presented in Galina and Lydia, can be understood characterologically in terms of a hierarchy of premises. On a superficial level, the two women agree that the present world is deeply flawed; they are conservatives who oppose today’s decadence in the name of traditional morals. Consequently they reject Kira and her “Pagan” values. On a deeper level, they disagree about what to do about that decadence; Marxism and religion demand different slogans and see different sources of redemption. They disagree about what Kira should give up her values for. However, on an even deeper level, Marxism and religion share the same basic premises: faith (the Marxists’ claim to being scientific notwithstanding), virtue through unending poverty and toil, and hatred of success. It is no accident that both women disagree with Kira’s approach to life and her values.

The rituals and incantations of communism and religion also serve similar purposes in each woman’s mind. Like everyone, Galina and Lydia need some way to understand their world, and to guide their own actions in that world. Their slogans provide points of focus that serve the function of ethical principles. Each claims that loyalty to these slogans is the only path to the salvation that the people of We the Living, desperately need but cannot attain. These promises are projections into the future, purported to be attained through faith and sacrifice today. And as Galina and Lydia repetitiously chant these slogans they deepen the impact of these ideas on their minds. This ensures that the ideals of the party or the church will come to mind when either woman needs guidance.

It is clear that material misery is only the first level of impact that the totalitarian system has on its victims. There are ethical and cognitive consequences as well. Ethically, both Galina and Lydia accept that salvation can only come by valuing a good that is greater than themselves; cognitively, each has come to believe that only the ideology she has accepted is valid. We the Living’s real message pertains not to particular economic or political flaws in communist practice, but rather to the nature of collectivism’s attack on the spirit and the mind of an independent man. These attacks have deadly consequences. The victims of tyranny are forced to shrink the range of their aspirations and their thinking, renouncing hopes of personal long-range achievement in order to focus on the immediate, tedious needs of survival. Ethically they must abandon every value that exists apart from attaining a meal today and serving the party tonight. Cognitively, they must abandon every thought that exists apart from the content of today’s meal and tonight’s speech.

This has pronounced effects on men like Kira’s father, Alexander Dimitrievitch, and her uncle, Vasili Ivanovitch Dunaev. Vasili is a fur trader of tremendous energy; “His muscles and the long hours of the Siberian nights had paid for every hair of every fur that passed through his hands” (34). Alexander is a textile manufacturer of similar energy and achievement. Each man has seen his self-made accomplishments taken by the Soviets. Each refuses to work for them, although Alexander eventually relents. Each is forced to look downward from thoughts of long-range success onto mere physical survival for the immediate moment. Neither can quite grasp that his downcast eyes mark the success of the revolution.

Alexander’s reaction to communist Petrograd is profound resignation; “What’s the use?” is his unchanging motto from start to finish. He renounces all hope for the future and consigns himself to mere survival in the present. He acknowledges that his situation is futile not because of any conscious refusal to face reality, but rather because of his justified conclusion that thought and action are pointless in the society of the communists. When Kira and her family arrive at their new apartment, Galina says that a little work will fix it and Lydia calls out the Lord’s name. But Alexander’s sigh encapsulates his view that nothing can restore their prosperity.

Alexander is entirely cut off from any values; he can work, but can attain nothing from that work beyond bare survival. He tries to live in the only way he can: by starting one small-scale business after another, turning to a low-level Soviet job only under pressure from his wife and the threat of starvation. Neither the church nor the state made his success possible; he knows that neither the church nor the party will save him and his family. In the present world he has no chance of success; that world belongs to the so-called “Nepmen” like Karp Karpovitch Morozov, dishonest speculators who get rich under Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Such men were beyond his comprehension; “Alexander wondered dully about their secrets. But the dreaded word ‘speculator’ gave him a cold shudder; he lacked the talents of a racketeer” (92). As events progress his estrangement from the world grows deeper; his “feeble shadow of a smile” may have indicated happiness at a visit from Kira, “had it not been for a dull haze grown between him and the life around him” (163).

Separated from his values, in a world not of his making, with every thought frustrated by threat of expropriation and every effort crushed by hostile social conditions, he is trapped between the energy of his own spirit and the decrees of the communists. His motivations to give up are conscious in the sense that he knows he will never be allowed to succeed; he does not pretend that he can. Yet he is also motivated subconsciously by a profound virtue that he has cultivated for years, has never named, and now must stifle: his productive ability. His desire to live and to act thwarts his attempts to give up. Unable to act in any meaningful way, but also unable to remain idle, he is torn on a rack between his own virtue and the tyrants over him. By the time Galina takes a job, the best energy he can muster is to concoct imitation milk for a cat he found in a gutter (163). In the end the only values he has left are a pair of galoshes, which he wipes off carefully after using them, and a jealously guarded collection of matchbox labels that he attaches to a wooden frame (445). It is his inalienable need for values that motivates him to guard these particular things as he does.

Alexander, like every character, illustrates the importance of politics. He is a productive entrepreneur who is doomed to extinction in a culture of cannibals. In America he would have created a business empire. In Soviet Russia he can produce nothing, feel nothing, think nothing.

In contrast to Alexander, Kira’s uncle Vasili Ilyitch Dunaev clings tenaciously to his vision of the future. He consciously renounces his most sacred values by disavowing the past: “Take one advice from an old man, Kira. Don’t ever look back. The past is dead. But there is always a future. There is always a future” (78). Yet, denials notwithstanding, he continues to hold a profound respect for the values of the past. After selling a priceless clock he had given to his wife for her birthday, he gives a million rubles to a disabled Imperial Army veteran: “Keep it. And I’ll still be your debtor” (87).

Grasping at the values of the past, he is unable to see that everything once dear to him is now worthless. The clock he sold was once so valuable that its sale required an Imperial order; it is now worth a few pounds of bread. The same is true for illegal czarist money, which he hoards. He intends to use it to pay a foreign debt, as well as to regain his possessions. His honor demands that the debt be paid, and he looks forward with a sense of achievement to paying it off (78). Although both his debt and his possessions are from the past, he is actually projecting his need for achievement into an otherwise barren future. He is looking forward to these achievements. But the implications of the czarist money are clear to Kira as well as to the reader: the values of the past are worthless in the world of the communists, to hold on to them in the present is a capital crime, and the future he desires—a return to a pre-Soviet era of decency and values—will not come to be. Despite his conscious protestations to the contrary, Vasili clings to those values at the risk of his life. And, like all such values, they must remain hidden, as Galina had taken pains to hide the French novel she read on the train from the Crimea (21).

Yet Vasili’s hopes are not centered primarily on material values. Like Galina and Lydia, his past has moral import; he reads Chekhov, and when he hears of a new production of La Traviata he says, “Yes . . . old classics are still the best. In those days they had culture, and moral values, and . . . integrity” (214). Doubtless czarist culture was not the nirvana that he remembers, but his very need for an alternative to the crushing staleness around him strengthens the effects of those memories on him.

Trapped in a miserable present that is cut off from the past, he places all his hopes on a future that he can conceive of only in terms of the values of the past. Unable to think that the values he craves have been exterminated everywhere, he projects them onto nations abroad, imagining a world where people live as human beings and not as animals. In response to what he thinks is a benevolent action from abroad, he says to his family:

But that’s Europe for you. That’s abroad. That’s what a human life does to a human being. I think it’s hard for us to understand kindness and what used to be called ethics. We’re all turning into beasts in a beastly struggle. But we’ll be saved. We’ll be saved before it gets us all. (257)

But his wife had long ceased hearing this; Vasili had predicted salvation from abroad for five years (77). But there is no indication that such a failure was lessening his faith in the intervention of nations from abroad.

His faith in the future is also drawn from his hopes for his children, a faith that is also not lessened by failures. Early on, when Kira meets him in the market, he says:

“You know, this is not a cheerful place. I feel so sorry for all the people here, selling the last of their possessions, with nothing to expect of life. For me it’s different. I don’t mind. What’s a few knick-knacks more or less? I’ll have time to buy plenty of new ones. But I have something I can’t sell and can’t lose and it can’t be nationalized. I have a future. A living future. My children. You know, Irina—she’s the smartest child. She was always first in school; had she graduated in the old days she would have received a gold medal. And Victor?” The old shoulders straightened vigorously like those of a soldier at attention. “Victor is an unusual young man. Victor’s the brightest boy I’ve ever seen. Sure, we disagree a little sometimes, but that’s because he’s young, he doesn’t quite understand. You mark my word: Victor will be a great man someday.”

“And Irina will be a famous artist, Uncle Vasili.”

“And Kira, did you read the papers this morning? Just watch England. Within the next month or two . . .” (85–86)

These claims for the future suffer a serious blow when Irina is expelled from school. But the deadly threat to Vasili is rather that Victor has not been expelled from school, and has joined the Communist Party. Galina thinks that Victor is smart and adaptable, but Vasili knows that he is losing his son (214). He cannot foresee that his future will be demolished by Victor’s betrayal and Irina’s sentence to Siberia, but he recognizes early the implications of Victor’s sell-out to the Communist Party. Consequently, when Irina is condemned, Vasili has no uncertainty about Victor’s complicity in her arrest. Her protestations notwithstanding, in this issue it is Vasili who is “practical” and Galina who is an “idealist.” Victor and Irina illustrate two possible ways that a father can lose his children: physical death by rejecting the party and spiritual death by joining it. Victor and Irina embody, in a microcosm, the basic alternative facing many of the minor characters in We the Living.

In his final goodbye to Kira, standing on the street, Vasili grasps onto all that is left of his future, his child Acia:

“It’s such a joy to watch her growing, day by day. She’s getting better at school, too. I help her with her lessons. I don’t mind standing here all day, because then I go home, and there she is. Everything isn’t lost, yet. I still have Acia’s future before me. Acia is a bright child. She’ll go far.”

“Yes, Uncle Vasili.”

“I read the papers, too, when I have time. There’s a lot going on in the world. One can wait, if one has faith and patience.” (450–51)

Vasili is torn by internal as well as external conflicts. From the outset he is aware of the consequences of consorting with the communists, and he steadfastly refuses to work for them. This is evidence for his integrity, his refusal to act in any way contrary to what he knows to be right. Alexander had vowed, with sudden strength, “Not as long as I live” when Maria suggested that he take a Soviet job (37), but he did not keep this vow. Vasili, however, did hold true to this commitment, making the same statement much later to Victor: “I will not work for your government so long as I live” (312). But Vasili also must realize that Irina and Victor are gone, that his wife has died, that Acia is absorbing pure propaganda at school (and that she is a brat), and that the outside world is little interested in Russia. Yet he continues to claim that the future will improve. The conclusion is unavoidable: he is consciously evading the nature of his situation. He is refusing to admit that there is no hope for the future. His is a faith in the future that is immune to the facts.

At each step Kira is aware that her uncle’s hopes are impossible, yet she treats him gently; she does not dispute that Victor and Irina will succeed, and she later agrees that Acia has a bright future. Vasili deserves this gentle treatment. He stands on the edge of a chasm that he cannot traverse. The present is misery. Like Alexander’s, his material values have been reduced to pittances, and have become actual dangers to his life. He too is trapped between his own unacknowledged virtues and the demands of the collectivist state. The moral values he craves are out of reach. He is an achievement-oriented man who is unable to pursue any goals and yet unable to give up. He creates a future because he must; without a future he will have to admit that no values are possible and that he cannot live. Vasili’s faith in Acia (and in England) has been created for the same reason as Galina’s faith in communism and Lydia’s faith in religion—and it is just as hopeless. Although Vasili’s error emerges from a more steadfast devotion to the values necessary for human life, his demise is inevitable once Acia follows either Irina or Victor to her logical end. But he is simply unable to abandon his grasp on life by giving up on his one remaining child and the world outside Russia.

To be cut off from all values is to be cut off from all goals. No thinking and no plans are possible if one’s values can be destroyed at any time. Vasili knows this from the first. When Alexander says, early in the novel, that he will open a store, Vasili disagrees with Victor over what this means:

“New enterprises, Uncle Alexander, have a great future in this new age,” said Victor.

“Until the government squashes them under its heel,” Vasili Ivanovitch said gloomily.

“Nothing to fear, Father. The days of confiscations are past. The Soviet government has a most progressive policy outlined.”

“Outlined in blood,” said Vasili Ivanovitch. (38–39)

Ayn Rand is systematic when presenting the basic ways that the victims grasp at the values needed for life. Lydia oscillates between her worship of religious icons and the classical composers she plays violently at the piano. Alexander has narrowed his vision to small-scale, particular things; he feeds his cat, wipes his galoshes, and guards his matchbox labels jealously. Galina, embracing the new ideology, screams party propaganda to get a pound of millet. Vasili holds on to hopes for his daughter’s future. Kira, always trying to protect her highest value, does whatever is necessary to save Leo’s life. Like every member of every overflow audience at every foreign film in We the Living, Kira and her family act desperately to hold on to the values that make life as a human being possible. Each is trapped between the selfish needs of life and the sacrificial demands of the party. And in each, the desire to live is facing a relentless onslaught. Only Kira is strong enough to withstand the attack on her spirit. It takes a bullet to bring her down.

Ayn Rand is also systematic when she shows how Kira’s family members move psychologically and physically toward inevitable destruction. Alexander gives up all expectations of improvement and simply exists, without hope or promise. Galina turns to a feverish faith in the revolution. Lydia strengthens her faith in God. Vasili affirms his faith in his children and the outside world. Irina, beginning to understand, disappears in prison. Maria dies from disease, crying out her desire to live. Victor sells his soul to the party by betraying a family member. Kira dies trying to escape. Through such systematic characterizations, Ayn Rand creates the society in which Kira, Andrei, and Leo play out their passionate tragedy, each coming to the end that he must.

There are deeper implications to the tragedies in We the Living. These implications reach far beyond the events of the book, to include the nature of tyranny and its foundations in the moral nature of a collectivist society. The portrayal of collectivist social conditions is one of Ayn Rand’s central concerns. She wrote in her journals that “The Picture” in We the Living is “a terrific machinery crushing the whole country and smothering every bit of action, life and air.” This picture is created through (1) “Economic Conditions” of “terrific poverty,” including hunger, cold, disease, lice; (2) “Mental Conditions” with “everything centered around one idea—one propaganda—and that idea fed to the people until they suffocate”; and (3) “Moral Conditions” where “men turn into cornered animals.”³ There are powerful economic, mental, and moral implications of the thoughts and actions of Kira’s family, and of the conditions under which they live.

The characters of Galina, Alexander, Lydia, and Vasili are vital to creating these social conditions and to showing their consequences. As members of the educated classes, and with a high degree of material well-being, they stand apart from the party insiders and the dirt-poor peasants in the countryside. As formerly successful businessmen and their families, they illustrate how the well-to-do are the targets of special economic vituperation by the party and the masses it claims to represent. Kira’s family members also illustrate the effects of revolutionary propaganda on the minds of people who have some degree of education. The moral conditions that result are precisely those of cornered animals, most vividly illustrated by Victor’s betrayal of Irina.

In We the Living, any attempt to pursue life-affirming values becomes a potential death sentence. On the physical level, any implication that a person or a member of his family has ever attained material wealth is reason for expulsion from school, dismissal from employment, an arbitrary tax levy, and brute physical labor. Kira and her family are made special targets of party animosity precisely because of the ambitious achievements of Vasili and Alexander. The moratorium on ambition elevates unscrupulous speculators into positions of unearned wealth while pushing productive individuals down into mindless physical labor.

But the hatred of success by tyrants is an old story that serves a special purpose. Aristotle, a philosopher much admired by Ayn Rand, understood the special antipathy of tyrants toward any men of ability. He wrote that “tyrants have mostly begun as demagogues, being trusted because they abused the well-to-do.” But the well-to-do are also a source of special danger for the tyrant, and a tyrant must control them most of all. To keep men from plotting, Aristotle continues, “It is in the interest of the tyrant to keep his subjects poor, so that the tyrant may be able to afford the cost of a bodyguard, while the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.” Aristotle observes that public monuments such as the pyramids of Egypt were intended to siphon the energy of the population away from independent activities.⁴

Likewise, in We the Living the activities of the party are not intended to attain prosperity through a “proletarian victory,” but rather to ensure that such a victory does not occur. It is a matter of self-protection for the party to require that everyone be absorbed in a daily struggle to survive. Prosperity is not possible under such conditions, since the basic requirement of prosperity—thinking—is precisely what is proscribed. But if material abundance did somehow fall out of the sky (or an international aid truck) the party would have to end it. Prosperity in any terms would provide people with the free time needed to think, the greatest enemy of the dictator. This must be avoided at all costs. The destruction of Kira’s family does not represent the failure of the communist plan, but rather its success. Among the symbols of that success are the treacherous Victor mounting the speaker’s platform to assume his place at the top—while Kira bends over a stinking kerosene stove, cooking moldy cabbage, soon to die in the snow.

But physical activity is only the first level of the totalitarian attack. The party’s destruction of human life goes far deeper than proscribing certain actions or confiscating property. A corollary to these miserable economic conditions is the airtight mental conditions. To hold its power the party must make it impossible for anyone to develop a long-range, conceptual plan of action apart from party ideology. The rulers want to destroy every man’s ability to act beyond the range of the moment by making it impossible to think meaningfully into the future. This attack is cognitive. The target is the conceptual mind. To control human action, the party must control human thoughts. To understand how the party does this, it is necessary to understand the relationship between perceptual awareness and conceptual understanding in Ayn Rand’s later philosophy.

According to her theory, human consciousness operates on several levels. It begins on the level of immediate perception, which is seeing that which is immediately in front of our eyes. Human beings share this ability with higher animals, such as cows, who also perceive what is before them, such as grass (although they have no concepts such as “grass,” “food,” etc.). A cow, if hungry, can move forward to eat the grass, but he cannot plan this action or consider its implications.

But man has a higher level of awareness: he has a conceptual faculty that allows him to understand abstract issues, to think about his physical and psychological values, and to undertake long-range actions to achieve those values. He knows not only grass but also organic chemistry. He builds food-processing plants and operates computer-controlled distribution systems. Man’s conceptual ability alone allows him to think into the future, to aspire and to imagine, and to create an industrial civilization. It also allows him to understand, and evaluate, his political systems, and to act against them if they contradict his values.

Such thinking is dangerous to tyrants. Thinking minds are free minds, and free minds think for themselves, forming difficult questions that require subversive answers. To counter this threat, the Soviets need to create a new man, a being who functions not with a rational capacity for abstract thought, but rather with the immediate perception of an animal. As long as a person is forced to focus on the next meal, the way a cow looks for grass, he will be unable to plot against the brutes that have turned his country into a slaughterhouse. To the extent that Kira must think about cooking food for Leo, she cannot think about engineering formulas, soaring bridges, or shivering theater curtains. As long as Alexander has to struggle to obtain his ration of bread, he will not be able to think about establishing an independent business. As long as Vasili can take no meaningful action beyond selling family possessions, his thoughts cannot rise above simple faith in his children. Collectivism destroys the men of independent spirit and independent wealth, on every level of intellectual achievement, by striving to reduce the range of their minds to a daily struggle for life, focused on that which is immediately before their eyes.

If the totalitarians could do so, they would empty every person’s mind and turn him into a materialistic robot. But man cannot function in this way. He must have some central focus, some means to connect disparate thoughts into a conceptual system and some means to guide his actions by principles. Nature abhors a vacuum, in physical reality and in the mind. So the leaders must create an ideology to replace what was once in their victims’ minds, so that each person never turns his thoughts away from this ideology. As there must be no empty spaces in the physical activities of daily life, so there must be no room for thinking in the minds of the people.

We the Living demonstrates that such propaganda is dangerous to those who are not actively aware of it. Galina is a perfect example of a woman who allows this propaganda to take over her soul, and Acia is the young person who is placed into a situation where there is no alternative to this propaganda. There is an ominous portent of Alexander’s changing state of mind; when Galina propagandizes about this being “a transitional period of . . .” Alexander yells out “State construction!” He then weakly speaks of his new Soviet job, as if defending himself from an accusation (273). His weakness contrasts with his earlier strength in denying that he will ever work for the Soviets.

Irina understands the intentions of this propaganda, telling Kira:

“Kira, I . . . I’m so afraid . . . I don’t know why, it’s only at times, but I’m so afraid. . . . You know, we’re all trying so hard not to think at all, not to think beyond the next day, and sometimes even not beyond the next hour. . . . Do you know what I believe? I believe they’re doing it deliberately. They don’t want us to think. That’s why we have to work as we do.” (327)

That’s why, Irina comes to understand, they have to memorize the names of innumerable people’s oil wells, recite mountains of newspaper articles, and give endless speeches to political clubs. As the party cannot demand that the people do nothing, so the party cannot demand that their minds remain completely empty. In both the physical and intellectual aspects of human life, the party must provide a substitute that commands a person’s primary attention and that accepts no competitors for that attention. Ultimately, it is because man is a conceptual being that the party must provide propaganda for his mind to focus on. Similarly, it is because man is a being with material values that the party must force him to struggle for immediate survival, without thought of long-range achievement.

Ayn Rand understood that life in a truly human sense is a progression of purposeful activity toward the achievement of life-affirming values. “Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.”⁵ To destroy a person’s ability to choose and achieve values is to leave him nothing to act for, no reason to strive, no chance to be happy. It is to divorce his actions from results and to demand that he act without purpose. The collectivist tyranny in We the Living is a vicious attack on any attempt to achieve any personal values. Every member of Kira’s family has to deal with the realization that no individual achievement is possible, and that struggle without requite is to be their lot. The terms by which Kira’s family are murdered can be found in the severance of individual thought and action from the achievement of values.
The political and social system of We the Living is important to Kira’s family; it demands their misery. Kira’s family constitutes an aspect of the society that the party must dominate. The tyrants maintain their power not only through their overt supporters like Victor and Galina, but also through people such as Lydia, who accept the fundamentals of the tyrant’s ideals even if they differ outwardly with the practice. For the present misery Lydia blames the sins of Russia, and Galina blames private speculators. In either case, the remedy is to blot out all selfish claims to flourishing, and to accept as virtuous an impoverished slavery that everyone secretly fears is its own end. Both sides reject Kira, the woman who demands the right to live for her own sake. Similarly, religious conservatives and Marxist liberals today reject Ayn Rand with equal vehemence, because they reject any claim that a man has a moral right to live selfishly, for his own sake. But affirmation of that right is the central value that Kira, Alexander, Galina, and Lydia cry out for, as Kira’s dying aunt Maria cried “I want to live!”

Reprinted from the English Language edition of Essays on Ayn Rand’s “We the Living,” edited by Robert Mayhew and originally published by Lexington Books, an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., Lanham, MD, USA. Copyright © by the author. Published in the English language by arrangement with Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, reprinting, or on any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

1. Ayn Rand, The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers, Tore Boeckmann, ed. (New York: Plume, 2000), 67.
2. In her journals Ayn Rand described Vasili, Lydia, and Alexander in terms of “the dying old world” or “the old world.” See David Harriman, ed., Journals of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1997), 59–60.
3. Harriman, Journals, 56–57.
4. Aristotle, Politics, 5.11.
5. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957; Signet thirty-fifth anniversary paperback edition, 1992), 940.