This is the conclusion of a three-part preview to a newly published article coauthored by Pavel Solovyev and me: “The Rand Transcript Revealed” (The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, December 2021, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 141-229). Part One informed readers of the publication of this important article, while Part Two situated it in the growing scholarly literature on Rand’s Russian roots.
In today’s final installment, I’d like to turn attention to what this newly published project offers. In this article, Pavel and I analyze and interpret facsimiles of important original documents—published for the first time—that are deeply relevant to the education of the young Ayn Rand at the University of Petrograd. We contribute what we consider to be a definitive reading of source material that provides a significant documentation of Rand’s courses, teachers, and textbooks—and what she might have learned from them. Other original source materials are revealed to advance further investigations of this key period in Rand’s life. We also include discussion of recent commentary on Rand’s education by other writers (such as Gary H. Merrill, in his book, False Wisdom: The Principles and Practices of Pseudo-Philosophy, which is reviewed in the same December 2021 issue by Roderick Tracy Long).
I was first introduced to Pavel in October 2020, through my friend Marsha Enright, after he posted many of these images to the public Ayn Rand Facebook page. What I found there astounded me—only because I possessed poorer black-and-white photocopies of many of these same images, and here they were, in pristine color, with brief descriptions by Pavel. Contacting him, learning from him, working with him has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. He has become not only a colleague and coauthor, but a friend.
Pavel earned his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. His “hobby” over the last 10+ years has been research in history, genealogy, and Russian and foreign archives. Some “hobby”! I was so deeply impressed by Pavel’s meticulous research, which, over our many months of working together, produced an overwhelming amount of information—the raw material—for use in this article.
Every time we came upon a puzzling detail, somehow, someway, Pavel would discover a startlingly new piece of information that opened promising paths as our research project unfolded. Based on his painstakingly accurate translation of key sources and his remarkable ability to decipher signatures on Rand’s university records—and then to track down matching signatures to authenticate them (images of which are also provided in the article)—we were able to diligently analyze, contextualize, and interpret this material. His superb detective work is an invaluable contribution to our understanding—such that no future scholarship on Rand’s university years will move forth without reference to it. Indeed, the publication of this important project is simultaneously an invitation to other scholars to critically examine and evaluate, so as to widen the community for interpretive analysis and discussion of this significant period in Rand’s formative intellectual development.
Rand certainly bore the scars of her Russian past but she also absorbed gems of wisdom bestowed on her by professors of significance. It’s all in the article—including information with regard to whether or not Rand studied with Kareev or Karsavin or even Lossky—a mystery that we devote much space to. We offer short biographies of every professor whose name appears on Rand’s matricula. Our work confirms that the overwhelming majority of those who were signatories to the matricula were among some of the finest teachers that Petrograd University had to offer.
But the story that unfolds is also a portrait of a very precarious time for intellectuals in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution. As we write:
An omnipresent thread that runs in the tapestry of academic life during the period of Alissa Rosenbaum’s university education was the politicization of scholarship, in which some professors targeted their colleagues as “counterrevolutionaries,” leading to their dismissal from teaching posts or exile abroad, only to be attacked later by university and state administrators who rewarded their formerly “loyal” informants with internment in prisons and concentration camps or execution by firing squad. As we will see, the lives of many of Rand’s professors at Petrograd University—regardless of their political beliefs or affiliations—were affected profoundly by this tragedy of mounting proportions, which devastated an entire intellectual generation.
Back in 1997, in reply to the many critics of my historical work on Ayn Rand, I freely admitted that on the basis of limited evidence, I had “engaged in an empirical investigation with a dose of judicious speculation.” As that evidence has unfolded over the years, we have gotten closer and closer to understanding more and more of what Rand studied and with whom she studied. In an appendix to the article, we present a table in which readers can see how our knowledge of Rand’s education has evolved over these last 2+ decades of research.
And that is as it should be. I’ve always viewed this research project as open-ended. Speaking for myself, I got a lot right, and some wrong—that’s what a learning experience is all about. In the end, however, I firmly believe that the data, though still incomplete, fully supports my argument that Rand was exposed to something of great value from her teachers—a profoundly dialectical way of looking at the world—and that this mode of inquiry would have an enormous impact on her life’s work.
For those who have been offended by the mere suggestion that Rand could have learned anything of value from her Russian teachers, all I could say in reply is to quote Hegel: “No one . . . can escape the substance of his time any more than he can jump out of his skin.” Rand proclaimed that she was a “radical” thinker, a person who sought to go to the root of so many important issues. But not even the most radical among us exists—from some Archimedean standpoint—outside the world we seek to change. Even as we seek to shape the world, we are shaped by it. Part of what it means to be dialectical is to accept what is as the basis for all that could be.
We invite you to check out our project. Yep, and here’s the sales pitch: It’s currently on JSTOR. I will announce its appearance on Project Muse shortly. And it will be in the hands of JARS subscribers soon—though the full color images can only be found on e-platforms. To subscribe to the journal, see here.
One final teaser … taken from a page of the article: An image of the title page of Alissa Rosenbaum’s Second Matricul …
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Postscript: And check out the public Facebook discussion that followed. In one thread, one commentator stated that in many ways, Rand was like an “inverted Bolshevik”—with her emphasis on the opposition between productivity and parasitism. I responded:
A very interesting observation (and in many respects, my reconstruction of her thought in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical shows the very inversion you allude to).
I should point out of course that some of the worst “parasites” in her novels, especially The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are “capitalists” of the crony kind, part of “the aristocracy of pull” peddlers, using government to gain privileges and wealth. But her antipathy toward business extended as well to the stifling atmosphere of corporate conformity—against which Howard Roark (her protagonist in The Fountainhead) must struggle. In fact, her earliest published writing (while she was still in the Soviet Union) on Hollywood films and film stars contain some strong indictments of studio owners. A recent two-part article by Shoshana Milgram quotes Rand as follows:
“But directors have an enemy. An omnipotent and indomitable enemy. An enemy whom it is difficult to fight — the firm’s owner. At any moment in his work, any director may be interrupted by the appearance of a decisive businessman, who states categorically: ‘This must be changed. This must be cut. This character must be omitted entirely. Cut out the ending.’ And the studio’s sovereign dares not argue.” The owners and presidents of film studios force their views and demands on the directors. They greedily pursue the public’s tastes. Like obedient slaves, they strive to satisfy every desire of the omnipotent public. They want to release only that which is popular. They are frightened by the new and unusual.”
Milgram’s article is in two parts:
‘Capitalism’: When and How Ayn Rand Embraced the Term (Pt. 1)
‘Capitalism’: When and How Ayn Rand Embraced the Term (Pt. 2)
In a follow-up reply, that pertains to the differences between the views of Karl Marx and Ayn Rand on productive work, I said:
There’s a section in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical that speaks to the issue … [of] Rand exhibiting traits of the ‘inverted Bolshevik’. I’ll quote a long passage from the book (pp. 271-73):
Interestingly, Rand enunciated a principle that Marx would have accepted in starkly different terms. For Marx, capitalist “exploitation” is a direct outgrowth of the separation of the product from the producer. In the production process, the laborer endows the product with its value and receives in return only enough for his or her own subsistence. The extraction of surplus value makes possible capitalist accumulation. But it is symptomatic of a condition in which the capitalist consumes value without producing it. In this regard, Marx views the capitalist qua capitalist as a parasite on the production process.
Paradoxically, Rand’s criticism of the Marxian doctrine of exploitation illustrates her own endorsement of a form of the labor theory of value. Rand presents a caricature of the classical labor theory, when she argues that in Marx’s view, “the material tools of production” (that is, “machines”), determine thinking, and that it is “muscular labor” which “is the source of wealth” (New Intellectual, 33). As we have seen, Marx’s conception of human labor was far richer than Rand presumed. Nevertheless, Rand criticized Marx for obscuring the intellectual praxis at the foundation of production. For Rand, an innovation, an idea, is the creative force behind the production of material values. The implementation of creative ideas are a permanent benefit to the day laborer, much more valuable than the hourly expense of merely physical work that extends no further than the range of the immediate productive process.
Rand presented a view of the capitalist as creator, inventor, and entrepreneur. It is the creator who stands at the top of the intellectual pyramid of ability, contributing “the most to all those below him,” but receiving far less in material payment than his or her innovations make possible. In Rand’s view, even though day laborers contribute their energy to the production process, they would starve outside the wider social context because they depend for their employment on the innovations introduced by those above them. Even the machines that laborers use are “the frozen form of a living intelligence,” expanding the potential of the laborers’ lives by raising their productivity (Atlas Shrugged, 1064–65).
Contrary to Rand’s assumptions, Marx did not endorse a vulgar version of the labor theory of value. Marx postulates all sorts of complex labortime derivatives, such that the labor-time expended by a skilled worker, even by a capitalist in his capacity as a skilled innovator, is a multiple of simple labor-time. And for Marx, it is obvious that the material forces, the “machines” as Rand puts it, do not strictly determine consciousness. In Marx’s view, “Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified” (Grundrisse, 706).
Rand grossly distorted the mature Marxian perspective. But in contrast to Marx, she offered a more sophisticated view of the creative process. As I have suggested in previous chapters, Rand saw creativity as a constellation of rational and emotional, conscious and subconscious, articulated and tacit elements that cannot be quantified as complex multiples of simple labor-time. Creativity is the lifeblood of human action. It is the very fuel of the capitalist system. It is an expression of the individual’s integrated nature as a rational being, and it is the source of values for human consumption and enjoyment. Indeed, as Barry (1983, 109) remarks, there are times in which Rand seems so awestruck by the creative qualities of the innovator and the entrepreneur that she occasionally “slips into a crude intentionalist explanation of the free economy; as if it were the virtues of capitalists that produced the system.” This, however, is not Rand’s view, but it does underscore Rand’s conviction that capitalism as a social system rewards such virtues, raising people to a higher standard of living, and challenging them to greater knowledge and greater achievement. Such a system enriches the efficacious, self-esteeming individual. It promotes the mastery of particular skills, even as it beckons the laborer to expand his or her capacities and earn the values that sustain life.
