Ayn Rand

  b. 1905; d. 1982 | Russian author/philosopher

At The Bottom

— 1923

Rosenbaum wondered if she would make it through the year alive, much less finish her degree.

Alissa Rosenbaum, an 18-year old senior at the University of Petrograd, watched in horror as the world around her disintegrated.  In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Rosenbaum’s country descended into a brutal civil war that would last five years.  As someone who did not come from the proletariat — her father had been a successful pharmacist and business owner — Rosenbaum was among those groups of students whom the Bolshevik party viewed with suspicion:.  Her middle class background had perhaps infected her with intolerable “bourgeois” ideas.  As the Bolsheviks tightened their grip on power, academic freedom was destroyed in the name of safeguarding the revolution.  Professors and students who did not fit the party’s ideological criteria were purged from the universities and sent into exile, while others were shipped to the work camps in Siberia.  Rather than focus on their studies, students whispered nervously about arrests and executions carried out by the Soviet secret police. Meanwhile, disease flourished throughout the land, with epidemics of typhus and cholera, influenza and pneumonia thinning the population and adding another layer of instability to an already fragile society.  Rosenbaum wondered if she would make it through the year alive, much less finish her degree.