After reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead I decided to read her first two novels.  Her first novel is We The Living.  Rand was 31 years old when We The Living was first published in 1936.  She emigrated to the US in 1926 at the age of 21.  I read the version of the book that was published in 1959 which includes a Forward that Rand wrote in October 1958. 

We The Living is set in St. Petersburg (Petrograd, Leningrad), USSR over several years in the early 1920s, just a few years after the Russian Revolution in 1917.  Ayn Rand was born and lived most of her early life in St. Petersburg and personally experienced the revolution and its aftermath with her family.  In the Forward of the book Rand states "We the Living is a near to an autobiography as I will ever write.  It is not an autobiography in the literal, but only in the intellectual, sense. The plot is invented; the background is not." 

This book was tough to read because the living and political conditions in St. Petersburg in the early Soviet era were almost impossible to endure.  Kira, the remarkable young woman that is the primary focus of the book, is put in incredibly challenging situations created by the environment in which she is forced to live.  In the Forward Rand states "We the Living is not a story about Soviet Russia in 1925.  It is a story about Dictatorship, any dictatorship, anywhere, at any time, whether it be Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or - which this novel might do its share in helping to prevent - a socialist America." 

Today the USA is a political battleground for the hearts and minds of its citizens.  A self described Socialist, Bernie Sanders, was a major candidate in the 2016 Presidential election.  The world is watching the country of Venezuela disintegrate economically as its Socialist leaders wreck what was once a reasonably prosperous nation.  Many may see it as a stretch to call We The Living a warning to all free people.  I feel it was timely for me to read it now.  My wife and I spent two days in St. Petersburg in the late summer of 2015 and we were physically in several places described by Rand, making the story more meaningful to me.  Earlier today I finished the book and reread the Forward.  It was very difficult reading about what it was like to survive in the wrecked economy of St. Petersburg and the USSR in the 1920s.  it was very difficult to continue reading the book as the major characters suffered under the boot of the Soviet system and had to make extremely difficult life choices.  Rand clearly explains how impossible it is to truly 'live" in a socialist dictatorship.  She knew first hand and she made her own personal choice, she emigrated to the United States and became a famous author continuing to impact the world decades after her death. 

This book doesn't deal very much with the fundamental causes of the Russian Revolution.  Rand was born into the upper class so her view would be very different from those people that were at the other end of the economic and political spectrum.  But she intimates that the fundamental principles of the revolution got hijacked along the way.  It wasn't supposed to end up the way it did.  But it did end up that way and continued on for decades until it collapsed on Christmas Day in 1991 when the Soviet flag was taken down from the Kremlin for the last time.  Now Russia operates under a different economic and political system - who knows how to describe it accurately. 

I hope we have all learned the lessons from the USSR period in world history.  Unfortunately, it appears that not everyone has learned those lessons.

TPM