Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (75 page)

THE ARCHIVAL MATERIALS

The personal file of the student Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum (Central State Historic Archive of St. Petersburg, Fond 7240, Inventory #5, file 3576) includes various documents, certificates, and photos. The following materials are most relevant to the current study:

  1. Petition to the Rector: Secondary School Records
Alissa Rosenbaum’s petition to the Rector of Petrograd State University is dated 14 August 1921. She was officially admitted to the university on 25 August 1921. (Rand fulfilled all the requirements of university study, passing all her requisite tests for twenty-three courses and three seminars by 15 July 1924.)

Of most importance, the petition provides information concerning Rand’s secondary school studies. She graduated on 30 June 1921 from the IV Group of Level II in School N 4 (the former
Zemstvo gymnasium
of A. P. Rushchinskaia and
A. A. Mironovich
), located in the Crimean city of Evpatoria. Her secondary school courses are listed: Languages (Russian, French, German, Latin); Mathematics; Physics; Cosmography (general description of the world or universe); History; Geography; Natural Science; Logic; Psychology; Soviet Constitution; Drawing; Political Economy; and Shop (literally “Manual Labor” or “Hand Work,” which consisted in the development of “practical” skills in both boys and girls).

Typically, students were rated by the Academic Council for both academic “achievement” and “conduct.” All of Rand’s secondary school grades are reported as “very satisfactory,” with the exception of “Soviet Constitution,” in which Rand received “credit” for having “studied” or “learned” the material. The secondary school certificate bears the signature of Mironovich, who served as Chairman of the School Council, and the signatures of other Council members.
³

  2. Handwritten University Records
The handwritten university record cards for Alissa Rosenbaum do not include much more information than was brought to light in my previous work. The record documents that Rand was a student of the
Social-Pedagogical Division (encompassing Literature and the Arts as well) of the Faculties (or Departments) of the Social Sciences of Leningrad State University.

Rand’s university coursework is documented across seven columns split over recto and verso pages. Column I lists the names of the courses, that is, the “subjects” or “practical studies” for which Rand received credit.

Column I of these handwritten records shows Rand’s coursework in a slightly different order from that presented in the typewritten transcript that I analyzed in 1999. The first seven courses are exactly the same. In the handwritten version, however, two of Rand’s senior seminar courses are misplaced: Course #24 below is listed as course #8, and Course #25 is listed as Course #9, thereby changing by two numbers the order of all subsequent entries (e.g., Course #8 in the typewritten transcript is listed as Course #10 in the handwritten version, and so on).

For the sake of consistency with my 1999 essay, I repeat the more formal, chronological listing of courses here—without my detailed analyses of the courses’ contents or the professors who most likely taught those courses.
⁴
Those analyses remain valid.

  1. General Theory of the State and the State Structure in the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) and the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)

  2. History of the Development of Social Forms (or Institutions)

  3. Psychology

  4. Logic

  5. French Language

  6. Historical Materialism

  7. History of Worldviews (Ancient Period)

  8. Biology

  9. History of Greece

10. History of Rome

11. Russian History

12. Medieval History

13. History of Socialism

14. Special Course: Social Movements in Fourteenth-Century France

15. Special Course: History of the Crusades

16. Modern History (“Modern” might also be translated as “Recent”)

17. Modern History of the West

18. History of Modern Russia

19. History of Pedagogical Doctrines

20. Methodology of the Social Sciences

21. The Politics and Organization of Popular
Education
in the USSR

22. Special Course: History of Medieval Trade

23. Political Economy

24. Seminar in Modern History (Sixteenth-Century England)

25. Seminar in Modern History (Seventeenth-Century France)

26. Seminar in the History of the Middle Ages (the Medieval Estate)

The second block of columns appears on the recto page; it has two subsidiary columns—spaces within which might be listed (Column II) the number of hours attended for “
lectures
” and (Column III) the number of hours attended for “practical studies.” The information (or lack thereof) in Columns II and III is of some interest.

Jeff Britting
(2004, 17–18), archivist at the
Ayn Rand
Institute, tells us that Rand enrolled in Petrograd State University “[i]n 1921, at the age of sixteen.” He adds: “Since the professors lectured mainly from their own published writings, she spent most of her time at home studying these texts, attending only the special seminars” (21–22). In my own previous work on the Rand transcript, I had established that many professors lectured from their own published writings. But I found no evidence that Rand hardly attended lectures. Perhaps Britting derives this information from Rand’s biographical interviews, but I do not find any reference to Rand’s lack of attendance in either “
Who Is Ayn Rand?
” (Barbara Branden’s authorized biographical essay in Branden and Branden 1962) or Branden’s biography,
The Passion of Ayn Rand
. In fact, Branden (1986, 42) informs us that “[e]ach day, [Rand] walked three miles to school and three miles back, wearing old, torn summer shoes”—odd for somebody who allegedly spent most of her time at home studying professorial texts.

Columns II and III of the actual student records do not provide any detailed information for the “number of hours” of student attendance in “lectures” or “practical studies.” In fact, the only writing in those columns is a few check marks, which indicate at the very least that Rand had attended the requisite number of lectures and/or fulfilled the requisite number of hours in “practical study.”

Of course, Britting’s implicit corroboration of my point—that “professors lectured mainly from their own published writings” and that Rand spent time “studying these texts”—only reinforces my thesis that she was, in fact, schooled in the
dialectical
methods endemic to the published works and spoken lectures of her Russian teachers.

I suspect that Britting is less interested in establishing these kinds of influences; his book,
Ayn Rand
, suggests that Rand was
sui generis
. He
stresses that Rand “had studied
philosophy
, but—with the exception of Aristotle—found it unhelpful in defining her values. The philosophy she sought was not in the university, but was a growing body of knowledge within her—a philosophy of which the first written glimmers had begun to appear in her diary seven years earlier” (Britting 2004, 24). There is nothing here that contradicts my historical thesis in
Russian Radical
. The influence that I posit is
methodological
, not substantive. In her courses and in their accompanying textbooks, Rand would have been intellectually primed with the
methodological
idea that issues and problems must be grasped in the wider context of relationships within the system they constitute—and across the dimensions of time (inclusive of their past, present, and potential future implications). This attention to the “art of context-keeping” is key to a dialectical methodological orientation, key to the Silver Age into which Rand was born, key to the works and lectures of virtually all of Rand’s identifiable professors, and key to Rand’s own philosophical approach.

Column IV of the Rosenbaum student records lists the “grade received” for the test (or final examination). In this regard, I should note, once again, that there is still no documentation in the dossier to confirm Rand’s statement that she graduated with “highest honors” (see Branden 1986, 54; cf. Britting 2004, 24). As I indicated in my “
Rand Transcript
” article, academic performance was usually assessed as “pass or fail, with a ‘retake’ option for those students who received failing grades” (363–64, in this edition). The student records show grades of “satisfactory” or “very satisfactory” or “studied” or “received credit for” or “fulfilled the requirements of” the courses in question. It is quite possible that “very satisfactory” might be interpreted as “honors,” but it is not the equivalent of graduating with the “highest honors.” This remains unconfirmed.

Column V provides spaces for the signatures of
official
signatories. In my 1999 study, I had indicated that officials at the Ayn Rand Institute, who had first discovered Rand’s student records, noted that the signatures on the transcript were illegible.
⁵
University archivists confirmed this, but the newest group of documents that I and others have examined reveal a few details that were not previously disclosed. However, I can confirm once again that the signature of Rand’s philosophy professor, Nicholas Onufrievich
Lossky
, is not to be found. As I argued in “The Rand Transcript”:

[T]he signatures next to each listed course were not necessarily or ordinarily those of the teacher. In most, if not all, cases, the signatures were of the rector, or the vice-rector, or the dean of the social sciences, or the department chair. (During the period in question, the school moved to unite the social sciences and the humanities.
Prior to 1922, the Rector was
V. M. Shimkevich
, while the dean of the Social Sciences was
N. S. Derzhavin
. There were many other officials who would have acted as official signatories on the document.) Given this fact, even
legible
signatures, analyzed by handwriting experts, would not necessarily yield more information on the specific teacher of each course. (364, in this edition)

At the time, I stated that “a more detailed examination of the university archives might reveal additional information both about the courses offered and the professors who taught them,” and that such an “investigation awaits the attention of future scholars” (364, in this edition).

Now in possession of this material, I can corroborate, indeed, that the bulk of these signatures are illegible, and that the signatures “were not necessarily or ordinarily those of the teacher.” Research assistants in St. Petersburg examined several additional publications that list university professors and did an even more thorough comparison of the surnames listed in these publications with the signatures that could be deciphered in the Rosenbaum dossier. But the very poor legibility of these signatures, the presence of abbreviated signatures, mere initials, or scribbled flourishes makes it
impossible
to come to any definitive conclusions about the signatories.

In addition to the kinds of official signatories I have mentioned above, those signatories listed are more typically deans, “examiners” (rather than lecturers, teachers, or professors), or other
educational
associates who had the authority to sign in an
official
capacity.

Given Lossky’s banishment to the university annex (the Institute for Scientific Research), he could not have provided a signature in such an
official
capacity. It appears that the “official signatory” for the Lossky course (Course #7) on the “History of Worldviews (Ancient Period)” was most likely Ivan Abramovich
Borichevsky
. In previous studies, I have described Borichevsky as one of those amateur Marxist professors who supplanted such purged “old world” non-Marxist scholars as Lossky (“Rand Transcript,” (365, in this edition). Borichevsky would have been fully acceptable to university officials as an appropriate signatory. How ironic, in fact, that a newly appointed hack Bolshevik professor, whose “embarrassing mistakes … were the subject of the students’ ridicule” (82, in this edition), would be the signatory for the great Lossky’s course. In retrospect, it is an ultimate insult, an ugly vestige of the Bolshevik era, which is now forever etched into the written record.
⁶

In this connection, there is another problem with the Rosenbaum file: poor dating, at least for the first seven courses listed. Column VI shows dates in the traditional day-month-year format (usually rendered as
number-Roman numeral-4-digit year). Such dates were usually certified after the fact—in some instances, much later. The
Borichevsky
signature, for example, is dated as 23 II 1923 (23 February 1923), but my former examination of the early placement of this course in
Rand’s transcript
(#7, as indicated in “Rand Transcript,” 366, in this edition) locates it in the Spring 1922 semester. The inaccurate dating of the first seven courses is implicitly acknowledged by an illegible signatory who certifies the credit earned for the earlier courses in question on 3 March 1923. The certification of the copy is etched vertically in the otherwise blank Column VII, stretching across the earlier entries, with three lines written horizontally below that vertical writing, within the column—“Check by Chief of the chancellery”—followed by the signature. Since Course #7 is included in this certification, I believe it supports my previous analysis of the transcript.

It is possible that
some
of the examiners listed throughout the transcript were also among Rand’s lecturers. A poorly legible signature for Rand’s course in “Logic,” for example, might be the last name of
Ivan Ivanovich Lapshin
prior to his arrest and exile (with Lossky) in August 1922; Lapshin, however, was in a precarious situation with Soviet authorities. (In Sciabarra 1999c [“Rand Transcript,” 365, in this edition], I had suggested that he might have taught Course #3.) But a competing record card for those first courses, which is in even poorer condition, lists the name of
V. Serebrennikov
in place of Lapshin (perhaps yet another “cleansing” of the record). The “bureaucratic mess that was Leningrad State University in the 1921–24 period,” as the researchers describe it, might be partially to blame for these various confusions. But, as we have seen, the need to pass a Bolshevik “political correctness” test in order to be an official signatory introduces additional problems for the authenticity of the record.