Alissa Rosenbaum had lived her short life oblivious to the existence of workers and peasants except as shadowy apparitions, specters of irrationality, or properly subordinated social inferiors. Then oh my god: there they were in the Winter Palace and at her door, behaving as equals and asserting their collective will with the backing of state power. In the midst of food and housing shortages, her family lost their privileged access to resources. The family home was seized and her father’s pharmacy was nationalized. She had no framework for understanding what was happening other than the raw experience of loss. She was not aware of the injustices that motivated the Bolsheviks or the workers and peasants who supported them. She had no access to their aspirations, fantasies, and desires. All Alissa saw was resentment, envy, theft, bullying, and the exercise of illegitimate power by people who did not deserve it and could not exercise it rationally. She rewrote the vast canvas of social, economic, and political conflict underlying the Bolshevik revolution—between Russians and non-Russians, poor peasants and landowning kulaks, workers and bosses, nationalists and internationalists, Christians and Muslims, Marxists and populists—into a stark melodramatic clash between worthy individuals and the mob. Not a surprising reductive analysis for a sheltered and privileged twelve-year-old caught in the swirl of overwhelming events. But she stuck to it and elaborated it for the rest of her life.

Andrei Taganov is a notable exception. Andrei is the son of a factory owner and a true-believing communist who served with Leon Trotsky in the Red Army during the civil war. He is consistently principled, unlike his comrades. He also bears the marks of the superior individual of Ayn Rand’s fictional universe. In her notes on his character in her journal, she writes:

Dominant trait: a born individualist who never discovered it. . . . He has an iron will and unconquerable strength. . . . He has an iron devotion to his ideals, the devotion of a medieval martyr. Capable of anything, any cruelty, if he is convinced that his aim needs it. Cruelty for the cause is, to him, a victory over himself; it gives him the sense of doing his duty against his sentiments. . . . The taste, manners, and tact of an aristocrat, but not conventional manners, just the poise and dignity of a man with inborn good judgement. . . . One of the few people who is absolutely untouched by flattery, admiration, or any form of other people’s opinion. Not because of proud disdain, but because of a natural indifference to it. Subconsciously he knows his superiority and does not need anyone’s endorsement.

Ayn Rand arrived on the scene in Hollywood without any clear understanding of the mode of business or the politics of representation developing there. Her initial astounding successes, dependent in part on her ability to assimilate as white, felt to her like pure individual achievement. Then she quickly ran into trouble that she could not comprehend. She arrived as Cecil B. DeMille’s adoring fan, but later dismissed him as a “box office chaser”—a dismissal signaling her failure to grasp the nature of the movies as an industry, where the motor powering profits was precisely box office chasing.

This belief in the inherent moral as well as technological inferiority of “primitive” societies shaped her response to the concern of a Native American cadet at West Point in 1974. The cadet asked her how she squared her beliefs with the historical record of dispossession and extermination of American Indians. She replied that the Indians had had the land for five thousand years and had done nothing with it, saying further that “it is always going to transpire that when a superior technological culture meets up with an inferior one, the superior will prevail.”