Critical Essays on Ayn Rand's "We the Living"

Critical Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living by Emre Gurgen: shows readers, in human-and-particular terms, how Communism degrades the lives of middle-class Russians, living in Saint Petersburg, Russia in the 1920's.

It does this by analyzing how characters are forced to engage in hypocritical, after-hours, social activities, where they must donate their free labor to the State as a socialist duty (otherwise they are fired); how characters, like Kira and Leo, are subject to the jurisdiction of revolutionary people's courts of class justice, not objective justice, as shown when the State illegally moves a tenant named Marina Lavrova into their apartment. Additionally, Gurgen's book also examines how characters, like Andrei Taganov, suffer party purges; how other characters, like Sasha and Irina, are condemned to the vast gulag system; how people routinely spy on each other in order to trade information to the state for some kind of reward; how the novel's Soviet government nationalizes character's businesses, seizes character's bank accounts, and breaks into and empties character's safety deposit boxes; how the book's socialist State makes Russians queue-up in endless bread-lines for rotten food that is always in short supply; how the book's centralized State deprives people of their privacy rights, even in their own homes; and, lastly, how the story's Marxists make characters, like Vava Milovskaia and Sonia Presniakova, raise their children in state-run day nurseries - like the Young Pioneers - since, the family is an institution of the past, according to the book's many Marxists.

Besides analyzing these topics, this 511-page book explores many other subjects, as well. Please, read my lengthy introduction, for a complete description.

* Note:

This book also examines, in its' 200-page annotated bibliography, the historical plight of the Ukrainians. By examining how Ukrainian characters are forced to work collective farms, primarily in the "black earth" regions of Ukraine, so Communists can sell the food they produce to the free West. Especially, ultra-minor Ukrainian characters, most of whom flee to major Russian cities, like Saint Petersburg, to search for food. Since, the Soviets routinely used starvation as a weapon against ethnic Ukrainians by creating artificial man-made famines. It also shows how a character named Irina Dunaeva is fired by the Soviets for not knowing how much coal a mine in the Donetz Basin of Ukraine produces; how a Ukrainian born character named Nester Makhno does not rob Kira's civilian train, since he is a Ukrainian military commander (in later life) who only fights against the Communists for betraying him.

Please read my Preface to Soviet Ukraine (after the intro) for a full listing of all Ukrainian topics this book examines.