Novel: We the Living

Overview
Ayn Rand’s 1936 debut novel, We the Living, follows Kira Argounova, a young woman determined to live for herself amid the suffocating collectivism of early Soviet Russia. Set in Petrograd in the early 1920s, the story traces a love triangle that doubles as a moral triangle: Kira’s fierce will to create a future, Leo Kovalensky’s aristocratic pride turned to despair, and Andrei Taganov’s austere revolutionary idealism. The novel presents the USSR not as a backdrop but as a machine grinding down private ambitions, affections, and integrity.

Setting and Characters
Kira returns with her once-prosperous family to a city of ration cards, communal rooms, and informers. The Argounovs, branded “bourgeois,” are stripped of status and forced into poverty. Kira enrolls at the Technological Institute to become an engineer, clinging to a vision of building and making as a statement of personal worth. She meets Leo, a handsome, sardonic scion of the former elite, as hungry for freedom as she is; they fall in love and live together on the edge of starvation. She also meets Andrei, a brilliant, incorruptible officer in the secret police who despises privilege and fights for the revolution with ascetic sincerity. Drawn to Kira’s vitality, Andrei falls deeply in love with her, while Kira’s heart remains with Leo.

Struggle and Compromise
Under the New Economic Policy, opportunity flickers but never lights. Kira and Leo hustle for work, barter for food, and dodge surveillance. Leo contracts tuberculosis, and the harsh arithmetic of survival forces choices that violate every private boundary. To secure medicine, sanatorium access, and favors, Kira becomes Andrei’s mistress, not out of love, but as a desperate bid to save Leo’s life. She pays with her body and her conscience, all while refusing to feign political devotion. The arrangement spares Leo for a time, but it poisons him with humiliation and self-loathing. He drifts toward petty speculation and a demoralizing affair sustained by illicit trade, trying to escape dependence even as he sinks deeper into it.

Around them, smaller tragedies echo the same pattern. Relatives who join the Party prosper by betraying former loyalties; young lovers are crushed by bureaucratic extortion; the school and factory committees chant slogans while extinguishing talent. Andrei, who once believed the revolution could cleanse corruption, confronts a regime that rewards cynicism and punishes honesty. His pursuit of justice exposes rot he can neither deny nor reform.

Revelation and Ruin
When Andrei discovers Kira’s true motive for their liaison, he faces a reckoning. He recognizes both the depth of her love for Leo and the moral vacuum of a system that made such barter necessary. In a final act of integrity, he uses his position to free Leo from arrest and shields Kira from reprisal. The cost is terminal: stripped of illusions about the cause to which he gave his life, Andrei resigns himself to death and commits suicide. Leo, hollowed out by shame and compromise, breaks with Kira; their love, once a defiance, has been ground down into resentment and fatigue.

Flight and Meaning
Left alone, Kira stakes everything on escape. She attempts to cross the border on foot in winter, seeking nothing more than the chance to live on her own terms. A Soviet guard’s bullet cuts her down in the snow, nameless and unrecorded. The ending supplies no martyr’s glory and no political manifesto, only the stark fact of a singular life extinguished by a collectivist state. Kira’s struggle, Andrei’s disillusionment, and Leo’s disintegration compose a portrait of individuals caught between desire and decree, affirming the novel’s central conviction: that a human life is not property of the state, and when power claims it, something irreplaceable is lost.