If Zohran Mamdani intended to come across as an Ayn Rand villain when he pledged to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” he succeeded. Unfortunately, socialism continues to appeal to young people on the left, as both parties jettison free market principles.

　　If there is one author who has inspired young people to think differently about these big ideas, it is Ayn Rand, who is remembered as the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. While the philosophical system she created, Objectivism, remains at the fringe of culture and academia, her moral defence of capitalism has inspired figures such as former Speaker Paul Ryan and former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. Yet one of her lesser-known books, We the Living, deserves more attention than it gets.

　　Rand, born Alisa Rosenbaum, grew up in Russia in a bourgeois Jewish family and lived through the Russian Civil War and the start of the Soviet regime, witnessing firsthand the effects of collectivization and nationalization. She came to New York in 1926 and exactly a decade later wrote a novel inspired by her formative years in Russia, We the Living.

　　In 1942, Italian filmmakers adapted We the Living into a two-part Italian film without Rand’s approval, ostensibly as anticommunist propaganda for the Mussolini regime. But Rand’s themes prevailed, undercutting its fascist messaging, and the film became a rallying cry for freedom in authoritarian countries in Europe, before it was suppressed by the same regime that had approved it. Long forgotten but recently restored, We the Living is worth revisiting to examine how and under what conditions cinema can shed light on the lived travesties of communism.

　　Rand wrote We the Living, having been a witness to history. She was twelve during the October Revolution, after which Rand saw her father’s pharmacy business nationalized. After returning years later from her family’s refuge in Crimea, she found herself caught in a purge of bourgeois students and expelled from Petrograd State University. According to her intellectual heir Leonard Peikoff, Rand wrote We the Living to flush Russia “out of her system.”

　　We the Living is set in 1922 Russia and follows Kira Argounova, who has returned to Petrograd along with her family. Her father, once the owner of a textile factory, attempts to eke out a living as a private trader. An aspiring engineering student, Kira, enrolls at the Technological Institute to build skyscrapers. Conspicuous as a woman and more so as an implicit individualist, she finds herself at odds with the schools ideological conformity. She finds a kindred spirit in a chance meeting with Leo Kovalevsky, a mysterious, conscientiously individualistic young man from a bourgeois background. 

　　Upon meeting again, the two of them fall in love and attempt to flee the country. They are caught by the secret police, but manage to escape prison, and Kira moves in with Leo in an apartment they are forced to share with strangers. Hungry and unable to find work, he begins to suffer from tuberculosis. Meanwhile, Kira is expelled in an ideological purge against students from Bourgeois backgrounds.

　　As Leo grows sicker, Kira struggles to no avail to find a state sanatorium that might take a non-communist. Upon discovering that her fellow student, a GPU secret police officer who sees communism as a moral ideal, Andrei Taganov, is in love with her, she becomes his mistress to finance Leo’s recovery.

　　Leo returns as a changed man, cynical, drunken, and spinning get-rich schemes with the help of corrupt officials. Kira painfully stands by him as Leo abandons the very ideals he once lived by. Tuberculosis failed to kill him, so he slowly destroyed himself. Andrei, however, finds his sensuality awakened and his communist ideal replaced by his love for Kira, “his highest reverence.” In a fascinating love triangle, the hero and the “villain” trade places.

　　The novel depicts the realities of communism as Rand experienced them: the breadlines, the lack of privacy, the censorship, and the loss of purpose to which Leo succumbed. While Orwell’s 1984 showed the double speak, surveillance, and psychological manipulation by which totalitarianism strips the soul of that which makes life worth living, Rand shows how communism, through the systemic nullification of the individual and his rights and every mounting, through every mounting inconvenience and indignity, strips the soul of that which makes life worth living. Rand exposes communism as an utterly vacant ideal, one under which no moral principles are possible. 

　　We the Living met with headwinds during the “Red Decade” of the 1930s, when socialism was popular among intellectuals. As Peikoff writes, “for nearly three years, We the Living was rejected by New York publishers. It was rejected by more than a dozen houses. A typical rejection said that the author did not understand socialism.” After an internal debate, Macmillan agreed to publish it, the owner believing it to be an important book even if it wouldn’t turn a profit.

　　And indeed, We the Living sputtered when first published in 1936, instead gaining a steady following through word of mouth. It found readers in England, Denmark, and, curiously enough, Italy. However, by 1937, when it was beginning to take off in America, the book went out of print.

　　American adaptations of Rand’s books have been mixed at best. Rand adapted We the Living into a play, The Unconquered, directed by George Abbott, which ran on Broadway for a total of six performances. Regarding the play as a complete failure, Rand later wrote that the source material did not work for theatre.

　　Despite compulsory moments of fascist propaganda littered throughout, film goers instinctively recognized that the film “attacked dictatorship and praised the individual, thus criticizing both communism and fascism with an attack on both.”

　　We the Living may have succeeded in Italy in part because Italians saw their own realities under a totalitarian regime reflected in Rand’s plot. By the late 1930s, Italy was roiled in international conflicts and, like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, used cinema for propaganda purposes. In 1940, Italy passed a law against the importation of Hollywood films from all the major studios. Italy had to make up for the loss of Hollywood imports by rushing more films into domestic production. To help fill quotas, the Italian government allowed domestic producers to seize the copyright of enemy authors. The censors encouraged, among other things, films with anti-Bolshevik and anti-communist themes. 

　　Bruna Scalera, daughter of Michele Scalera, the owner of Scalera Studios in Rome, must have thought that We the Living fit the bill. Her father hired Goffredo Alessandrini, a director known for making Italian propaganda films, to helm the project and attached two writers, Corrado Alvaro and Orio Vergani, to adapt the script.

　　Merely getting the film approved by censors proved difficult. The Ministry of Popular Culture initially refused to approve the project because Alvaro and Vergani were “outside the fascist ideology.” The studio appealed the decision to Benito Mussolini’s son, Vittorio Mussolini, who decided it was appropriate enough, with some changes.

　　Despite the censors, the pre-production process resulted in a uniquely faithful adaptation of Rand’s source material, such that the film was split into two parts, Noi Vivi (We the Living) and Addio Kira (Goodbye Kira). In their initial script, however, Alvaro and Vergani had turned Kira from an engineering student to an aspiring ballet dancer. Alessandrini rejected this and opted to shoot directly from the book, spinning out new pages every morning of the shoot. The biggest difference would be the ending, which left out Kiras fatal attempt to escape the Soviet Union. Rand intended the conclusion in the novel to make a statement that under a totalitarian regime, no life can flourish. While the film’s conclusion feels abbreviated, it does focus the film around the tragic romance between Kira and Leo.

　　Alida Valli was cast as Kira and Rossano Brazzi as Leo, capturing him in large measure as Rand described him: “too strong to compromise, but too weak to withstand pressure, who cannot bend but only break.” Curiously, extras in the film included Russian nobles and members of the Russian émigré community.

　　Fosco Giachetti, cast as Andrei Taganov, found himself clashing with the political censors. From their perspective, his character garnered too much sympathy for a communist official. Vittorio Mussolini himself requested that the actor dial back his portrayal of the character. To this, Giachetti responded, “Well, I don’t do favors to anybody, my artistic personality is mine, and if in the film I don’t find the novel’s Andrei, on whom we have based everything and signed the contract, I won’t do the film.”

　　Upon release, the film attracted great interest from critics and audiences. Despite compulsory moments of fascist propaganda littered throughout, film goers instinctively recognized that the film, as Jeff Britting writes, “attacked dictatorship and praised the individual, thus criticizing both communism and fascism with an attack on both.” We the Living became Italy’s longest, most successful film at that time, earning the prestigious Biennale film prize at the Venice Film Festival, where it drew a standing ovation. The film played around Europe, including in Vichy France, Greece, Denmark, Hungary, and Romania. In Nazi Germany, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels expressed disapproval that the film portrayed the Russians as being “too mild.”

　　We the Living succeeded throughout Europe because people recognized the malignant forces of statism in a way that Americans were too removed to understand. Just as Italian censors began to catch on, Nazi Germany pressured Italy to pull the film. Benito Mussolini ordered the film shelved, and all negatives and prints seized. The National Fascist Party accused the filmmakers of “waging a war against the wishes of the majority of the Italians.” The reason for its success is also the reason that it was suppressed.

　　Protesting the takedown of the film, the film’s stars Alida Valli and Rossano Brazzi refused to work in Italy until the end of the war. Alessandrini fled the country, and Scalera Studios’s legal counsel was blacklisted by the government. Brazzi went on to work with resistance groups in Italy for the duration of the war.

　　Meanwhile, when Rand learned of the film’s existence, she fumed that her intellectual property had been appropriated by fascists. But Valli, who, along with Brazzi, eventually migrated to Hollywood, reassured her that the public had not been duped. Rand’s legal battle ended in an out-of-court settlement in 1961. In 1968, her lawyer located a surviving nitrate in Rome, and Rand found that the film, with the exception of the propaganda scenes, was faithful enough for her satisfaction. She especially approved of Valli’s performance as Kira. Assisted by a young editor, Duncan Scott, Rand orally edited the film in 1968 and 1969, cutting scenes of fascist propaganda and combining the two films into one. 

　　Although Rand never lived to see the completed film, the reedited version of the film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 1986. In 2023, an 80th anniversary restoration overseen by Scott premiered at the Film Forum in New York City, and it went on to play in film festivals worldwide in the next two years.

　　In storytelling alone, We the Living delivers a searing political romance. Allessandrini’s direction prefigures post-war Italian neo-realism with taught pacing, shadowy, high contrast lighting, and misty close-ups. War conditions kept the production confined to studio sets, but the framing and dramatic lighting make up for these limitations. Valli’s Kira conveyed the cold, ironclad resoluteness and pining sensuality that Rand had likely intended, and lead actors channel the steely passion and rapid cadence that makes Rand’s philosophical dialogue crackle. Given especially the extratextual politics of the film’s history, there is no better cinematic dramatic presentation for Rand’s stated theme of “the individual versus the state.”

　　The film’s themes remain profoundly relevant. The 80th anniversary restoration seems to have sputtered after its festival run, but it deserves broader exposure. It would be interesting, for instance, to see The Criterion Collection release a special edition including extra features, such as the original cut of the two films, that explore their historical context.

　　If the production history demonstrates anything, it is that films like We the Living find audiences in places that understand socialism and communism firsthand. By contrast, Americans yet to experience real socialism still view it as a moral and practical ideal. As Roger Scruton observed in The Meaning of Conservatism, “socialism has been able to perpetuate the belief in its moral purity, despite crime upon crime that has been committed in its name.”

　　For those with lived or socially constructed memories of Soviet regimes, socialism is not simply an abstract end that promises social justice. Perhaps we need several more decades of Mamdanis before America understands as much. Or, instead, maybe show them We the Living.