Ukrainian forces continue to pummel Russian-occupied Crimea and assassinate high-ranking war criminals on what was once their sovereign territory. Vladimir Putin, a graduate of Leningrad State University, says his seizure is a matter of historical prerogative. The "true sovereignty of Ukraine," he claims, "is possible only in partnership with Russia." Another graduate of Leningrad State University, Alisa Rosenbaum—better known by her nom de plume Ayn Rand—foresaw and condemned the philosophical underpinnings of Putin's war in Ukraine.
Rand was only 12 when she and her family fled from Petrograd to Ukrainian Crimea in 1917, during the withering nationalization campaigns of the Bolsheviks. She and her family returned in 1921 to Petrograd, where, despite the abysmal conditions brought about by civil war and collectivization, she took advantage of the Communists' liberal policy of allowing women into universities. Just before graduating, however, she was summarily purged for being excessively bourgeois—but reinstated at the behest of visiting British scientists. Personal experience, unsurprisingly, led her to abhor the injustices inflicted by collectivist ideologues. "Call it fate or irony," she later wrote, "but I was born, of all countries on earth, in the one least suitable for a fanatic of individualism, Russia."
Rand's 1964 essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness, composed amid the tensions of the Cuban missile crisis, helps illuminate the moral underpinnings of the geopolitical tensions surrounding Ukraine today.
