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More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.comFore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.comFROM RUSSIA TO ROOSEVELT 15Living under such dire circumstances, the Rosenbaums continued toprize education and culture. Alisa, now a full-time university student,was not asked to work. When her parents scraped together enoughmoney to pay her streetcar fare she pocketed the money and used it tobuy tickets to the theater. Musicals and operettas replaced fiction as herfavorite narcotic.At Petrograd State University Alisa was immune to the passionsof revolutionary politics, inured against any radicalism by the travailsher family was enduring. When she matriculated at age sixteenthe entire Soviet higher education system was in flux. The Bolshevikshad liberalized admission policies and made tuition free, creating aflood of new students, including women and Jews, whose entrancehad previously been restricted. Alisa was among the first class ofwomen admitted to the university. Alongside these freedoms theBolsheviks dismissed counterrevolutionary professors, harassed thosewho remained, and instituted Marxist courses on political economyand historical materialism. Students and professors alike protestedthe new conformity. In her first year Alisa was particularly outspoken.Then the purges began. Anticommunist professors and studentsdisappeared, never to be heard from again. Alisa herself was brieflyexpelled when all students of bourgeois background were dismissedfrom the university. (The policy was later reversed and she returned.)Acutely aware of the dangers she faced, Alisa became quiet and carefulwith her words.Alisa’s education was heavily colored by Marxism. In her later writingshe satirized the pabulum students were fed in books like The ABCof Communism and The Spirit of the Collective. By the time she graduatedthe school had been renamed Leningrad State University (andPetrograd had become Leningrad). Like the city itself, the universityhad fallen into disrepair. There were few textbooks or school supplies,and lecture halls and professors’ offices were cold enough to freezeink. Ongoing reorganization and reform meant that departmentsand graduation requirements were constantly changing. During herthree years at the university Alisa gravitated to smaller seminar-styleclasses, skipping the large lectures that were heavy on Communistideology. Most of her coursework was in history, but she also enrolledin classes in French, biology, history of worldviews, psychology, and