What is the main conflict in We the Living by Ayn Rand?

Kira Argounova arrives at Petrograd in 1922 on the "threshold of a box car" because there were not enough seats in the passenger cars. She is eighteen years old and is accompanied by her mother, Galina, her father Alexander, and her twenty-eight-year-old sister, Lydia. Kira almost immediately announces that she plans to attend the Technological Institute to become an engineer. Under the Communist Party, her college is free and she's granted a student ration card which entitles her to a small allotment of food, though it's not sufficient to support her entire family. Her father is the former owner of a successful factory and he opens a textile store. However, it soon closes because there are few people with any money to spend on anything other than food. Alexander and Galina next take the advice of a former employee and go into the soap business, but it's also a failure. Galina eventually becomes a schoolteacher and a staunch supporter of the Communist regime.