Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks function in the novel less as a fully described organization than as a force whose Russian success transforms political expectation. Their revolution becomes a measure of how far wartime authority might be shaken: to some, the beginning of a worldwide workers’ movement; to others, a danger to be met with force.

Revolution as an International Prospect

When Don Stevens arrives on leave, he is exhilarated by the Bolsheviks’ success in Russia. He connects it to reports of mutiny across the armies, arguing that the collapse at the Battle of Caporetto might spread across the front and that German soldiers, too, were ready to revolt. He tells Eveline Hutchins about mutinies at the Battle of Verdun and troops advancing toward attacks while rejecting the war and firing on gendarmes. In his reading, these upheavals could inaugurate a world revolution. The Bolsheviks thus enter the story not through an account of their leaders or institutions, but through the scale of change their victory seems to make imaginable.

Don’s response is both political and personal: he imagines that the war’s suffering might lead to a new social order shaped by working people. His certainty is set against the surrounding atmosphere of alarming battlefield rumors and preparations to evacuate the Red Cross office in Paris. The novel does not confirm his predictions. Instead, it shows how the Russian revolution supplies a framework through which characters interpret instability elsewhere, and how hope can turn crisis into evidence that a broader transformation is near.

News, Sympathy, and Hostility

The Bolsheviks also surface in brief, stark headlines. One announces that 800 fighting men cheer them; another asks how they should be dealt with and answers with a call to shoot them. These fragments place enthusiasm and violent hostility side by side, presenting the revolution as a contested international issue rather than a remote Russian episode. Their compressed, headline-like form leaves the arguments undeveloped, but the contrast makes the stakes plain: the same revolutionary cause can appear as a source of solidarity or as an enemy to be eliminated.

Solidarity and Political Repression

A meeting at the Empire Casino in the Bronx is organized to send greetings from American workers to Russia’s victorious workers. The passage does not identify the organizers as Bolsheviks or describe the gathering as a Bolshevik organization; its stated purpose is an expression of worker solidarity with the new Russian government. Yet the scene shows how the Russian upheaval has become a rallying point in American radical politics. Federal agents monitor the meeting, police close the doors and break up the crowd outside, and soldiers and sailors enter the gallery. Ben Compton argues that capitalist governments are driving workers toward slaughter for the benefit of bankers and munitions makers, and that workers will eventually turn the weapons they have been taught to use against their exploiters. He is arrested with others as the meeting is broken up.

The repression continues after the arrests. Ben is held for three days without food or water and questioned by successive groups of detectives. Authorities offer to quash the charges if he will report for military training; he replies that, if released, he will continue opposing the war. He is ultimately released on bail on Morris Stein’s assurance that he will not agitate before trial. The episode does not establish that Ben belongs to the Bolsheviks. Rather, it shows the pressure placed on American radical opposition at a moment when the Russian workers’ revolution had become a powerful example and symbol.

The Limits of the Novel’s Portrait

The evidence offers no organizational history, membership structure, or sustained account of Bolshevik policy. Its portrait is made from political reactions: Don Stevens’s expectation of spreading revolt, headlines that alternate between acclaim and a demand for execution, and an American meeting that voices solidarity with Russia’s workers under surveillance and police pressure. That fragmentary treatment is significant in itself. The Bolsheviks matter in the narrative as both an event in Russia and a possibility invoked in arguments over war, class power, and the future of political authority.