Bolshevism

Bolshevism in the novel is at once a revolutionary possibility, a fear projected onto unrest, and a word circulated through a postwar world where war’s violence has not ended. News headlines make it sensational; officials and political observers weigh it against oil, military intervention, and disorder; workers give radical politics a lived setting in organizing and protest. The narrative never presents these meanings as interchangeable: its characters disagree over whether revolution ends war or merely turns it inside out, while the state’s response to labor and antiwar dissent shows how quickly political argument becomes a question of force.

A Revolution Seen Through Rumor and Headlines

The novel first makes Bolshevism visible through the unstable medium of news. A newsreel-style fragment announces that Lenin has been shot by Trotsky in a drunken brawl, presenting a dramatic claim without establishing it as fact. The headline’s compressed certainty belongs to the montage’s larger flood of alarming, disconnected reports; it registers how revolutionary politics reaches distant readers as spectacle as well as information.

In Paris, Edgar Robbins treats the revolutionary question as part of a contest over resources and influence. Discussing whether the American president will recognize the Soviets, he speculates about an unofficial mission and insists that oil and manganese complicate the issue. He describes the British army as occupying Mosul, the Karun River, Persia, and, according to recent reports, Baku, which he imagines as a future oil metropolis. His argument punctures any clean separation between Wilsonian idealism and material interest: recognition of a revolutionary government is discussed alongside the strategic value of petroleum and mineral resources. Richard Ellsworth Savage questions whether the Baku oil fields are running dry and asks whether the United States has enough oil at home, but Robbins answers by striking the table. The scene leaves the political dispute unresolved and makes economic power part of the atmosphere in which revolution is judged.

The Postwar Spread of Unrest

Reports of Bolshevik upheaval travel alongside evidence that the armistice has not brought a settled peace. During a long train delay in East Prussia, Richard Ellsworth Savage meets Fred Summers, who is guarding a Red Cross supply car. Their train ride across a frozen plain becomes a conversation about pogroms, starvation, and the condition of people described as both desperate and crazed. Summers calls the postwar situation a massacre rather than peace; the exchange gives the revolutionary crisis a human setting of violence and deprivation, rather than leaving it as a distant contest of political labels.

Later, on another train to Paris, Ed Schuyler lays out a sequence of anticipated upheavals: Hungary has gone red, Bavaria has followed, and Austria, Italy, Prussia, and France may come next. He also reports that American troops sent against the Russians in Archangel have mutinied. For Ed, these developments form a world revolution and make the period exhilarating as well as dangerous. Richard Ellsworth Savage rejects his confidence that revolutionary violence can end war. In his view, the revolutions are the war turned inside out: killing opponents does not stop war, but reproduces it by other means. Their argument turns Bolshevism from a distant political forecast into a dispute about what counts as peace and whether force can break the cycle of force.

The newsreel broadens that uncertainty beyond Europe. One fragment describes Germany as caught in a race between American food and Bolshevism, while another reports that Washington might find it easier to send troops to establish order south of the Rio Grande than to dispatch them to Asia Minor. The same montage reports a threat of mutiny by United States troops. These juxtaposed items do not supply a single authoritative account; they show how revolutionary fear, food, military discipline, and possible intervention are made to seem parts of one unsettled international crisis.

Labor Conflict and Political Voice

The novel also places radical politics among workers organizing against employers and police. In New Jersey, Webb Cruthers takes Anne Elizabeth Trent to see a textile strike. At the mills, special deputies guard the gates, while a strike headquarters crowded with foreign workers, handbills, newspapers, and typewriters reveals the practical labor of organizing. When the company-controlled town offers no suitable hall, the meeting takes place in a neighboring town. There, Ben Compton tries to address the crowd from a lamppost after police prevent people from entering a hall they have hired. His arrest and the dispersal of the strikers show the narrow space permitted for collective speech. The episode concerns a labor strike rather than Bolshevik organization, but it establishes the coercive conditions in which workers’ radical language circulates.

That pressure becomes bodily when Anne Elizabeth later joins a picket line. In the cold, early light, strikers sing “Solidarity Forever” and jeer at strikebreakers as police break up the line. When a young woman falls, a policeman kicks her in the face; Anne Elizabeth attacks him and is struck from behind and taken to a police wagon. The scene does not identify the strike as Bolshevik. Instead, it shows how industrial conflict, police violence, and the defense of workers’ dignity can bring people into direct confrontation with state power—the material realities against which more abstract predictions of revolution acquire urgency.

A more explicit international gesture occurs at the Empire Casino in the Bronx, where Ben Compton and others hold a meeting to send greetings to Russia’s workers’ and peasants’ government. Federal agents sit in the front row with a stenographer, police close the doors after the first couple hundred people enter, and soldiers and sailors slip into the gallery. The audience’s cheers and the singing outside make the meeting a public act of solidarity, but its language is monitored from the beginning. Ben argues that capitalist governments are driving people into an unnecessary war that benefits bankers and munitions makers; he predicts that workers will learn from the violence imposed on them. Police then converge on the speakers, arrest Ben and others, and require men of conscription age to show their registration cards before they can leave. The meeting connects sympathy for the Russian revolution to American antiwar protest, while the arrests reveal the risks of making that connection publicly.

The State, the Word, and the Unsettled Peace

The consequences continue after the meeting. An agent offers Ben release from the charges if he promises to report for military training, since his number has been called. Ben replies that, if released, he will continue opposing capitalist war until he is arrested again. He is freed on substantial bail after Morris Stein assures the authorities that Ben will not agitate before trial; the Steins do not tell him who supplied the bail. The state’s response therefore joins prosecution for political activity to conscription, while the conditions of release try to contain that activity without resolving his opposition.

Across these episodes, Bolshevism is not a stable synonym for every strike, socialist pamphlet, or act of protest. The novel distinguishes labor organizing and syndicalist politics from the Russian revolutionary government, even as characters connect them through arguments about class power and war. Its shifting appearances—as a sensational headline, an object of strategic calculation, a forecast of spreading upheaval, and a point of solidarity at a watched meeting—make the term carry both genuine political hope and the fears used to justify repression. Richard Ellsworth Savage’s insistence that revolution may reproduce war remains in tension with Ben Compton’s conviction that workers must learn to resist it. The unsettled peace supplies no final verdict; it leaves the reader amid competing claims about whether upheaval can end violence or merely give it a new form.