Hungarian Soviet Republic

The Hungarian Soviet Republic enters the narrative not through a sustained account of its government, but through two compressed forms of report: a newsreel headline and a heated conversation about revolution spreading across Europe. Together they make Hungary a sign of the unsettled postwar order, while leaving the regime’s history and fate outside the novel’s immediate focus.

A headline in the newsreel

The regime is named in a newsreel-style sequence as a headline urging the Magyar people to overthrow the Bela Kun regime. The abrupt item appears amid sharply different fragments, including a question about Wall Street’s interest in the peace treaty, a mystery involving missing women, and a report that France is buying American stocks. Its placement turns Hungary into one signal in a rapid, disjointed flow of political and commercial news rather than the subject of a developed historical account.

The headline presents the situation as urgent and unsettled, but does not describe events within Hungary or establish what followed. The reader encounters the regime through the compressed language of public information: a name, a call to action, and the implication of political crisis.

Hungary in a forecast of revolution

Later, on a train to Paris, Ed Schuyler describes Hungary as having gone red while predicting a sequence of further upheavals. He expects factory seizures in Italy on May Day, then revolution in Austria, Italy, Prussia, and France; he also reports that American troops sent against the Russians in Archangel have mutinied. In his account, Hungary is both an existing revolutionary example and the first link in a forecast of continental transformation.

Richard Ellsworth Savage disputes Ed’s confidence that revolution offers a way out of war. He argues that the Allies have the situation under control and that the fighting has not truly ended: revolutions that kill opponents, he contends, turn war inside out rather than abolish it. Their argument gives the Hungarian reference a double force. For Ed it supports the possibility of a world revolution; for Richard it belongs to a continuing cycle of violence. The scene establishes their disagreement, not an independent confirmation of Ed’s predictions.

Revolutionary language and political repression

The novel’s other scenes of political action take place in the United States and should not be mistaken for consequences of the Hungarian events. During a textile strike in New Jersey, Ben Compton addresses workers after police prevent them from entering a meeting hall; he is dragged away, and later demonstrators are beaten and arrested on the picket line. In the Bronx, a meeting supporting Russia’s workers’ and peasants’ government is monitored by federal agents and broken up by police. Ben is arrested after denouncing the war and its profiteers, then released on bail under an assurance that he will not agitate before trial.

These episodes show the domestic setting in which news of European revolution circulates: labor organizing and expressions of solidarity meet surveillance, restrictions, and arrest. The novel does not connect these American confrontations causally to the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Instead, its brief references to Hungary sit within a wider postwar landscape where revolutionary hopes, predictions of upheaval, and state repression coexist.