Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution enters the novel chiefly as a contested political horizon rather than as a sustained account of events in Russia. Its presence is registered through fragmentary headlines, reports of spreading revolt, and arguments among characters who disagree over whether revolution promises an end to war or merely carries war into another form. That indirect, unstable presence makes the revolution both a political possibility and a subject already vulnerable to rumor, sensationalism, and competing interests.

Headlines and Unsettled News

A newsreel-style sequence places a claim that Soviet rule is certain to be overthrown beside other abrupt fragments of public news. Another headline announces that Lenine has been shot by Trotsky, followed by the phrase about a drunken brawl. The juxtaposition supplies no sustained account or confirmation; instead, the revolution reaches the reader as a startling piece of news among many, its apparent turning points compressed into the same discontinuous public stream.

The headlines’ certainty and extremity contrast with the uncertainty of the surrounding political moment. A declaration that Soviet rule is about to fall coexists with later discussion of Soviet recognition and a spreading international upheaval. The novel thus gives news its own dramatic power while showing how little a headline, by itself, can settle about the future.

Revolution as a Postwar Argument

On the train toward Paris, Ed Schuyler tells Richard Ellsworth Savage that revolutionary seizures of factories are expected in Italy on May Day. He describes a chain of countries that, in his view, may follow Hungary and Bavaria: Austria, Italy, Prussia, and France. He also reports that American troops sent against the Russians in Archangel have mutinied. These claims arrive as Ed’s account of what he has heard, not as an omniscient chronicle; their urgency lies in his conviction that upheaval has become international and immediate.

Richard Ellsworth Savage disputes Ed’s confidence that revolution offers a way out of war. He argues that the war has ended formally, but that revolutions are the war turned inward: shooting opponents cannot stop violence, only reproduce it. Ed, who says he has abandoned royalism after seeing the King of Italy, now entertains the prospect of a dictator. Their argument exposes a fracture within revolutionary expectation itself: revolt may appear as emancipation to one observer and as another passage into coercion to another. The two men end the night angry and drunk, and only later resume easier conversation, without any resolution of their political disagreement.

Soviet Recognition, Oil, and Power

In Paris, Richard Ellsworth Savage asks whether the President will recognize the Soviets. Robbins answers that he is betting on recognition and believes an unofficial mission may be sent, while immediately qualifying the prospect through oil and manganese. His account turns from Soviet politics to the strategic competition over resources: he describes British occupation across the Middle East and points to Baku as a possible future oil metropolis. In his telling, idealistic language about Russia cannot be separated from petroleum, minerals, and imperial influence.

This exchange gives the Russian Revolution a wider political geography without making it a self-contained Russian episode. Soviet recognition is discussed in a Paris café, through an American’s question and Robbins’s resource-centered answer. The revolution’s international significance is therefore measured not only by the fate of Soviet rule but also by the powers calculating what recognition, access, and control might mean.

Local Radicalism and the Revolutionary Horizon

Elsewhere, the narrative shows workers acting on class solidarity without explicitly identifying their actions as consequences of the Russian Revolution. At a construction camp, Ben Compton joins a strike after Nick Gigli tells him that the bosses have cheated the men on their hours. When the employer mocks Ben’s solidarity across ethnic lines, Ben insists on standing with his class and is fired. The scene grounds political radicalism in a specific workplace conflict: a dispute over time and pay becomes a test of dignity, allegiance, and the employer’s authority.

The lumber workers’ account similarly presents industrial democracy as a concrete program. Organizers demand real wages rather than company scrip, dry clothes, decent bunkhouses, wholesome food, and an eight-hour day, while timber owners identify themselves as patriots and set out to drive radicals from the camps. These passages place revolutionary language within the struggles over work and power that continue after the war. They do not establish that the Russian Revolution directly causes American strikes; rather, they show a world in which calls for worker control and the fear of radicalism circulate alongside reports of Soviet upheaval.

Narrative Significance

The novel’s treatment of the Russian Revolution is shaped by contrast: a prediction of Soviet collapse, a sensational report of violence, a debate about revolution’s relation to war, and a conversation in which resource interests shadow diplomatic idealism. Rather than resolving these competing accounts into a single judgment, it lets their conflict persist. The revolution becomes a measure of how the postwar world interprets political change—sometimes as liberation, sometimes as renewed violence, and sometimes through the strategic calculations of states and markets.