The Russian Revolution of 1917 serves as a powerful political horizon in the novel, linking wartime dissent, American labor conflict, and arguments over who should control the postwar world. Its significance is conveyed through competing interpretations and acts of solidarity rather than through a continuous account of the revolution itself: for some, it signals the possible spread of workers’ power; for others, it becomes a subject of anxious prediction and international rivalry.

Revolution as Political Horizon

When Eveline Hutchins meets Don Stevens at an antiwar gathering in New York, he presents the revolution in Russia as the beginning of a worldwide social revolution. He connects that prospect to European workers’ unrest and predicts that the United States will not stay out of the war. In his account, bankers recognize the threat, the press is bought and silenced, and the decisive question is whether industrial workers, farmers, and casual laborers will accept war. His revolutionary analysis turns international events into an immediate question about political power at home.

Stevens’s certainty is also theatrical. He moves between arguments about finance and warnings that he and Eveline may soon be jailed or shot, while ordering more wine and turning his attention to her. Eveline laughs, unable to explain why beyond finding him funny. The scene makes revolutionary politics vivid as both serious analysis and dramatic performance: a vision of imminent upheaval voiced over dinner, with its risks and predictions still unresolved.

Labor Conflict and Collective Action

The novel places this vision beside American labor struggles. After Christmas, Webb Cruthers takes Eveline to a textile-workers’ strike in New Jersey. Outside the mills, police and special deputies stand by the wire gates; strike headquarters is crowded with workers, handbills, newspapers, and hurried organizing. The meeting is barred from a hall in a neighboring town, where the mills’ ownership leaves the strikers unable to secure a venue. Their exclusion gives the language of class conflict a concrete setting: control of property determines who may gather and speak.

Ben Compton addresses the crowd from a lamppost, calling the closed hall an insult to the working class. As police drag him away and the crowd begins to disperse under mounted officers, Webb climbs onto a hydrant and protests the denial of the strikers’ permit. Eveline later joins Webb on the picket line before dawn. When police kick a fallen young woman in the face, Eveline strikes at an officer and is taken into a police wagon. These episodes do not present the strike as caused by the Russian Revolution; rather, they show the local labor conflict in which the prospect of workers’ power could acquire meaning—and the force used to limit workers’ speech and action.

A Meeting for Russian Workers

The clearest public act of solidarity takes place at the Empire Casino in The Bronx. A week after Ben and his comrades begin arranging a meeting to greet the soldiers’ and peasants’ government, two federal agents sit in the front row with a stenographer. Police shut the doors after the first few hundred people have entered, while officers break up the crowd outside. Soldiers and sailors slip into the gallery, making the meeting a watched and contested space before the speakers begin.

The chair announces a resolution carrying greetings from America’s oppressed workers to Russia’s triumphant workers, and the audience rises to cheer. Ben speaks against a war he says benefits bankers and munitions makers, arguing that workers will learn from the profiteers’ instruction in the use of guns. Police move in; Ben and others are arrested, and men of conscription age must show their registration cards before leaving. Ben is taken away in a closed limousine before he can speak to Helen Mauer. The scene binds revolutionary solidarity to the risks of domestic dissent: the gathering’s message crosses borders, but the state’s response is immediate and local.

Afterward, an official offers to quash the charges if Ben will report for military training. Ben says he will continue opposing the war if released, and the offer is rejected. He is released on bail of fifteen thousand dollars on the condition, secured by Morris Stein, that he do no agitating before trial. The Steins do not tell him who supplied the money. The sequence shows how a political commitment narrows into practical constraints: bail provides release, but not freedom to resume organizing.

Russia, Oil, and Competing Predictions

In Paris, discussion of Russia becomes entangled with the struggle over oil and postwar influence. At the Café de la Paix, engineer Mr. Rasmussen talks about Baku and other oil-producing regions, warning that Anglo-Persian and Royal Dutch interests are outpacing the United States in the Near East. J.W. Moorehouse argues that public opinion can be stirred against British advantage and disputes who has a legitimate claim to Baku. Eveline asks about the Russians; the conversation turns to self-determination, the region’s Turkish and Armenian population, and the rival possibilities of British or Russian control.

The speakers’ forecasts expose the uncertainty—and self-interest—within this debate. Moorehouse says he would prefer the reds to the British, though he doubts they will last. Rasmussen claims that Lenine and Trotsky have split and that the monarchy will return within three months. The novel presents this as a confident prediction in conversation, not as an outcome established by the narrative. Russia is at once a revolutionary question and a strategic resource in an argument shaped by oil, national claims, and competing empires.

Revolution and the Power of Finance

A newsreel-like account of financial power supplies a further contrast to the workers’ hopes. It describes the Morgan interests’ control through a network of banks, insurance companies, railroads, and other enterprises. By 1917, the Allies had borrowed $1.9 billion through the House of Morgan; by the end of the Peace Conference, the phrase J. P. Morgan suggests carries the weight of an immense financial power. Set beside the revolutionary meetings and labor protests, these figures sharpen the divide between mass political demands and the institutions able to shape war finance and public policy.

Across these episodes, the Russian Revolution is less a settled explanation than a force that changes how characters interpret their own moment. Stevens sees the possibility of world revolution; organizers send greetings to Russian workers; officials answer dissent with surveillance, arrest, and conditions on release; and business figures debate Russia through the language of oil and influence. The revolution’s narrative importance lies in this circulation between international hope and immediate constraint: it gives American workers a horizon of solidarity even as the scenes repeatedly show the power arrayed against their attempts to act.