War & Peace Quote by Herman Gorter

Gorter’s sentence lunges at history mid-stride, more dispatch than lyric: the Russian “masses” don’t merely hope, they “knew for certain.” That confidence is the point. He’s trying to naturalize an alliance that was anything but automatic in revolutionary Russia, where the factory worker and the peasant often occupied different moral universes and fought for different prizes. The line works by collapsing contingency into inevitability.

Notice the stacking of qualifiers: “already saw during the war, and in part before their very eyes.” It’s not enough that the proletariat has theory; Gorter insists they have proof. War becomes the brutal laboratory where class lines harden, hunger and conscription make politics tactile, and the promise of land turns peasants into a decisive force. “Before their very eyes” is rhetorical stagecraft: it turns analysis into witnessing, inviting the reader to accept the conclusion as obvious, almost vulgar in its visibility.

The subtext is strategic persuasion aimed at the Left’s internal audience. Gorter, a Dutch poet turned committed communist, wrote in an era of vicious debates over the Russian Revolution’s meaning and exportability. By presenting peasant alignment as inevitable, he shores up the Bolshevik wager on a worker-led revolution in a largely agrarian country and answers skeptics who saw the peasantry as fickle, petty-bourgeois, or reactionary.

Even the phrasing “would soon be on their side” carries a quiet command: history has chosen a side, and the only serious politics is to stand where the masses are supposedly headed. It’s prophecy disguised as reportage.