Politics & Power Quote by Herman Gorter

A poet doesn’t reach for cadastral language unless he wants the reader to feel how brutally physical politics can be. Gorter’s sentence is inventory masquerading as inevitability: “an enormous amount” signals abundance, then the list tightens into a catalog of power. “Large estates, crown lands, government land… monasteries” isn’t just geography; it’s a roll call of institutions whose authority is literally grounded in acreage. The quiet provocation is in the verb phrase “to be divided,” which treats redistribution not as a radical fantasy but as a pending administrative fact.

The subtext is strategic. By emphasizing scale and variety, Gorter frames Russia as uniquely primed for revolutionary rupture: not only is there land, there are many owners, many legal regimes, many sacred justifications for possession. That complexity strengthens the argument that the old order is overextended. It also implicitly flatters the revolutionary imagination: if the material is there, the project can be completed. Land becomes the master currency that can buy legitimacy for a new regime, because it touches peasants where ideology often can’t.

Context matters: early 20th-century Russia was defined by agrarian inequality, an autocracy buttressed by property, and a church intertwined with economic life. Gorter, writing from a European left milieu, is less interested in Russian landscapes than in Russia as a case study for how revolutions win or fail: not by slogans alone, but by who controls the dirt. The sentence’s dryness is the point. It sounds like a ledger because revolutions, at bottom, are arguments about accounting.