Time & Perspective Quote by Herman Gorter

Gorter’s line is a deliberately sour antidote to the romantic poster of “the people rising.” He grants the Bolshevik Revolution its horror twice over - “terrible” in the slog of development and “terrible now, after the victory” - then slips in the poison pill: in the moment itself, it was “easy.” That inversion does a lot of work. It implies that the glamour of rupture is cheap, purchased on credit, while the interest payments come later in the form of coercion, famine, and a proletariat disciplined in its own name.

The kicker is his attribution: “and this was due to the peasants.” In Marxist orthodoxy, peasants are politically unreliable, a class without the supposed clarity of industrial workers. Gorter, writing from the orbit of Western European communism and its internal fights, is pointing at the Revolution’s original shortcut: Russia’s overwhelmingly agrarian reality made it possible to topple the old order quickly, but that same fact also warped what “proletarian” rule could actually mean. A revolution carried by peasants can win power; it struggles to build a workers’ society without substituting the party-state for the class.

As a poet, Gorter is alert to timing and tempo: “actual time” versus “long years.” The subtext is a warning about political narratives that confuse a swift seizure of power with emancipation. He’s not denying the Revolution happened; he’s questioning what, exactly, happened to the proletariat once the easy part was over.