Kronstadt!

Woke up this mornin' (dum dah, dah dum)... Began to suspect I was dead...

Dead, or transported back in time to around 1973. It was weird. The radio came on, and in place of the Today Programme's bickering politicos and harumphing presenters, some guy was telling me all about Kronstadt and the NEP. "Lenin vsegda s nami!" (Lenin is always with us), someone sang. WTF?? Maybe there had been a revolution. Whatever, it was still time to get up.

It turned out that BBC journalists were on strike, over cuts and job losses at the World Service. The Today Programme finally came on at 7:00, hustled through the ethereal picket lines by a crew of scab journos (Sarah Montague, you disappoint me; Justin Webb, well, I might have known). But my head had well and truly been returned to a previous epoch, when the word "Kronstadt!" signalled a lively discussion, possibly ending in a fist-fight.

I have mentioned my political past a few times before (e.g. Turning Up) but rarely has it seemed quite so long ago as it did this morning. The early history of the Soviet Union once seemed rather like the Big Bang -- it was thought to be crucial to understand the sub-atomic political manoeuverings and betrayals of that time, to stand any chance of understanding the subsequent history of the universe. In March 1921, were the sailors of Kronstadt deluded counter-revolutionaries or heroes of anarchism and freedom from Bolshevik oppression? Was Trotsky a ruthless, murdering oppressor or a clear-eyed revolutionary strategist? Revolutionary politics could often seem like a series of complex, overlapping blood feuds. Or a long-running soap opera.

Nobody cares much now. It's all sitting in the archives somewhere -- all the books, magazines, newspapers, flyers, posters, handouts, minutes, membership lists -- and is gradually acquiring the status of the once-urgent theological disputes of the Middle Ages. History. In retrospect, it is hilarious, and a little tragic, that so many bright young people once wasted so much time trying to turn the crank of a machine that had already had all its fuel stolen (the last of it chucked about as Molotovs in Paris 1968).

Where are they now, our old comrades? A very few have kept the faith, patiently awaiting a change in the political weather. Some have disappeared without trace. Most, like me, have ended up as middle-ranking public servants with self-limited careers, propping up local trades union branches, and eternally skeptical of "management". But some are now household names: prominent academics, journalists, broadcasters, politicians and lawyers, including a former Director of Public Prosecutions, senior members of the Labour Party, and a current Coalition minister. The Establishment, in a word.

I wonder, did any of them wake up this morning, too, and have a flashback to the days when they sat in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, plotting the downfall of capitalism? And I wonder if any of them then crossed the picket lines at the BBC, too busy and too senior, now, to lose a day's work to "workerist tokenism"?