Nomenklatura
The nomenklatura (Russian: номенклату́ра, Russian pronunciation: [nəmʲɪnklɐˈturə]; from Latin: nomenclatura) were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions were granted only with approval by the communist party of each country or region.
Virtually all members of the nomenklatura were members of a communist party.[1] Critics of Stalin, such as Milovan Đilas, critically defined them as a "new class".[2] Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian, claimed that the nomenklatura system mainly reflected a continuation of the old Tsarist regime, as many former Tsarist officials or "careerists" joined the Bolshevik government during and after the Russian Civil War[3] of 1917–1922.
The nomenklatura formed a de facto elite of public powers in the former Eastern Bloc; one may compare them to the Western establishment[4] holding or controlling both private and public powers (for example, in media, finance, trade, industry, the state and institutions).[5]
Individuals with a nomenklatura background have continued to dominate economic and political life in Russia since the end of the Cold War. According to one 2022 estimate, 60% of elites in the Vladimir Putin regime had nomenklatura backgrounds.[6]
Etymology
The Russian term is derived from the Latin nomenclatura, meaning a system of names.[citation needed]
The term was popularized in the West by the Soviet dissident Michael Voslenski, who in 1970 wrote a book titled Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class (Russian: Номенклату́ра. Госпо́дствующий класс Сове́тского Сою́за, tr. Nomenklatúra. Gospódstvuyushchiy klass Sovétskovo Soyúza).Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag
See also
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Nomenklatura Portal |
- Apparatchik
- Bolibourgeoisie
- Criticisms of communist party rule
- Mazhory
- New Soviet man
- New class
- Partmaximum
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- ↑ (1998) Elites, crises, and the origins of regimes. Rowman & Littlefield, 128. ISBN 0-8476-9023-7.
- ↑ Wasserstein, Bernard (2007). Barbarism and civilization: a history of Europe in our time. Oxford University Press, 509. ISBN 978-0-19-873074-3.
- ↑ Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, p.444.
- ↑ Alan Barcan, Sociological theory and educational reality (1993) p. 150
- ↑ See also: (1965) The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry Into Community Problems, New sociology library. Cass & Company.
- ↑ (2022)Long Soviet shadows: the nomenklatura ties of Putin elites. Post-Soviet Affairs 38 (4): 329–348.
- This article contains material from the Library of Congress Country Studies, which are United States government publications in the public domain.
- A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former). Chapter 7 - The Communist Party. Nomenklatura.
Further reading
- Voslensky, Michael, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1984, ISBN 0385176570.
- Russian original was written in 1970, distributed by samizdat, and eventually printed as Восленский М.С., Номенклатура. Господствующий класс Советского Союза. М., 1991.
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