Nomenklatura

The nomenklatura were a category of administrators within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key positions in the bureaucracy.

Quotes

 * Let me examine the alleged "distinction from capitalism" characteristic of the Soviet Union and see whether it isn't a distinction from a certain stage of capitalism rather than from capitalism as a whole. The determining factor in analyzing the class nature of a society is not whether the means of production are the private property of the capitalist class or are state-owned, but whether the means of production ... are monopolized and alienated from the direct producers. The Soviet Government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise. ... "Bureaucratic state socialism" is an irrational expression behind which there exists the real economic relation of state-capitalist-exploiter to the propertyless exploited.
 * Raya Dunayevskaya, "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society" (1941), in Russia: From Proletarian Revolution to State-Capitalist Counter-Revolution (2017), p. 210


 * Understandably, the more the American dream turned to nightmare, the more people were attracted to the Russian alternative of a planned economy - insulated from the vagaries of the market, yet capable of feats of construction every bit as awesome as the skyscrapers of New York or the mass-produced cars of Henry Ford. All the totalitarian state asked in return was complete control of every aspect of life. Only in your dreams were you free from its intrusion, and even there the omnipresent demigod figure of the Leader was liable to intrude. The justification for this abolition of individual freedom was equality: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, as the slogan put it. The aim was not just rapid industrialization; it was the 'liquidation' of the bourgeoisie and other property-owning classes. Yet, as George Orwell would later observe, on the Soviet 'Animal Farm' some animals turned out to be more equal than others. It did not take long for a 'new class' (as the dissident Yugoslav Milovan Djilas later called it) to spring up, composed of the elite functionaries of the totalitarian state. Their control over every aspect of economic life and their freedom from any kind of independent scrutiny or popular accountability made it easy to justify and pay for a whole range of Party privileges; the nomenklatura were also in position to enrich themselves unofficially through peculation and corruption.
 * Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 197


 * These examples show that the factories which have fallen into the clutches of such degenerates are socialist enterprises only in name, that in fact they have become capitalist enterprises by which these persons enrich themselves. The relationship of such persons to the workers has turned into one between exploiters and exploited, between oppressors and oppressed.
 * Mao Zedong, On Khrushchov’s Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World (1964)


 * Some leading collective-farm functionaries and their gangs steal and speculate at will, freely squander public money and fleece the collective farmers. ... Collective farms under the control of such functionaries virtually become their private property. Such men turn socialist collective economic enterprises into economic enterprises of new kulaks. There are often people in their superior organizations who protect them. Their relationship to the collective farmers has likewise become that of oppressors to oppressed, of exploiters to exploited. Are not such neo-exploiters who ride on the backs of the collective farmers one-hund-red-per-cent neo-kulaks?
 * Mao Zedong, On Khrushchov’s Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World (1964)