Nomenklatura
노멘클라투라
The list of posts that could not be filled without party committee approval, and by extension the stratum of officials who filled them. Rule through appointment was the secretariat's key mechanism for controlling the party, and the word later hardened into a sociological name for the Soviet ruling stratum.
In depth
Formation of the system
Nomenklatura is an administrative term from the Latin for a list. In the USSR the word named the list of posts that could not be filled without the approval of a party committee. The system began when the secretariat systematized personnel work in the early 1920s, classifying posts by grade and specifying which level of party body confirmed each grade.
Its political meaning appeared at once. When appointments in the party organization are settled by the confirmation of a higher body rather than by election, lower organizations become dependent on higher ones, and the composition of congress delegations is affected in turn. It was this connection that led oppositions in the inner-party disputes of the 1920s to make the secretariat's power of appointment their target.
The nomenklatura as a social layer
Over time the word came to name people rather than a list. The stratum of officials who circulated through nomenklatura posts enjoyed distinct conditions in pay, housing, medical care, education, and access to consumer goods. Privilege took the form of access rather than ownership, which is what made the characterization of this layer difficult.
Analysis of it was argued over on the left for decades. Trotsky defined it as a bureaucratic caste rather than a class, stressing that it stood in no relation of ownership to the means of production. Theories of state capitalism and of bureaucratic collectivism held conversely that a layer with effective command over the disposal of the surplus must be treated as a ruling class. Voslensky's Nomenklatura (1980) is the representative work describing the layer as the ruling class of the USSR.
Dissolution and conversion
Under perestroika in the late 1980s the legitimacy of the nomenklatura system became a matter of open dispute, and the introduction of contested elections eroded its core. When the clause granting the CPSU a monopoly of power was deleted in 1990 its institutional basis disappeared as well.
The layer itself did not disappear. In the privatization of state assets after the Soviet collapse a substantial part of the former official stratum converted into owners and managers of enterprises, and that path became a central question in analysing the political economy of Russia and other successor states. The conversion of privilege through access into privilege through ownership supplied the nomenklatura debate with retrospective evidence.