Staffing USSR incorporated: The origins of the nomenklatura system

Abstract

basic constituent elements of the Soviet socio-political order. The essence of thlis order has been the attempt consciously to manage every area of socially relevant activity, outside a closely circumscribed private sphere, through an array of hierarchically structured formal organisations, all coordinated and directed at the centre and at successively lower levels by the apparatus of the Communist Party. Although some subsidiary use is made of market mechanisms, and mass participation and initiative in support of official programmes are encouraged, both chance and opposition have been seen as abhorrent to such an order, and for very good reason. For both chance and opposition are disruptive not only of the specific purposes of those managing the society, but of the very pattern of assumptions and relationships on which their capacity to manage it depends, and therewith both their legitimating goal of 'communism' and their own safety, power and privileges. It is not surprising, therefore, that such apparently inoffensive terms as stikhiinost' (spontaneity), samotek (undirected movement) and liberalizm (tolerance) have been imbued with such deprecatory force in the Soviet lexicon. This abhorrence of chance and opposition has always been particularly obvious in the sphere of leadership and personnel policy. As Lenin remarked at the XI Congress in 1922, 'if the Central Committee is deprived of the right to direct [rasporyazhat'sya] the allocation of personnel, it will be unable to direct [napravlyat'] policy'.1 That Lenin should have taken such a position was completely consistent with his prescriptions for the party as a centralised, disciplined organisation of professional revolutionaries, and its hegemonic, 'vanguard' role vis-a-vis the working class and its organisations, prescriptions which had long marked him and his Bolshevik followers off from the rest of Russian Marxism, however imperfectly they may have been achieved in practice prior to the Revolution. Nevertheless, while these prescriptions do lie at the root of the