Word: nachalstvo
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...peak of the social hierarchy is an elite, known as the nachalstvo (roughly, the Establishment), which includes perhaps a million people. This privileged group consists of a ruling class -those wielding power in state, party and military circles-and an upper class, comprising party-favored intellectuals, artists and top athletes. Whether they enter this exclusive club via the committee room, the Bolshoi stage or the hockey rink, members of the nachalstvo are assured of hidden perks denied to ordinary citizens...
...theorists inscrutably justify such inequality as a "non-antagonistic contradiction." Others, including some Marxist dissidents, claim that the system has not really created an elite class, since political power and its direct perquisites cannot be inherited. But there is one flaw in that argument: the ease with which the nachalstvo can arrange good educations and careers for their offspring tends to perpetuate their privileged status. Despite the historical gulf that separates them from the pre-revolutionary regime, the Communist elitists enjoy their prerogatives as unabashedly-and guard them as jealously-as their tsarist predecessors ever...
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