Word: nomenklatura
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...personal reward for being Gromyko's adviser was that I became a member of the nomenklatura hierarchy. This is a list of the most important posts in the party, government administration and other institutions. These positions are filled by direct party appointment or with party approval. Nomenklatura is a caste system that applies only to the elite class. Its many levels enjoy varying degrees of privilege according to rank. For Politburo members there is no limit or restriction on privileges. Below this level the grading structure begins. The Central Committee defines the place of anyone eligible for inclusion...
Solidarity therefore resolved to overhaul the country's crumbling economic system and to share with the government in running it. "We wanted to make the authorities accountable to society," explained Bronislaw Geremek, Walesa's chief theoretician. As a start, the union decided to attack the corrupt and inefficient nomenklatura system, under which the government chose plant managers not for their skills but for their loyalty to the party. The union's stratagem: force the government to approve a system of self-management for the factories that would allow workers' councils to choose their own managers. Even Walesa was skeptical about...
...anything, centralized bureaucracy is more pervasive than ever in the U.S.S.R. The present leaders have refined and extended the quintessentially Soviet notion of nomenklatura (nomenclature). That is, the Communist Party leadership prerogative to dispense patronage and designate virtually every important manager in every sector of society-from industry to academe, from culture to science, from the customs service to the diplomatic corps. The result, concludes Historian Billington, is "bureaucratic state socialism," in which the party has a permanent monopoly on power...
...agency and staff. These full-time party professionals, numbering some 200,000, exercise broad supervisory powers over their governmental opposites. The party's chief means of maintaining primacy over the nation's other bureaucracies, including the trade unions and police as well as the government, is the power of nomenklatura, the hiring and firing of officials outside the party apparatus. Brezhnev would have also had to secure the loyalty of a second source of power?those groups that exercise an informal influence on the Politburo. The most important of these is the coterie of party officials based outside Moscow; they...