"Nomenklatura were people within the Soviet Union who held various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions were granted only with approval by the Party."
"Virtually all members of the Nomenklatura were members of the Communist Party. Richard Pipes said that the Nomenklatura system mainly reflected a continuation of the old Tsarist regime, as many former Tsarist officials or 'careerists' joined the Bolshevik government."
"The Nomenklatura formed a de facto elite of public powers in the Soviet Union; one may compare them to the Western establishment holding or controlling both private and public powers (for example, in media, finance, trade, industry, the state and institutions)."
"The Nomenklatura referred to the Communist Party's power to make appointments to key positions throughout the governmental system, as well as throughout the Party's own hierarchy."
"Coextensive with the Nomenklatura were patron-client relations. Officials who had the authority to appoint individuals to certain positions cultivated loyalties among those whom they appointed."
"The patron promoted the interests of clients in return for their support. Powerful patrons, such as the members of the Politburo, had many clients. An official could be both a client (in relation to a higher-level patron) and a patron (to other, lower-level officials)."
"The Soviet power structure essentially consisted of groups of vassals (clients) who had an overlord (the patron). The higher the patron, the more clients the patron had. By promoting his clients' careers, the patron could advance his own power."
"The Nomenklatura system arose early in Soviet history. Vladimir Lenin wrote that appointments were to take the following criteria into account: reliability, political attitude, qualifications, and administrative ability."
"All of the 2 million members of the Nomenklatura system understood that they held their positions only as a result of a favor bestowed on them by a superior official in the party and that they could easily be replaced if they manifested disloyalty to their patron."
"Promotion in the bureaucratic-political hierarchy was the only path to power. The most important criterion for promotion in this hierarchy was approval from one's supervisors, who evaluated their subordinates on the basis of political criteria."
"Milovan Đilas, a critic of Stalin, called the Nomenklatura the 'new class', and he claimed that it was seen by ordinary citizens as a bureaucratic elite that enjoyed special privileges and had supplanted the earlier wealthy capitalist élites."
"'New class' is used as a term by critics of countries that followed the Soviet-type Communism to describe the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats and Communist party functionaries which arose in these states."
"The theory of the new class can be considered to oppose the theories of certain ruling Communists, such as Joseph Stalin, who argued that their revolutions and/or social reforms would result in the extinction of any ruling class as such."
"It was Đilas' observation as a member of a Communist government that Party members stepped into the role of ruling class, a problem which he believed should be corrected through revolution [which would have, of course, resulted in the creation of yet another new class...]."
"Đilas posited that the new class' specific relationship to the means of production was one of collective political control, and that the new class' property form was political control."
"For Đilas, the new class not only seeks expanded material reproduction to politically justify its existence to the working class but also seeks expanded reproduction of political control as a form of property in itself."
"Đilas used this argument about property forms to indicate why the new class sought parades, marches and spectacles despite this activity lowering the levels of material productivity."
"As the new class suborns all other interests to its own security, it freely executes and purges its own members in order to achieve its major goal of security as a ruling class."
"After security has been achieved, the new class pursues a policy of moderation towards its own members, effectively granting material rewards and freedom of thought and action within the new class, so long as this freedom is not used to undermine the rule of the new class."
"Finally, Đilas predicted a period of economic decline, as the political future of the new class was consolidated around a staid programme of corruption and self-interest at the expense of other social classes."
"A bureaucratic collectivist state owns the means of production, while the surplus or profit is distributed among an elite party bureaucracy (Nomenklatura), rather than among the working class."
"It is the bureaucracy—not the workers, or the people in general—which controls the economy and the state. Thus, the system is not truly socialist, but it is not capitalist either."
"Oligarchical collectivism was Orwell's fictionalized conceptualization of bureaucratic collectivism, where Big Brother and the Inner Party form the nucleus of a hierarchical organization of society, only concerned with total domination by the Party."
"[The Eastern Bloc] form of bureaucratic collectivism is supposed to integrate various sectors of society, such as labor unions, corporations, and government organizations, in order to keep contradictions in the economy from developing into a general meltdown."
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