Inside the Nomenklatura

Abstract

This chapter examines the stabilization of hierarchies and the changing balance between co-optation and political exclusion after the war. It looks into the subsidence of the Bolsheviks' fixation on the class struggle and former practices of class discrimination that were progressively dismantled when Joseph Stalin declared the ceasing of class exploitation and the inclusion of “nonantagonistic” classes in the population by mid-1930s. It also describes the Soviet regional party cadres in the late 1940s that still inhabited a resolutely ideological world. The chapter investigates the state of affairs in Russia that reflected an increasingly bitter ideological conflict with the West. It also talks about the massive campaign against “theft of socialist property,” campaigns against “speculation,” and against the enlargement of private plots on collective farms.