One should not be surprised that the nomenklatura shed few tears over the collapse of the Soviet system. Deprived of his position, an individual lost everything and became marginal. Like before, its boundless control over society was connected to positions.
After Stalin’s death the systematic execution of leading cadres ended, but the institutional situation of the Communist Party nomenklatura did not change. But it was not a carrier but the leader of the dictatorship implemented by the party’s leaders and from 1929 to 1953-by Stalin personally. The nomenklatura clan was a nervous system created by the Bolsheviks as a state-commune, and it exercised rigid control over all civic-political and trade union organizations that were also built according to the principle of “democratic centralism”. In actuality, this clan (not class) of leaders had absolute control over its subordinates, yet was totally without rights vis-a-vis their superiors. This multinational union state was ruled by the Soviet Communist Party nomenklatura, later identified by the Soviet emigre Mikhail Voslensky as a new privileged class. The creation (also by means of terror) of the political dictatorship’s socioeconomic foundations made every citizen materially dependent on the state. The political dictatorship instituted by the Bolsheviks in the first months after the October coup was initially maintained only through terror. Since the state could satisfy only minimal, survival, needs, communist construction was carried out under the guise of building the socioeconomic foundations of socialism. Under these circumstances, nationalized (socialized) ownership of the means of production remained private but concentrated in the hands of several people, who ruled the state party.Īs Soviet propagandists declared, the building of communism was supposed to secure the distribution of material and cultural benefits among the members of society in accordance with their needs. Communist Party committees were created according to the principle of “democratic centralism,” with the result that all power over society, the state, and the party was in the hands of a “chosen few,” namely the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)/All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)/CPSU. The Bolshevik party was building a “bright future” for Soviet citizens under the slogan of liquidating private ownership of the means of production. In 1932-1934 Stalin broke the backbone of the freedom- loving Ukrainian peasantry and the national intelligentsia that had emerged from the peasant milieu, and in 1937 he made special efforts to destroy the entire Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine during the mass terror. For several decades the politically active segment of Ukrainian society, its intellectual potential, was destroyed in a systematic and deliberate fashion. Ukraine should also be described as a postgenocidal country. Not coincidentally, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are referred to as postcommunist or post-Soviet ones. But to a decisive degree only the recent past influences contemporary political, socioeconomic, and cultural processes. Ukrainian history started being depicted as a battlefield between the Western and Eurasian civilizations, and Catholic and Eastern Orthodox religious world views.
In an attempt to free their mentality of Marxist-Leninist postulates, our intellectual elite jumped at the idea of a civilized approach proposed by the British historian Arnold J. Therefore, let us examine the evolution of the Ukrainian political elite. The state is a category linked primarily to the political elite. This thesis should be developed by stressing not the differences but the common features of these phenomena, namely the collapse of a civilization based on a doctrinal rejection of private ownership.Ī socioeconomic order is a category that is directly linked to a population, a people, and a nation. INDEPENDENT UKRAINE RULED BY THE SOVIET-COMMUNIST PARTY NOMENKLATURAĮarlier I mentioned that the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet system were different phenomena, but in the public’s mind they merged into one.