#nomenklatura

[vaevictis2]

Comment faire faillite ?

[russia-libertaire]

"The third change came under Putin, as we embarked upon a new stage of Russian capitalism with obvious neo-Soviet features. The economy in the era of our third President is a curious hybrid of the free market, ideological dogma and various odds and ends. It is a model that puts Soviet ideology at the service of big-time private capital. There are an awful lot of poor, indeed destitute, people. In addition, an old phenomenon is flourishing again: the nomenklatura, a ruling elite, the great bureaucratic class that existed under the Soviet system. The economic system may have changed, but members of this elite have adapted to it. The nomenklatura would like to live the high life like the "New Russian" business elite, only their official salaries are tiny. They have no desire to return to the old Soviet system, but neither does the new system suit them ideally. The problem is that it requires law and order, something Russian society is demanding ever more insistently, and accordingly the nomenklatura has to spend most of its time trying to obviate law and order to promote its own enrichment. The result has been that Putin's new-old nomenklatura has taken corruption to heights undreamt of under the Communists or Yeltsin. It is now devouring small and middle-sized businesses, and with them the middle class. It is giving big and super-big business, the monopolies and quasi-State businesses, the opportunity to develop. (In Russia this means these are the nomenklatura's preferred source of bribes.) This is the kind of business which in Russia produces the highest and most stable returns not only for its owners and managers but also for their patrons in the State administration."

Putin's Russia, by Anna Politkovskaya

[funstealer]

Nomenklatura Studio M809 Goth Boot in Split Suede “Crosta”

[narutofashion]

Outfit for Darui

Nomenklatura Studio 2019

[sovietpostcards]

It seems wild to me that Elton John was allowed to perform in USSR?

It was wild for sure! I looked it up, it's such an interesting historical event (and I do love Elton John). Some interesting facts:

Apparently the person who invited EJ to the USSR and made it all happen was a nephew of Aleksey Kosygin (then the Premier of the USSR). Elton did want to visit the USSR and asked the embassy about it, but I'm sure that a big name would have to be involved to bypass the bureaucracy machine.

Elton gave eight concerts in total, four in Moscow and four in Leningrad. The bulk of the tickets in Moscow were distributed among nomenklatura. There was no free sale of tickets. Some tickets were privately exchanged for luxury goods like Armenian cognac or fur coats. A small fraction of tickets was available on the black market, and the price was as high as a month's salary (100-150 roubles). In Leningrad the ticket situation was a little easier (less nomenklatura in the city), but the demand was crazy. Fans flooded the city. People signed up through designated social Soviets and queued for days (and nights) in advance to have a chance at buying a ticket.

Elton brought 11 tonnes of equipment. Such quality of light and sound was unfamiliar to the Soviet people. He also brought along 30 journalists.

Here's the film about EJ's visit. And here's an audio record of one of the Moscow concerts (it was released in 2019).

[thesiltverses]

I do find it a fascinating and appropriate choice for the most central representative of the government that we see, the guy who seems to be running the show more than anyone else, including the war effort, is the Press Secretary.

this entire situation is made so completely out of propaganda and bullshit that the bullshit artist in chief is now driving the ship. the propaganda matters more than the actual events anyway, so why shouldn't the propagandist be directing things? it's kinda perfect.

I'm glad Shrue got to beat him up a little. (I kinda wish they'd kept going until his trachea collapsed, but one takes what one can get.)

Thank you!

Yeah, it was really important to us both that as the stakes got higher in the series, the final antagonistic representative of the government shouldn't be the High Adjudicator himself or some Musk-esque billionaire CEO of one of the great faiths (although we did briefly consider it). Because then you get trapped in a story about the consequences of toppling an individual tyrant, which is never what the story was about.

So instead we have Carson, who is entirely symptomatic of the hollowness, selfishness, and lack of principle at the Legislatures' heart, but who is not seeking supreme power for himself and whose toppling wouldn't meaningfully affect the power structure, since he's ultimately only a middle manager and priest-like interpreter of the emptiness overhead.

There's a fun bit in Capitalist Realism where Mark Fisher talks about Kafka's bureaucratic nightmares as an allegory for the absence of "final authority" at the heart of late capitalism, which is really what we were going for with the character, in particular the second paragraph:

The quest to reach the ultimate authority who will finally resolve K's official status can never end, because the big Other cannot be encountered in itself: there are only officials, more or less hostile, engaged in acts of interpretation about the big Other's intentions. And these acts of interpretation, these deferrals of responsibility, are all that the big Other is. If Kafka is valuable as a commentator on totalitarianism, it is by revealing that there was a dimension of totalitarianism which cannot be understood on the model of despotic command. Kafka's purgatorial vision of a bureaucratic labyrinth without end chimes with Žižek's claim that the Soviet system was an 'empire of signs', in which even the Nomenklatura themselves - including Stalin and Molotov - were engaged in interpreting a complex series of social semiotic signals. No-one knew what was required; instead, individuals could only guess what particular gestures or directives meant. What happens in late capitalism, when there is no possibility of appealing, even in principle, to a final authority which can offer the definitive official version, is a massive intensification of that ambiguity.

[germanpostwarmodern]

For the past two decades independent commissions of historians have critically researched the history of institutions like the German foreign ministry or the foreign intelligence agency, with a particular focus on the period 1933 to 1945 as well as the personnel continuities between the Nazi regime and postwar Federal Republic. In a meritorious effort an interdisciplinary team of 28 researchers did this for the building sector which on many levels played a crucial role in the regime’s rule.

The result of some 6 years of research is the present four-volume tome, published by Hirmer Verlag in 2023: it examines the preconditions for, the institutions and effects of the NS regimes planning and building activities. The authors’ approach goes far beyond the often-discussed monumental buildings and also points to the second row of civil servants who implemented and translated the orders and ideas of the Nazi nomenklatura. A striking example of it is the regional development planning in the occupied eastern territories and the Soviet Union where planning, violence, displacement and extermination went hand in hand, as Alexa Stiller and Karl Kegler convincingly document.

Another difficult part of the NS planning is the housing policy because it concerns so many different levels, including forced labor camps, ghettos. In a comprehensive collection of case studies different authors demonstrate how deeply ideology and planning were intertwined, resulting in monumental urbanism just as well as mass murder. Interestingly the third volume reaches beyond the Nazi era and focuses on the housing policies and urban plannings of the immediate postwar years, the GDR and the Federal Republic and elucidates the personnel continuities between the former regime and the two German postwar states. What’s more is the overview of the dealing with NS building between 1945 and 1975 as well as the exemplary reception of this difficult built heritage in the monument preservation.

With its broad range of topics, which I barely touched upon here, the four-volume set is dense compendium of the current state of research and at the same time demonstrates that considerable research is still required.

[roastie]

today's wikipedia rabbit hole went like this : googled "why is strictly come dancing called that" -> strictly wikipedia page -> strictly ballroom -> baz lurhmann -> romeo + juliet -> brian dennehy -> gorky park -> nomenklatura -> cadre system of the chinese communist party -> all china women's federation

[probablyasocialecologist]

The complex, planned control of a huge country required automation. After discussions that took place from 1956 to 1957 at the Institute of Economics in Moscow under the leadership of academician K. Ostrovityanov, a troubled mode of commodity production under socialism was officially adopted, contradicting Karl Marx’s writings on the practice of economic planning. State-owned enterprises worked according to the plan and, at the same time, for profit. This doctrine divided the country’s economists into Marxists (advocates of a non-commodity economy), who denied the commodity nature of production under socialism, and restorers of capitalism (promoters of a commodity economy). The ideological struggle between these economists received a new impetus with the awareness that cybernetics were needed to solve economic problems. Yet, while cyberneticists were busy solving the complex problem of automating economic management, the party nomenklatura, afraid of losing the privileges that came from planned, manual control, imposed economic “reforms” from the 1950s through the ’90s. At the same time, a shortage of goods in the consumer market was created in the short-term interests of the nomenklatura by fixing prices, which led to increased speculation and corruption. The system of equilibrium prices—a necessary feedback mechanism of the consumer market that plays an important role in optimizing the supply structure—was excluded from the economic planning process. This doomed the ruble to defeat by the dollar. The reforms aimed at giving more and more rights to enterprises, allowing them to focus on profit, intensified the chaos in public administration and ultimately led to the collapse of the country in 1991, with the restoration of capitalism and the transfer of management of the country’s development to global capitalist forces. How do we explain why the nomenklatura ended up choosing to dismantle socialism? It is necessary to note that Stalin eliminated the party maximum in 1932. According to the academic E. S. Varga, the abolition of the party maximum contributed to the disintegration of Soviet society into layers with huge differences in income and the personal enrichment of appointed party nomenklatura. Their example was followed by the bureaucracy and the lower strata, becoming expressed in careerism, intrigues against competitors, theft, and corruption. The contradiction between the officially proclaimed communist morality and the real ideology of the ruling circles led to a widening gap between the elites and the working people, and encouraged cynicism and careerism in society.

[infinitysisters]

“Moral grandiosity seems to have infected the nomenklatura class of giant corporations. It is not enough for them to ensure that the corporations make a decent profit within the framework of the law; they must claim to also be morally improving, if not actually saving, the world.

So it was with Alison Rose, the first female chief executive of the National Westminster Bank, a large British bank 39 percent owned by the British government. When first appointed to the position, she said that she would put combatting climate change at the centre of the bank’s policies and activities. Whether shareholders were delighted to hear this is unknown.

But the bank, under her direction, went further. Its subsidiary, Coutts, founded in 1692 and long banker to the rich, compiled a Stasi-like dossier on one of its customers, Nigel Farage, before “exiting” him from the bank, to use the elegant term employed by Ms. Rose. (Defenestration will come later, perhaps.)

Farage is, of course, a prominent right-wing political figure in Britain, as much detested as he is admired. There was no allegation in the dossier that he had done anything illegal; indeed, in person, he had always acted correctly and courteously toward staff. What was alleged was that his “values” did not accord with those of the bank, which were self-proclaimed as “inclusive” (though not of people with less than $3.5 million to deposit or borrow). Farage was depicted as a xenophobe and racist, mainly because he was in favour of Brexit and against unlimited immigration. That anyone could support Brexit for any reason other than xenophobia, or oppose unlimited immigration other than because he was a racist, was inconceivable to the diverse, inclusive thinkers of Coutts Bank.

Ms. Rose saw fit to leak details to the BBC about Farage’s banking affairs, claiming to believe that they were public knowledge already. She did not mention the 40-page dossier that her staff had put together, about Farage’s publicly-stated views. The Stasi would have been proud of the bank’s work, which comprehensively proved him to have anti-woke views.

Whatever else might be said about Mr. Farage, no one would describe him as a pushover, the kind of person who would take mistreatment lying down. Even the Guardian newspaper, which cannot be suspected of partiality for him, suggested that the bank and its chief executive had questions to answer.

It was not long before Ms. Rose had to beat a retreat. She issued a statement in which she said:

I have apologised to Mr. Farage for the deeply inappropriate language contained in [the dossier].

The board of the bank said that “after careful reflection [it] has concluded that it retains full confidence in Ms. Rose as CEO of the bank.”

The following day, Rose resigned, admitting to “a serious error of judgment.”

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 $𝟏 𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧.

The weasel words of Ms. Rose and the bank board are worth examination. They deflected, and I suspect were intended to deflect, the main criticism directed at Ms. Rose and the bank: namely, that the bank had been involved in a scandalous and sinister surveillance of Mr. Farage’s political views and attempted to use them as a reason to deny him banking services, all in the name of their own political views, which they assumed to be beyond criticism or even discussion. The humble role of keeping his money, lending him money, or perhaps giving him financial advice, was not enough for them: they saw themselves as the guardians of correct political policy.

It was not that the words used to describe Mr. Farage were “inappropriate,” or even that they were libelous. It is that the bank saw fit to investigate and describe him at all, at least in the absence of any suspicion of fraud, money laundering, and so forth. “The error of judgment” to which Ms. Rose referred was not that she spoke to the BBC about his banking affairs (it is not easy to believe that she did so without malice, incidentally), but that she compiled a dossier on Farage in the first place—and then “error of judgment” is hardly a sufficient term on what was a blatant and even wicked attempt at instituting a form of totalitarianism.

This raises the question of whether one can be wicked without intending to be so, for it is quite clear that Ms. Rose had no real understanding, even after her resignation, of the sheer dangerousness and depravity of what the bank, under her direction, had done.

As for the board’s somewhat convoluted declaration that “after careful consideration, it concluded that it retains full confidence,” etc., it suggests that it was involved in an exercise of psychoanalytical self-examination rather than of an objective state of affairs: absurd, in the light of Ms. Rose’s resignation within twenty-four hours. The board, no more than Ms. Rose herself, understood what the essence of the problem was. For them, if there had been no publicity, there would have been no problem: so when Mr. Farage called for the dismissal of the board en masse, I sympathised with his view.

There is, of course, the question of the competence of the bank’s management. Last year, the bank’s profits rose by 50 percent (I wish my income had risen by as much). I am not competent to comment on the solidity of this achievement: excellent profits one year followed by complete collapse the next seem not to be unknown in the banking world. But the rising profits under Ms. Rose for the four years of her direction seem to point to, at least on some level, of competence. How many equally competent persons there are who could replace her, I do not know.

Still, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐛𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬, as illustrated in this episode, is worrying. Would one trust such people if the political wind changed direction? Their views would change, but the iron moral certainty and self-belief would remain the same, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. How many meetings have I sat through in which some apparatchik has claimed to be passionately committed to a policy, only to be just as passionately committed to the precise opposite when his own masters demand a change of direction?! The Coutts story is one of how totalitarianism can flourish.”

—

Theodore Dalrymple

[chicago-geniza]

The Dispossessed is...so far a coming-of-age story about the Space Intelligentsia-Nomenklatura

[russia-libertaire]

Stalin and the Nomenklatura

'Stalin... concentrated on building up the party apparatus, which he controlled as general secretary. Most Communists had not spotted that this was where real power lay, once other political parties, institutions, and social classes had been destroyed. They were content to let Stalin assemble and classify his personnel files, not fathoming their potential. He used the information in them to appoint and advance the career of those who supported him, usually those who had joined the party during or since the civil war, and to block those who opposed him, who were not infrequently the party's old intellectuals from the days of underground struggle and early revolutionary elan. ... the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 instructed committees at all levels to keep up-to-date lists of employees suitable for particular kinds of work and for promotion within their field. These lists were amalgamated with Sovnarkom's lists of specialists. Coordinated by the party secretariat, they now enabled Stalin to oversee all appointments to responsible positions, not just within the party and state but in all walks of life. This was the start of the nomenklatura system, which in time became the most extensive and tightly controlled system of executive patronage the world had ever seen. With its help the party Central Committee became the control panel of the Soviet Union's ruling class.'

Russia and the Russians, by Geoffrey Hosking

[hyperions-fate]

It's moronic to reduce every state action and conflict to Western influence. But it's equally moronic to ignore that the ruling classes of the Western powers have, particularly over the course of the past thirty years, created a world system where unending wars, occupations, drone assassinations, kidnappings and renditions, black site torture camps, strategies of ethno-sectarian tension, and all kinds of criminality have become acceptable methods of foreign policy. Russia's elite of industrial profiteers and washed-up nomenklatura are simply the latest actors to embrace these new and innovative techniques.

[ravenkings]

one thing i’ve truly never understood about tankies is that like......neither was the USSR at the time it collapsed (and frankly a long time before) nor is the contemporary PRC anything CLOSE to what one would consider “communist.” like with the USSR there was very much a party elite (i.e. the nomenklatura) whose progeny did benefit from the privilege of being associated with said elite (and many of whom frankly stayed part of the elite into the formation of the russian federation when they bought up all the state assets for sale and then became putin’s pet oligarchs.) and like vis-à-vis contemporary china.......................honestly if you think that ANYTHING going on there is in any way, shape, or form moving forwards with “marxist” principles as opposed to some general nationalist-authoritarian ideology with capitalism on hyperdrive then like............idek what to say to you.........

[oscarjcarlisle]

In the 1920’s Isaac had distinguished himself in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution, and had some small influence on the Party. He was among the nomenklatura and used his connections in the Red Army to found a secret Paranormal Affairs division of the OGPU, later folded into the NKVD. Isaac met Stalin several times in person, and after Stalin’s accent to power Isaac demonstrated his immortality, convincing Stalin (though he needed little convincing) that magic was real and a possible threat to the Union. Thereafter Stalin committed essentially any resources Isaac requested to the Paranormal Affairs division. In actuality, magic users posed very little threat to the Soviet Union and all Isaac did was help them hide themselves from the persecution that Stalin would have levied against them.

Isaac despised Stalin, and tried several times to have him assassinated while also maintaining his good standing, but failed. Instead he did his best to mitigate the damage the rest of the NKVD was doing to the ethnic and religious minorities in Siberia.

Beryozka, the large tiger pictured here, was one of Isaac’s lieutenants and a personal friend. He was abducted from his village of reindeer Samoyedic reindeer herders in the Far North as a boy during the revolution, and fought in the Red Army, where he met Isaac. He speaks a Samoyedic dialect and is very familiar with the folklore and cryptids of Siberia, making him one of the division’s top field agents.

Beryozka is also gay and mostly closeted, Isaac was one of the first people he came out to, and while neither of them consider themselves to be in a relationship, they are very affectionate to each other. Only the other officers of the Paranormal Affairs division really know, and Isaac hand picked all of them to be fairly open-minded, anti-statist individuals, the type who’d rather let the two of them be gay together than report it to anyone because they hate the oppressive state more than they’re icked out by two guys cuddling.