What is the bureaucratic oligarchy of the Party? What place does it occupy in the structure of Soviet society? Why does it hold a privileged position? How does it govern the State and the population? The official view was and is that after the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’, there effectively exist three nonantagonistic classes in Russia: the workers, the peasants of the kolhozes, and the employees of the State. In fact, these latter have never formed a homogeneous class. For on the one hand there are ordinary employees, members of the Party, who are not invested with any power, who govern nothing and nobody, who cannot give orders or make decisions which have the force of law. On the other hand, there are functionaries who are invested with authority and who rule enterprises, institutions, whole branches of the economy, politics, culture, daily life and the State itself in its internal and external relations—not to speak of the Party which directs and organizes all these. They can give orders and make decisions which have the force of law. They form the ruling stratum of this socialist society, which dominates every domain of life and monopolizes
The function of this was in reality to draw a line of demarcation between the bureaucratic leadership of the Party and all the other groups in the population. Secrecy assured this leadership isolation from the external world and stability internally, so that its personnel could be sheltered from accidents, fluctuations or intrusions deriving from uncontrolled or unreliable elements outside. This privileged status of the dominant stratum found its expression in the revival of the Tsarist system of the nomenclatura—that is, the establishment of lists of selected individuals, invested with the supreme confidence of the Party, for whom were reserved all responsible positions in the Party and the State.
The members of the nomenclatura were thus given an institutionalized position of privilege over the toiling masses. The bureaucratic oligarchy of the Party thereby freed itself from the public opinion of the workers and became accustomed to despising them. Its activity unfolded within a separate and autonomous sphere, beyond the control of either society or the Party. This oligarchy naturally sought to affirm its unavowed juridical and material privileges, by a tacit use of goods which essentially belonged to the administration itself. Among the advantages which it thus enjoyed were high salaries, ‘envelopes’ passed from hand to hand, allocation of food unfindable in shops, private canteens, large and sometimes luxuriously appointed apartments, villas with gardens, flowers, tennis courts, swimming-pools, cars and personal chauffeurs, and sumptuous rest-houses.
Where are the deeper reasons to be found for the fact that the working masses of Russia, whom the Communist Party had swept along a particular road of transition to socialism unforeseen by Marxism, had in the years after Lenin’s death become so quickly subordinated to the unlimited power of the top group of the party bureaucracy, that the organizational principle of society, democratic centralism, laid down as it was in the statutes of cpsu(b), had not been developed further? Why did the centralism of the Party leadership devour democracy and preserve it only outwardly, purely formally?
The reasons lie in the ‘Russian path of transition to socialism’ which arose from the revolutionary situation of 1917. This enormous, economically backward country whose population in its overwhelming majority was peasant and petty bourgeois, had deposed its old rulers because of their degeneration and impotence which had brought about a condition of economic ruin, and was now confronted with incredible difficulties. In order quickly to restore and expand the economy, to subdue the resistance of the reactionary rural bourgeoisie, to hold out alone, encircled by powerful and dangerous capitalist countries, gigantic centralized and organized exertions as well as tremendous material