Rebuilding the Soviet nomenklatura 1945-1948

The term nomenklatura has been widely used but the social and political phenomenon it refers to has never really been analyzed. At the end of World War II, the party's control over the staffing of key positions in place since the 1920s nearly came to nothing when each department of the Central Committee became subjected to the ministry that it was supposed to control - ministries having acquired autonomy during the war thanks to their efficiency and financial means. There was a turning point in 1946-1948 when (in the midst of Zhdanovism) the Central Committee tried to find the administrative means and ideological incentives to help party leaders regain the upper hand in the recruiting of officials. This initiative proved very soon to be doomed to failure in the face of a swelling corpus of nomenklaturshchiki, this cohort of leaders that eventually - as its sociological study demonstrates - acquired greater stability and an ever-increasing number of privileges during the years following Stalin's death.