The End of Privilege?

Abstract

Virtually everyone who has an interest in Russia would now readily concede that Soviet society possesses an easily recognisable elite. This fact was not always widely appreciated. The existence of elitism in a rigorously ‘socialist’ society was for decades carefully concealed in official pronouncement. And so loud was the blare of Marxist-Leninist propaganda, so inaccessible was Soviet society to objective study, that many people in the West were inclined to accept, in large measure, Soviet protestations of egalitarianism. Indeed, such was the lack of awareness of the phenomenon that Milovan Djilas’s interesting, though unoriginal, book on the so-called ‘new class’, created something of a sensation when it appeared in 1957.