Abstract
For Pareto, revolutions were above all a matter of elite change.1 And for many there was a revolution in this sense in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, with changes in government and a shift towards pluralist and democratic politics throughout the region. Several years on, the change looks less decisive. Former communist parties returned to power in Hungary, in Poland, in Lithuania, and in Bulgaria. In Romania, there was a change of leadership but less clearly a change of political regime. Former communists maintained their position in Serbia and in Slovakia, and, with a change of nomenclature, in most of former Soviet Central Asia. In Russia itself the communist party left office, but it revived in early 1993, polled strongly in the elections in December of that year, and was by far the largest party in the Duma elections that took place in December 1995. The Russian public, for their part, remained committed to the concept of a USSR, they rated their political system less highly than the one they had experienced in the Soviet years, and in any case they thought the communists were still in power.2
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Notes
See Vilfredo Pareto, Treatise on General Sociology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1935).
David Lane and Cameron Ross, ‘The Changing Composition and Structure of the Political Elites’, in David Lane (ed.), Russia in Transition (London: Longman, 1995), p.68.
See Thomas A. Baylis, ‘Plus 9a change? Transformation and Continuity Amongst East European Elites’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 27, no.3 (September 1994), pp.315–28.
See for instance Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class (London: Bodley Head, 1984).
For a discussion of the changing composition of the Central Committee and of what Robert Daniels described as the ‘job slot’ system, see Evan Mawdsley, ‘Portrait of a Changing Elite: CPSU Central Committee Full Members 1939–1990’, in Stephen White (ed.), New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp.l91–206.
See T. H. Rigby, Political Elites in the USSR (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990), Chapter 4; V.G. Sirotkin, ‘Nomenklatura (zametki istorika)’, Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1990, no.6, pp. 12–26; T.P. Kozhikhina and Yu.Yu. Figatner, ‘Sovetskaya nomenklatura: stanovlenie, mekhanizmy deistviya’, Voprosy istorii, 1993, no.7, pp.25–38; and O.T. Dzhavlanov and V.A. Mikheev, Nomenklatura: evolyutsiya ot-bora (Moscow: Luch, 1993).
See for instance Mervyn Matthews, Privilege in the Soviet Union (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978); and H’ya Zemtsov, Chastnaya zhizn’ sovetskoi elity (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1986). The party’s own investigation into privilege was reported to the Central Committee in December 1990: Materialy Plenuma Tsen-tral’nogo Komiteta KPSS 10–11 dekabrya 1990 goda (Moscow: Politizdat, 1991), pp.86–95.
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Kryshtanovskaya, O., White, S. (1998). From Power to Property: The Nomenklatura in Post-Communist Russia. In: Gill, G. (eds) Elites and Leadership in Russian Politics. International Council for Central and East European Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26573-2_5
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