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 signs

Eventually the name nomenklatura would become a pejorative for stolid bureaucrats.

visceral distaste for the elites, for castes, culture and the nomenklatura. Do we have to choose between the moronic masses and the arrogant privileged classes

In a ‘bureaucratic socialist regime’ like the USSR, it is the intelligentsia that is liable to occupy this position. It shares certain advantages with members of the nomenklatura (the bureaucracy of the single party), but it is a class distinct from the latter.

the most dangerous place to be at the time of the terrible 1930s purges in the Soviet Union was at the top of the nomenklatura

dispensing with the non-Russian republics would have been to destroy much of the party nomenklatura

The Stalinist purges of high party echelons relied on this fundamental betrayal: the accused were effectively guilty insofar as they, as the members of the new nomenklatura, betrayed the Revolution.