To quote from a bourgeois work, There Is No Freedom Without Bread! by Constantine Pleshakov, 2009, pp. 60-61:
>The world of luxury [Soviet and Eastern European officials] created for themselves was still a far cry from that of Imelda Marcos or John F. Kennedy and their wealth was not hereditary or even for life, because a leader ousted from power lost most of the material benefits the day he as sacked, and every person in Romania knew that the Ceaușescus' prosperity was exactly as lasting as the orchids they imported.
>These were elites whose dacha furniture had metal tags nailed to it, so that when the person fell out with the leader or retired, an inventory team could count and account for every chair he left to his successor (in 2006 in the United States, a severance package for a "failed" chief executive of Home Depot was $210 million). Moguls drove around in Soviet-made Chaika limousines, their windows covered by arrogant curtains, but their children could not inherit them. Here, privileges were like fiefs and had no monetary backup: you lose power, you lose its spoils.
>In 1968, the conqueror of Warsaw, Marshal Rokossovsky, diagnosed with terminal cancer, begged a doctor to send him to the subtropical Crimea on the Black Sea, to the Ministry of Defense dacha: "I know that I can die at any moment, please make my last year good." The doctor counterfeited the paperwork, and the retired war hero got clean bedsheets, free meals, and a room with a view. When one of the most powerful men in Bulgaria, a secretary of the party's Central Committee, had a fling, he asked a subordinate—in his case, a writer, for the secretary supervised arts and literature—to lend him his apartment for the night because he couldn't take his date to a hotel: the management would have reported him to his very own Central Committee, which would have been only too happy to shred him to pieces for "moral decadence." In principle, Eastern European elites were as shackled by the rules as were their subjects, and, doubtlessly, whispered the names of freedoms they would've wanted.
>The greatest spymaster of Eastern Europe, Markus Wolf, chief of East German intelligence for thirty years, wrote in his memoir: "People who could leave the country were greatly envied by the population at large; travel fever was acute in this country of nontravelers. I had traveled less widely for pleasure than most middle-class American college students, which is something that Western commentators tend to forget when they talk about the lives of the members of the nomenklatura. For all my privileges, I had never visited the Prado, the British Museum, or the Louvre . . . I was privileged to have a fine apartment, a car and a driver, and pleasant holidays at the invitation of other secret services in the Eastern bloc. But these were always connected to my job and status; in the end, the wider world was sealed off to me, too."
Not to mention that the "nomenclatura" was not the capitalist class, which exploits labor and engages in mass layoffs whenever the recessions and depressions inherent in capitalism set in.
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On the subject of Soviet elites:
To quote from a bourgeois work, There Is No Freedom Without Bread! by Constantine Pleshakov, 2009, pp. 60-61:
>The world of luxury [Soviet and Eastern European officials] created for themselves was still a far cry from that of Imelda Marcos or John F. Kennedy and their wealth was not hereditary or even for life, because a leader ousted from power lost most of the material benefits the day he as sacked, and every person in Romania knew that the Ceaușescus' prosperity was exactly as lasting as the orchids they imported.
>These were elites whose dacha furniture had metal tags nailed to it, so that when the person fell out with the leader or retired, an inventory team could count and account for every chair he left to his successor (in 2006 in the United States, a severance package for a "failed" chief executive of Home Depot was $210 million). Moguls drove around in Soviet-made Chaika limousines, their windows covered by arrogant curtains, but their children could not inherit them. Here, privileges were like fiefs and had no monetary backup: you lose power, you lose its spoils.
>In 1968, the conqueror of Warsaw, Marshal Rokossovsky, diagnosed with terminal cancer, begged a doctor to send him to the subtropical Crimea on the Black Sea, to the Ministry of Defense dacha: "I know that I can die at any moment, please make my last year good." The doctor counterfeited the paperwork, and the retired war hero got clean bedsheets, free meals, and a room with a view. When one of the most powerful men in Bulgaria, a secretary of the party's Central Committee, had a fling, he asked a subordinate—in his case, a writer, for the secretary supervised arts and literature—to lend him his apartment for the night because he couldn't take his date to a hotel: the management would have reported him to his very own Central Committee, which would have been only too happy to shred him to pieces for "moral decadence." In principle, Eastern European elites were as shackled by the rules as were their subjects, and, doubtlessly, whispered the names of freedoms they would've wanted.
>The greatest spymaster of Eastern Europe, Markus Wolf, chief of East German intelligence for thirty years, wrote in his memoir: "People who could leave the country were greatly envied by the population at large; travel fever was acute in this country of nontravelers. I had traveled less widely for pleasure than most middle-class American college students, which is something that Western commentators tend to forget when they talk about the lives of the members of the nomenklatura. For all my privileges, I had never visited the Prado, the British Museum, or the Louvre . . . I was privileged to have a fine apartment, a car and a driver, and pleasant holidays at the invitation of other secret services in the Eastern bloc. But these were always connected to my job and status; in the end, the wider world was sealed off to me, too."
Not to mention that the "nomenclatura" was not the capitalist class, which exploits labor and engages in mass layoffs whenever the recessions and depressions inherent in capitalism set in.