ABSTRACT

This chapter describes a research project which is concerned with the fate of party functionaries who were a specific social group in the former USSR, i.e. the nomenclature. The existence of the nomenclature in the former social structure of Soviet society has been acknowledged by a plethora of researchers. The interviewees were former functionaries of one city district committee in the centre of St.Petersburg. People belonging to the corps of party functionaries, including party district workers, came to their positions as a result of a process of ‘negative selection’. Several interviewees emphasized the importance of having a close familiarity of the work organization as well as one’s own work plus responsibility and honesty, which differentiated positively the former apparatus people from the new breed of bureaucrats who came in with Yeltsin. For many party functionaries the events of August 1991 were, however, a shock, followed by fears that ‘all communists will be put up against the wall’.