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by CoastalCoder 1433 days ago
Could you explain what a "nomenclature family" is? I haven't heard that term before.
2 comments

Soviet Union was a state where most people didn’t have access to goods, fresh food, fine education, sturdy clothes or footwear.

Nomenclature was a very small class of people with privileged exclusive access.

It’s either families with relatively short ties to Kremlin: people with high positions, spies, diplomats, nuclear scientists, state journalists, pro-government writers.

Or people like heads of grocery chains, import shops who controlled access to goods and clothes.

People like these could put their children at most successful universities without exams, buy them Western cars and spoil with caviar while most people stood at the queues for hours to get sour milk or bones for soup.

A family of Soviet bureaucrats, possibly in more than one generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura