The Soviet class system evolved in unexpected ways. Stalin declared in 1936 that the ''exploiting classes'' had been liquidated and that there now existed only three classes in society: workers, peasants (collective farm members), and intelligentsia. This obscured a more complex social reality. Although the old upper and middle classes were gone, a new class of factory and other managers assumed many of the functions and status of the old commercial and managerial class. The professions also quickly reassembled, in altered form, within the new society. Assorted white-collar elements grew in number and diversity. At the same time the Soviet Union abandoned its early egalitarian theories, introducing significant wage differentials as well as differential access to the scarce food and consumer goods. It allowed de facto class stratification to evolve based on education, occupation, income, and access to goods, as well as the new factor of Communist Party membership.

A new elite quickly developed, made up of Communist Party officials and high-ranking government, military, economic, and even artistic and cultural figures. This elite was marked both by power and by access to material goods. The latter was the special feature of the new political-social system in that many goods and services were not available for money but only by regime allocation: large private apartments, dachas (summer houses in the countryside), access to special food and other merchandise stores, use of special medical clinics, choice vacation spots, differential access to news and information, use (and later ownership) of automobiles, and other privileges. This new elite was able to ensure preferential admission to the best schools (and then jobs) for their children, thus handing down its advantages. A new, partially inherited class system of privileged and unprivileged evolved. The Soviet regime initially made an effort to conceal social stratification and the elite's privileges, but during the era Leonid Brezhnev's rule (1964-1982) it was much more open about them. The social hierarchy took on more formal characteristics, some reminiscent of the old legally defined estates of tsarist Russia. Probably the most significant of these was placement on the nomenklatura list, the list of important positions the filling of which was controlled by a party official, central or local; assignment to these positions made one by definition a part of the elite and participant in its own graduated schedules of privileges and access rights. Other signs of regime-designated hierarchy appeared, such as enterprises (usually defense-related) authorized to give their workers special benefits and the residency permits required to live in certain cities (such as Moscow), which carried with them better access to goods and other opportunities. . . .

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