Documentation of the Communist Nomenclature in the Polish Peoples Republic. An Outline of the Problem
Documentation of the Communist Nomenclature in the Polish Peoples Republic. An Outline of the Problem

Summary/Abstract: Personnel policy was one of the main instruments of power employed by the Communist authorities. One of its most prominent elements was the ‘nomenclature’, system established exactly as in the Soviet model. Formally, it was an index of managerial positions in the state decided by appropriate levels of the communist party. In practice, the result was a Communist elite – a closed, self-reproducing caste which established a monopoly of social, political and economic power. They would not be subject to scrutiny from any lower body and would enjoy multiple benefits as a result of their place in the hierarchy. The nomenclature was combined with a highly-regulated proces of information circulation. Therefore, the Communist party produced multitudes of documents related to the nomenclature system. After 1990, they were stored in the state archives and became a great source for studies of the Communist’s personnel policies, especially those of the Communist nomenclature. The article is an attempt at a synthetic study of the documentation and information included there that are direct results of the nomenclature’s existence in the context of both the ideological as well as the realistic implications for the Communist system in Poland.

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