But that's the key point: these people weren't insiders, not before gaining their positions, and they didn't even really accumulate wealth. They gained benefits from their position, sure, but little of that was attached to their position -- rather, to their office, and when that office lapsed, so did those privileges. When Khrushchev was removed from office, he got a small pension (500 rubles/mo.) and a house + cottage in which to spend his retirement, and even that was considered relatively comfortable.

So what did they accumulate? Few acquired power for life; none acquired significant wealth, or a power base independent from the party-state. Even after the end of the union, it was not the former nomenklatura who became new oligarchs: by and large it was the security services and their affiliates who were able to feed on the corpse.

You're right to critique how I described class in the previous message, but what I was trying to accumulate was essentially the above. It's not perfect, but I think this is very much a situation where it's important to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I would far rather live in a society where my leaders were once workers like me, raised in the same way, and all men were subject to the same basic economic guarantees. What we live in today is the rule of oligarchs, and it'd be a big step up to merely suffer the rule of bureaucrats.