THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC 477sole access to the fixed list of the most influential and remunerative appointments - the
nomenklatura. State and party organs at regional, city, and district level followed the
same procedures as their seniors in central government. To establish this monopoly in
the first place required considerable ruthlessness and blood-letting. Thereafter, the
machine could be kept running with a minimum of overt violence. All posts were filled
by the Party's nominees, trained in the Party's own academies, and kept in check by the
security services and by the threat of periodic purges. It involved a network of political
patronage on a scale unthinkable in pluralist societies. In theory at least, no one capable
of making a decision which might be hostile to the communist Establishment could ever
reach a position to make it.
The whole governmental system was structured to prevent all forms of independent
initiative. On the principle of 'dual power', all offices of state were 'shadowed' by paral-
lel offices within the apparatus of the Party. Hence the Council of State and the Council
of Ministers were subordinated to the Party's Political Bureau; the President of the
Republic and the Prime Minister took their orders from the First Secretary; the Minister
of Foreign Affairs answered to the head of the Party's Department of Foreign Affairs; and
the village mayor to the secretary of the Party's village committee. The 'Socialist state'
was nothing more than the administrative branch of the ruling Communist Party.
Further, individual members of the nomenklatura were encouraged to hold positions
simultaneously in both State and Party. The leading ministers were frequently also party
secretaries or members of the Party's Central Committee. Party organs habitually nomin-
ated comrades from their own number to run the states offices dependent on them.
Lastly, every rung of the Party ladder was formally required to execute the orders of the
rungs above. Every Party Member was sworn to obey the instructions of his superiors.
As a result, the situation was achieved where the Party dictated to the state; the Political
Bureau dictated to the Party as a whole; and the First Secretary, once established, dictated
to the Political Bureau. Democratic Centralism involved an arrangement where central-
ization was pushed to extremes, and where democracy ran in reverse.
Despite the Party's open adherence to the theory of the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat',
the central institution of that dictatorship, the nomenklatura, remained strictly secret. In
fact, in terms of the Polish Constitution, which guaranteed the equality of citizens, it was
strictly illegal, thereby confirming that the Constitution and the legal order were conve-
nient fictions. As reorganized in 1972, the Polish nomenklatura was operated by the
cadres department of the central Party Secretariat, and consisted of two separate lists -
one, a list of reserved posts in the state and party bureaucracies, the other, a list of people
exclusively entitled to fill those posts. The former was known... the latter was never
revealed, but it was thought to contain between two and three hundred thousand names
from every conceivable walk of life. These were the dictators, the self-appointed bureau-
crats who collectively controlled the means of production, the agencies of coercion, and
the media of information, of the entire country. In practice, since they appointed the key
secretaries of the Party's regional, city, and rural committees, they also controlled the
corresponding nomenklatura lists of the lower levels. Although one rightly tended to
think of the nomenklatura as a magic circle of top bosses, there was not a cleaning super-
visor or a park keeper in the land whose job, directly or indirectly, did not fall within its
purview. Membership of the magic circle carried important privileges - higher salaries,
preferential pensions, special identity cards, access to education, private Party health
clinics, holiday homes, car pools, luxurious family housing, foreign travel, and foreign