This Just In: Nomenklatura

I guess this is old news but it is new to me and history has its claims:

...the entry on nomenklator in the Great Polish Encyclopedia,

A slave in ancient Rome ... who had the duty to remind his master of the names of persons with whom to exchange greetings. It was particularly important in office-hunting in the Republican period.

More to the point, perhaps, they should have pondered the origin of the word nolmenklatura in Polish usage. It is a Latin term, referring to the lists of named properties of the great feudal magnates, and by extension to the tenants who possessed thoseproperties. Here one can see the true culturazl ancestry of communist society. Anything further removed from socialism, as the rest of the world imagined it, would be hard to conceive.

That's Norman Davies in Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland's Present, a gripping read in its own right, and a bracing reminder of what particular horrors we have, for the moment at least, put behind us.