The article discusses the wrong, in the author’s opinion, understanding by Yu.A. Nisnevich, of the nomenclature essence of the Soviet period, presented in Sociological Studies, No. 8, 2018. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, on the wave of perestroika and “openness” in our country, there was an active process of “exposing crimes” of the Soviet period. Especially fierce criticism fell on the nomenclature, regarded as the new exploiting class in the USSR. Yu.A. Nisnevich accepts this understanding of nomenclature and shows the process of supposed regeneration of this layer in postsoviet conditions as an unchanged and even more criminalized group. Not agreeing with this approach, the author shows its fallacy and considers it completely inapplicable to the current ruling stratum. Actually nomenclature was a personnel technology connected with responsibility of party committees for the positioning and activity of economic heads and heads of social institutions.