Could we not substitute the modern liberal elitists for the old nobility in a technological marxist state? The wealthy liberal elitists: Movie/TV stars, Silcon Valley millionaires, most of the big name print and television journalists, the committed leftist politicians and such monied famlies that do exist in America.
Wouldn't these high-profile front groups and families be allowed to retain their status - as long as they served as useful mouthpieces for the State? I rather imagine they would be willing tools once the stark realities of the choice before them is made clear: Maintain relative wealth and popularity or be stripped of their wealth and influence, thereby forced to live by a subsistance job and meager handouts from the State.
I would defer to a historian of the Russian civil wars, but my impression was that there was essentially nothing left of the old intelligentsia and artist class by the time the Leninists got through with them. All were subject to searching examinations of their political purity, and those who failed ended up in Siberia, or in the West, especially Paris, if they could get away. Ayn Rand comes to mind.
The intelligentsia of the interwar and postwar periods were people who were useful to the regime, or at least available. Lysenko comes to mind. He was cosseted by the Soviet regime because his theory of educable genes echoed Leninist political theory. He set genetics back in Russia 50 years, and his complaints and professional rivalries condemned other, better geneticists to death in the gulag system. Lysenko was finally denounced in the 1950's for error, about 25 years too late.