The leadership that was offered the dark people [the Russian people] at this moment came for the most part from a group of men and women who had long been isolated from practical life--they had spent there days in remote Siberian villages or, in the words of Pyotr Ryss, in attics on the side streets of Paris, New York, Brussels, or Geneva. For years they had been occupied with thought, with theory, with plans and fantasies dominated by Russian maximilism, denying a life based on moral principle. They were, Ryss believed, cold and endlessly logical in their own terms. They hated the Government of Russia. They hated the alien cities and villages in which they had been compelled to live. They were accustomed to living within themselves, without discipline, seeing life in the narrow terms of their own reading. The theories which they conceived were new to them but often old, already tried in the outer world. And each of these individuals had his own theory, his own secret for saving humanity. Only give him the opportunity and he would save the world and make people happy.