Overflight, 87

Here, then, was the classical pattern of political conspiracy. … At the center, there is always a tiny group in complete control, with one man as the undisputed leader. Next is a circle of secondary leadership that, for the most part, is unaware of an inner core. They are led to believe that they are the inner−most ring.
In time, as these conspiracies are built from the center out, they form additional rings of organization. Those in the outer echelons usually are idealists with an honest desire to improve the world. They never suspect an inner control for other purposes, and only those few who demonstrate a ruthless capacity for higher leadership are ever allowed to see it. . …
Eugene Lyons had been a correspondent for United Press in revolutionary Russia. He began his career as highly sympathetic to the Bolsheviks and their new regime, but six years of actual living inside the new socialist utopia shattered his illusions. In his acclaimed book, Workers’ Paradise Lost, he summarizes the true meaning of the October Revolution:
«Lenin, Trotsky, and their cohorts did not overthrow the monarchy. They overthrew the first democratic society in Russian history, set up through a truly popular revolution in March, 1917… They represented the smallest of the Russian radical movements… But theirs was a movement that scoffed at numbers and frankly mistrusted the multitudes. The workers could be educated for their role after the revolution; they would not be led but driven to their terrestrial heaven. Lenin always sneered at the obsession of competing socialist groups with their "mass base." ‘Give us an organization of professional revolutionaries,’ he used to say, ‘and we will turn Russia upside down.’ …
Even these contingents were pathetically duped, having not the remotest notion of the real purposes for which they were being used. They were striking out, they thought, for the multi−party Soviets, for freedom, equality, and other goals which their organizers regarded as emotional garbage…

Overflight