“perennial prodigies, . . . heirs to a lost sacred mission, . . . strangers among the people they called ‘the people.’”

     "To be a true intelligent meant being religious about being secular; asking 'the accursed questions' over lunch and dinner; falling deeper and deeper into doubt and confusion as a matter of principle; and feeling both chosen and damned for being better educated, more intelligent, and more honest than one’s milieu.  Whether a member of the intelligentsia could find the answers to the accursed questions and still be a member of the intelligentsia was open to question.  Lenin thought not (and did not consider himself one).  The authors of the antiradical manifesto Signposts believed there were no nondoctrinaire intelligentsia members left (and considered themselves an exception).  Most people used the term to refer to both the conscious and the confident—as long as they remained self-conscious about being better educated, more intelligent, and more honest than their milieu.  The proportion of those who had overcome doubt kept growing.  Most believed in the coming revolution; more and more knew that it would be followed by socialism."

     I.e. the eschaton.  Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government:  a saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2017), 24.  The headline is from p. 23.