1918–1920 were years of great hardship for Balmont who, living in Petrograd (with Elena Tsvetkovskaya and their daughter Mirra) had also to support Andreyeva and their daughter Nina in Moscow. He struck up a friendship with Marina Tsvetayeva, another poet on the verge of physical collapse. Unwilling to collaborate with the Bolsheviks (whose "hands were smeared with blood," as he declared openly at one of the literary meetings) occasionally he had to be forced to. In 1920 Anatoly Lunacharsky (urged by Jurgis Baltrushaitis, then the head of the Lithuanian diplomatic mission in Moscow) granted Balmont permission to leave the country. Boris Zaitsev later opined that what Baltrushaitis did was actually to save Balmont's life. According to Sergey Litovtsev (a Russian critic who lived in immigration) at one of the secret meetings of the Cheka the fate of Balmont was discussed, "...it's just that those who were demanding he be put to a firing squad happened to be in the minority at the time." On May 25, 1920, Balmont and his family left Russia for good. As soon as Balmont reached Reval, rumors began to circulate that he had begun to make anti-Soviet public statements, leading to the cancellation of other writers' journeys out of Soviet Russia. Balmont denied these rumors, and there is no evidence to support them, but by 1921 Balmont was regularly publishing inflammatory articles against the Soviet government in the émigré press.