In Paris Balmont found himself unpopular. Radical Russian emigres took his safe and easy departure as a sign of his being a Communist sympathizer. Lunacharsky, with his apologetic article ensuring the public at home that Balmont's stance was not in any way anti-Bolshevik, played up to these suspicions. On the other hand, the Bolshevik press accused him of 'treacherousness' for "having been sent to the West on a mission to collect common people's revolutionary poetry and abused the trust of the Soviet government." Condemning repressions in Russia, Balmont was critical of his new environment too, speaking of many things that horrified him in the West. What troubled him most though, was his longing for Russia. "Not a single other Russian poet in exile suffered so painfully from having been severed from his roots," the memoirist Yuri Terapiano later argued. For Balmont his European experience was a "life among aliens." "Emptiness, emptiness everywhere. Not a trace of spirituality here in Europe," he complained in a December 1921 letter to Andreyeva.