Balmont welcomed the February Revolution and even entered the competition for a new Russian national anthem, but the failure of the Provisional Government and the October revolution left him bitterly disappointed. He joined the Constitutional Democratic Party and praised Lavr Kornilov in one of his articles. He condemned the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat as destructive and suppressing. Still, in his essay "Am I a Revolutionary or Not?", he argued that a poet should keep away from political parties and keep "his individual trajectory which is more akin to that of a comet rather than a planet."