For Merezhkovsky the October Socialist revolution was a catastrophe. He saw it as the Coming of Ham he wrote about a decade later, the tragic victory for, as he choose to put it, Narod-Zver (The Beast-nation), the political and social incarnation of the universal Evil, putting the whole human civilization to danger. Merezhkovsky and Gippius tried to use whatever influence they retained upon the Bolshevist cultural leaders to ensure the release of their friends, the arrested Provisional government ministers. Ironically, one of the first thing the Soviet government did was lift the ban from the anti-monarchist "Pavel Pervy" play and it was staged in several of Red Russia's theaters.