After the October Revolution, about which he felt apprehension, he spent some time wandering around Russia (in the Luga district, Smolensk, Kostroma, and Crimea). He visited the city of Ostashkov, where he began work on his novel "Ugryum-reka" ("Ugryum River" or "Grim River"), a historical novel about wealthy Siberian merchants at the turn of the century which was published in two volumes in 1933. His first novel to be published, however, was "Vataga" ("The gang," 1923). From 1927 he lived in Detskoye Selo. For the last seven years of his life he worked on the historical epic "Yemelyan Pugachev" (), "a colorful panorama of the 18th-century Cossack and peasant uprising," whose first volume he published in 1941 while he was living in blockaded Leningrad; it was published (unfinished) in three volumes after his death and won him the Stalin Prize. He left Leningrad in April 1942 and his seventieth birthday was celebrated in Moscow in October 1943; on this occasion he was awarded the Order of Lenin. After his death in 1945 he was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery (site number 2). In 1950 a monument to him was unveiled in Bezhetsk, and in 1973 a museum dedicated to him was opened there.