The poem, hailing the 150-million-strong Russian people's mission in starting the world revolution (represented here as an allegorical battle of Russian Ivan and the American president Woodrow Wilson, the embodiment of the capitalist evil) failed to impress the Soviet revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin who apparently saw in it little but a pretentious Futuristic experiment.

[3] On 5 March 1920 Mayakovsky recited fragments of the poem at the event celebrating the opening of the All-Russian Union of Poets Club in Moscow.

/ 150 millions speak through my mouth / Masses marching over the stepping-stone paper is the offset duplicator machine getting these pages printed.

Vladimir Lenin, for whom Mayakovsky was just "one of those Futurists" (whom he reviled) was outraged with the fact that Gosizdat printed 5 thousand copies of the poem which he found "pretentious and dodgy.

"[6] On 6 May 1921 in the course of one of the Soviet government's meetings Lenin forwarded a note to Lunacharsky: "You should be ashamed of yourself, having supported the printing of 5 thousand copies of Mayakovsky's 150 000 000.

But – 1) no lesser poet than Brysov expressed his delight and demanded for 20 000 [copies] to be printed, 2) the poem, as recited by its author, had great success - mind you, with the workers' audience.

"[8] Lenin, obviously dissatisfied with Lunacharsky's reply, sent to Gosizdat's director M.N.Pokrovsky a similar note, demanding that the publication of the works by "those Futurists" should be curtailed.

According to the Soviet literary historian E. Naumov, there is one "still unpublished verbatim account of one of the disputes under the Lunacharsky's chairmanship, concerning the Left Front of the Arts (LEF).

In Chicago, a monstrously rich wonder-city, the world revolution's worst enemy Woodrow Wilson abides in a giant hotel, sporting a bowler-hat "higher than Sukharev Tower."

Wilson strikes first and slashed armless Ivan, but out of the wound, instead of blood, peoples, machines, gubernias, et cetera start to pour out to attack the old world.