Also in 1911, he published the poem "Of Demyan Bedny," which led to him being known by that name, and he began a private correspondence with Vladimir Lenin that was said to develop into a long-lasting personal friendship.

Arthur Ransome described him in 1919 as "fatter than he used to be (admirers from the country send him food) with a round face, shrewd laughing eyes, and cynical mouth, a typical peasant.

He wrote a plaintive letter to Stalin asking, and received a long reply accusing him of having insulted the Russian working class.

He told the poet Osip Mandelstam that he had been reported by a secretary, who had heard him complain that Stalin left grubby finger marks on books borrowed from Bedny's private library,[4] but it appears that Bedny's real offence was that his writings were highly critical of Russia's imperialist past, but Stalin, though he was not an ethnic Russian, "nevertheless grasped that Russian nationalism was the glue that held the Soviet Union together".

[5] In November 1936, the Politburo condemned Bedny's opera The Bogatyrs for its "antihistorical and mocking depiction of Old Russia's acceptance of Christianity.

On 12 June 1937, he published a 54-line poem celebrating the previous day's announcement that Marshal Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders had been arrested, which included all of their names in a rhyming scheme.