At age 15, he was editor of the youth newspaper Yunosheskaya Pravda, and head of the press department of the Moscow branch of Komsomol.
In 1927, a section of Mayakovsky's poem celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution was published in the journal Molodaya Gvardia, which Yermilov edited.
His reference to a 'false leftist note' implied that Mayakovsky "was a quasi-Trotskyite - in a year when Trotskyites were being rounded up and sent into prison or exile.
"[4] Mayakovsky retaliated by creating a huge poster with a four-line slogan saying that there were not enough bathhouses to wash away all the bureaucrats who were aided by critics like Yermilov, and displayed it in the Meyerhold Theatre.
This was because when another speaker at a party meeting had mentioned that a writer had attempted suicide, Yermilov replied: "Let that kind poison themselves, they won't be missed.
[8] In January 1963, he launched an attack on Ilya Ehrenburg over the memoir he had published eight months earlier saying that people had kept quiet about arbitrary arrests in the 1930s.