Communist Party, regarded the letter as "demagogic", a volume of "rabid passages and at the same time desperate sighs of the soul", and "a vulgar work". The letter has also been regarded as a call to arms on the eve of the August Coup. According to A. James Gregor, the signatories (a number of them active CPSU members) abandoned class war rhetoric, emphasizing rather "a salvation of the Motherland", stressing the priority of patriotism over Soviet Marxist ideology. Two Central Committee members, Otto Latsis and Andrey Grachev, explicitly attacked the publication in their speeches at the plenum, but were heckled and had difficulty in making themselves heard. Ten years after the publication, on 14 August 2001, Sovetskaya Rossiya published an appeal entitled "Stop reforms of death!" («Остановить "реформы смерти"!»), in which the letter "A Word to the People" was called "prophesying". Review Gennady Zyuganov (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation) later noted: "I can remind you that the publication of this collective letter caused a great resonance. In addition, the provokes hate from the authorities side, including Yeltsin and his entourage. We remember how Rutskoy and Yeltsin first called the document 'Yaroslavna’s weeping' from the stands and the screens, and then, they threatened the authors with prison". In his memoirs, the ideologist of Perestroika and the former head of the propaganda department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Alexander Yakovlev, negatively characterized the letter, calling it "demagogy", "a set of evil passages and simultaneously desperate moans of the soul", "vulgar essay" and "ideological program of the August rebels". The poet and publicist Yuri Kublanovsky calls the letter "a symbiotic manifesto of communism and patriotism, signed, alas, by many highly talented cultural figures". See also Letter of Forty-Two Architect amidst the Ruins August coup Gennady Zyuganov References 1991 in the Soviet Union Dissolution of the Soviet Union Open letters Politics of Russia Soviet internal politics 1991 documents 1991 in Russia