An enormous, unforeseen calamity has taken place. Motherland, our land, a great power, given to us to ward with the nature, glorious ancestors, it is perishing, breaking apart, falling into darkness and nonbeing. And this collapse takes place at our silence, toleration and accord.<...>
Brethren, too late are we waking up, are observing the misery when our home is already burning in four corners, when extinguishing this has to be done not by water, but by our own tears and blood. Do we allow for the second time during this century civil discordance and war, again throw ourselves into merciless millstones, set started not by us, that will be grinding the bones of the people, breaking in two the backbone of Russia? <...> Let us unite, so as to stop the chain reaction of the disastrous collapse of the state, economy, human personality; in order to contribute to the strengthening of the Soviet power, to the transformation of it into a genuinely people's power, and not some manger for the hungry nouveaux riches, who are ready to sell off everything for the sake of their insatiable appetite.<...> Soviet Union, this is our home and stronghold, built with enormous efforts of all the peoples and nations, that has saved us from disgrace and slavery at the times of hideous invasions! Russia - unique, beloved! - she is crying for help.
According to V. Bondarenko, it was Alexander Prokhanov who wrote the text of the publication. Three of the signatories later joined the State Committee on the State of Emergency in the 1991 August Coup attempt against Gorbachev. In his memoirs, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, a founder of perestroika and former head of the propaganda department of the 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 armson the eve of the August Coup. According to A. James Gregor, the signatories 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!", in which the letter "A Word to the People" was called "prophesying".
Review
Gennady Zyuganov 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″.
