Days after returning to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), she was shocked to hear a party official refer to free speech as a "bourgeois superstition".[124] As she and Berkman traveled around the country, they found repression, mismanagement, and corruption[125] instead of the equality and worker empowerment they had dreamed of. Those who questioned the government were demonized as counter-revolutionaries,[125] and workers labored under severe conditions.[125] They met with Vladimir Lenin, who assured them that government suppression of press liberties was justified. He told them: "There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period."[126] Berkman was more willing to forgive the government's actions in the name of "historical necessity", but he eventually joined Goldman in opposing the Soviet state's authority.[127]