The Republic of ShKID

In the early twenties the streets of a country coming out of civil war are full of homeless children. Some of them are gathered up and placed in a reform school named after Dostoevsky. The boys have learned to survive on the street, recognise no rules and hold tightly together. The school's director, Viknixor, is an educated and calm man who, rather than suppressing them, lets them set up rules of their own. What emerges is a small republic. The source is the book published in 1927 by two former pupils of the school, Grigory Belykh and Leonid Panteleyev. The book has a history of its own: Belykh was arrested in 1936, died in prison in 1938, and the work went unprinted for a long time afterwards. Gennadi Poloka's 1966 adaptation is unusually loud and disorderly for a Soviet children's film, with Sergei Yursky as the director at its centre. The narrative does not fully surrender to the cliché of the good teacher saving the child.