Timur and His Squad

Timur and His Squad (Russian: Тимур и его команда, romanized: Timur i yego komanda) is a short novel by Arkady Gaidar, written and first published in 1940. The book tells the story of a gang of village kids who sneak around secretly doing good deeds, protecting families whose fathers and husbands are in the Red Army, and doing battle against nasty hooligans. It had a huge impact upon the young Soviet audiences. Timurite movement (Timurovtsy), involving thousands of children, became a massive phenomenon all over the country. Timur and His Squad remained part of the curriculum in every Soviet school even up into the 1990s. The short novel was adapted into two feature films, Timur and His Team (1940) by Aleksandr Razumny and Timur and His Team (1976) by Aleksandr Blank and Sergei Linkov.