Known best for his work as a Soviet educator and warden of two major youth colonies in the mid 1920s to the mid 1930s, Anton Makarenko entered Soviet literary consciousness in 1933 when he published the first part of Pedagogicheskaia poema (Pedagogical Poem; translated as The Road to Life, 1936), a semifictional work based on his experiences in the perekovka (reeducation) of the homeless, vagabond, and delinquent youth of Soviet Russia, known as besprizorniki. Beginning in 1920 and for the next fifteen years, Makarenko was in charge of two of the most famous colonies for homeless youths. From 1920 to 1928 he was warden of a youth colony in Poltava named for Maksim Gor'ky, arguably the most important writer of Stalinist Russia and Makarenko's personal correspondent and literary adviser. From 1927 to 1935 Makarenko oversaw a production commune in Khar'kov named after Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, former head of the Cheka (secret police).

Encouraged by Gor'ky...