They set the table for breakfast, but no one comes to the dining room: the children haven stolen keys from the janitor, Meftahutdyn, and left the school.

Vikniksor decides to treat the children more strictly; in the morning, the teachers and the staff send them first into the shower, then into the dining room, where they are dismissed from the table for the slightest infractions, and finally are seated at their desks.

Palvan, teacher of literature, has his own "method of education"; fawning before the disorderly street children, he sings them songs (mainly "urban folklore") during lessons, without burdening them with studies.

The senior students chastise a new ShKID member, Alexei Panteleyev, because he refuses to steal cakes from Vikniksor's half-blind mother.

Written in 1926 and published a year later, the story The Republic ShKID tells of the fate of homeless adolescents who, for various reasons, find themselves in the school-commune, founded in 1920 by educator Viktor Nikolaevich Sorok-Rosinskiy, whose pupils, quite in the spirit of the time shortened his name to "Vikniksor".

"[6]Some homeless children depicted in the film were played by real juvenile delinquents, which gave the director the additional task of having to make sure that they would not break any laws.

[7] Although Poloka's film immediately gained popularity, Panteleyev was rather disappointed; he wrote in 1967 in "Komsomolskaya Pravda": In our school theft, card games, and usury flourished.

[8]But in Poloka's movie, unlike the original story, the protagonist became Vikniksor and the storyline shifted its focus to his hard struggle against the evil inclinations acquired by the teenagers on the street.