Gorky Colony

The Gorky Colony was a reform school for street children and juvenile delinquents in the 1920s, located in the Poltava Raion of Soviet Ukraine. It began in 1920, when the educator Anton Makarenko was invited to head the Poltava Colony for Young Offenders, and a year later it became the Gorky Colony and soon attracted the attention of the writer Maxim Gorky himself. By the summer of 1925 it had 140 pupils, 130 boys and 10 girls. Makarenko built its life around a working collective with institutionalized self-government and self-management, and his method combined insistence and respect with school education and productive labour. He published two articles on the colony in 1923 and two years later made a public report on it to the All-Ukrainian Conference for orphanage teachers. The colony is the basis of the classic Soviet book The Road to Life, also published as The Pedagogical Poem. Makarenko was dismissed from it in September 1928 and concentrated on his work in Kharkiv.