Anton Makarenko

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Anton Semyonovich Makarenko (Russian: Антон Семенович Макаренко, 1888–1939) was a Ukrainian and Soviet educator and writer, one of the founders of the Soviet pedagogy, who elaborated the theory and methodology of upbringing in child collectives and of introducing the productive labor into the educational system.

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution he established self-supporting orphanages for street children left orphaned by the Russian Civil War, including the Gorky Colony and later, under Stalin's auspices, the Dzerzhinsky Commune. The Soviet establishment hailed these establishments as a grand success in mass rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents.

Makarenko wrote several books, of which The Pedagogical Poem (Педагогическая поэма), a fictionalized story of the Gorky Colony, was especially popular in the USSR.