Children at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, held from 17 August to 1 September 1934

A delegation of Pioneers addressed the Congress with a greeting. Among the various groups of participants were children brought to the Congress by Samuil Marshak, who delivered a report arguing that writing for children is harder than writing for adults. The children were a living example of the reading audience for whose sake the report was written. Another group of children was invited by Maxim Gorky: these were Irkutsk Pioneers from a circle at School No. 6, who, under the guidance of Ivan Molchanov-Sibirsky, were writing a collective book about their own lives. They had divided the plot into separate parts, each devoted to one of the co-authors, and the common text was corrected by joint effort. When Gorky learned of this collaboration among the children, he sent them a letter of praise, and, meeting them in Moscow, where they had come on an excursion, invited them to the writers' congress.