This book is a collection of four short novels by Arkady Gaidar: School, Chuck and Geck, Blue Cup and Timur and His Squad.Timur and His Squad is a short novel by Arkady Gaidar, written and first published in 1940. The book tells the story of a gang of village kids who sneak around secretly doing good deeds, protecting families whose fathers and husbands are in the Red Army, and doing battle against nasty hooligans. It had a huge impact upon the young Soviet audiences. Timurite movement (Timurovtsy), involving thousands of children, became a massive phenomenon all over the country. Timur and His Squad remained part of the curriculum in every Soviet school even up into the 1990s. (From Wikipedia)The book was translated from Russian by Lucy Flaxman and edited by Leonard Stoklitsky. The book was published in1948 by Foreign Languages Publishing House.