Renowned children’s writer, Arkady Petrovich Gaidar, was born in 1904 and acted as a war correspondent for the newspaper of the Communist Union of Youth, Komsomolskaya Pravda, in WWII (or The Great Patriotic War as it is known in the former Soviet bloc). In the autumn of 1941, when cut off by the enemy forces, he joined a group of partisans as a machine gunner, but within weeks soon died in action. He is buried in Kaniv, where the A.P. Gaidar Library-Museum was later built in his name, but has since been renamed The “Literary Kaniv” Museum.

Gaidar began writing his first stories in December 1924. They appeared in print between 1925 and 1927. He studied writing with the prominent writers of the time, who would literally break Gaidar’s work down into pieces, sentence by sentence explaining to him the rules and peculiarities of the genre as he eagerly absorbed their every word.

On 26 October 1941 Gaidar was fatally injured in a battle with SS units. Later a trackman found Gaidar’s body and buried it beside the railway line. After the war, Gaidar’s remains were transferred to the Ukrainian town of Kanev, where they were buried on a hill overlooking the Dnieper River.

Russian economist Yegor Gaidar is Arkady Gaidar's grandson. In the autumn of 1991, at the age of 35, he had to deal with the collapse of the Soviet economy and the disintegration of a nuclear empire into 15 states. Boris Yeltsin asked him to serve first as deputy prime minister, then as finance minister and then as acting head of government.