ambassadors of Russian culture

In 1933 a unique boarding school was set up in Russia to provide a home for the children of revolutionaries around the world - the children of Mao, Tito and La Pasionaria passed through its doors. It still exists, though few of its pupils today are foreign.

In 1939, a nine-year-old Palestinian girl found herself alone, sobbing her heart out in a Russian children's home.

"I remember how much I cried. It hurt," Daulia Saadi explains, more than 70 years later.

"I asked my mother many years later: how could you do it?"

"She said, 'Daulia, what could I do?'

"Our parents were so passionate about the revolutionary struggle that they left their children in another country.

"Their whole lives were abnormal."

Now the children are mostly from Russia and former Soviet republics, often from hotspots of inter-ethnic conflict.

Although the age of communist revolutions is long gone, another generation of children, they argue, might grow up to serve as "ambassadors of Russian culture" overseas.