Children of Lieutenant Schmidt

Children of Lieutenant Schmidt (Russian: Дети лейтенанта Шмидта) is a fictional society of con men who pretended to be children of Russian revolutionary hero Lieutenant Schmidt. They are described in satire The Little Golden Calf by Ilf and Petrov. Main antihero of the novel, Ostap Bender befriended two hapless members of this society.

According to the novel, roaming across Russia in the 1920s were numerous fake relatives of Karl Marx, Prince Kropotkin, and other revolutionary figures. Their con tricks were aimed at persuading various Soviet officials into granting them cash. Their numbers grew, and to prevent any unlucky chance of spoiling each other's attempts, they started to "unionize", with Schmidt's Kids being the most difficult to organise. When the latter finally decided to convene, "it turned out that Lieutenant Schmidt had thirty sons, from eighteen to fifty-two years in age, and four daughters, stupid, unattractive and no longer young". They split Russia into 34 territories.

Ostap Bender, being in difficult straights, decided to play the same game, but ran into another trickster (Shura Balaganov, who became his accomplice) right in front of a bureaucrat in a Soviet office. Bender managed to get out of the gaffe by pretending Shura was his brother. Later they met yet another "sibling" - Samuil Panikovsky (Russian: Самуил Яковлевич Паниковский), who was running for his life (he had ignored the convention, trespassed, and was caught red-handed by victims of yet another "brother").