First Russian School, on Yulin Road
Shanghai Architecture Wandering 走跳上海建築.
Shanghai Architecture Wandering 走跳上海建築 has a wonderful exploration of the First Russian School (Реальное училище), which was first founded in 1921 in French Concession and moved to 27 Yulin Road in 1931. Located in the Wayside area, where the resident Russians were mostly poor, the school had about 100 students - mostly the children of the employees of the Shanghai Electric Co., watchmen, bodyguards, port workers, etc. A third of the students enjoyed the fee waiver; the rest paid 5-20 dollars a month. In 1935, the SMC allocated a fund of 6,000 dollars a year for the support of the First Russian School. The chemistry professor Alexandr Nikolaevich Russanoff was the founder and the perennial Headmaster; after his death in July 1936 his wife Olga Alexeevna Russanoff, also a teacher, took over the job, aided by T. S. Safonoff and S. S. Panchenko.
By 1937, the Russian schools of Shanghai had a total of about 6,000 students (a slightly smaller number of children were in foreign schools). The Japanese hostilities in Hongkew in autumn 1937 drove most of the Yulin Road school’s students to the new Russian School, at 89 MacGregor Road (aka Pushkin’s School), which opened in April 1937.
First Russian School in the early 1930s. V. D. Zhiganov.