Arkady Gaidar, Chuk and Gek

Chuk and Gek
cover by ACT
(source: http://www.livelib.ru/book/1000352650)
no copyright infringement intended

Chuk and Gek (two kids always ready for childish follies) live with their mother in Moscow. The father is away in the Siberian taiga for geological research. As the New Year closes in, the father sends a telegram asking them to come over. After making a very long and eventful train journey and a two-day journey through taiga on a dog sled, they arrive to find that nobody is at the base. Actually the father has sent a second telegram warning about the change of plans, but the kids lost it in one of their routinely gamboling  and then were too afraid to tell anything to the mother. The next day the guard returns from hunting and announces that the geological research team is gone for a ten-day trip and he also will be gone for two days. While the three can stay in the guard's hut, he has no keys to the main houses or the storage. Chuk, Gek and their mother must now survive the next ten days in this wilderness all by themselves, with only the meager supply that they have brought with them. As in any children story, everything ends well, after a couple of adventures. And of course, the father and the rest of the team will come back just in time to spend the New Year together with the kids and their mother. Arkady Gaidar wrote the story in 1939. A movie was made in 1953.

(info source: wiki)

Чук и Гек, 1953
(video by Rohit Bal)

(Gaidar)