The "true" story of the Soviet boy hero

Legend has it that Pavlik Morozov, a model youth of the new Soviet Union, denounced his father for hoarding grain and was killed by kulaks seeking revenge. Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero, a new book by Catriona Kelly, looks at the historical record of the story to try and determine the truth.

During her research on Soviet childhood, Kelly became intrigued by the case and a book about Pavlik written by dissident author Yury Druzhnikov in the 1970s but published in Russia only in 1995. Druzhnikov claims the boy was actually murdered by agents of the Soviet secret police to create a cause celebre that would accelerate collectivization in this intransigent region. Skeptical of this view, as well as the official one, Kelly set out to investigate the "real" story of Pavlik Morozov. "Evidence" from the Soviet press is unreliable at best, and few people living at the time of his murder are still alive. But Kelly had an extraordinary stroke of luck: She was allowed access to the Morozov case file from the KGB archives -- hundreds of pages of typed and handwritten testimony, interrogations protocols, copies of trial transcripts and so on. This permitted her to juxtapose conflicting accounts of the affair, and to follow the prosecutors as they fashioned their case.

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What does seem reasonably certain is that in September 1932, near the end of the First Five-Year Plan -- which brought the bloody collectivization of Soviet agriculture -- a 13-year-old boy named Pavel Morozov and his 9-year-old brother, Fyodor, were found murdered in the woods outside Gerasimovka, a dirt-poor village in the forests of the Urals province. The boys had apparently been out berry-picking; their bodies were discovered some distance apart, splattered with cranberries and the blood from multiple stab wounds, and Pavlik's head had been covered with a sack of some sort. Within a few weeks, the crime had come to national attention thanks to an article in Pionerskaya Pravda. Prosecutors contended that Pavlik had been murdered by a "nest of kulaks" resisting collectivization that included his grandfather, grandmother, uncle and cousin. These four people were found guilty in late November and sentenced to be shot.

Subsequently, the Soviet propaganda machine began to mythologize the story of Pavlik Morozov in fits and starts. Kelly follows the development of Pavlik's myth through several decades, juxtaposing it with other child heroes, real and fictional, and attempting to place it within the greater context of shifting Soviet policies and attitudes toward children and childhood. The authorities sought to turn the murdered boy into a model of selfless dedication to the state that could be useful in raising further generations of the "new Soviet man."