Morozov Pavlik (Pavel Trofimovich) (1918-1932). Pioneer, glorified by the media as a participant in the struggle against the kulaks during the collectivization of the USSR. Born in with. Gerasimovka, Sverdlovsk region, in a large family (five children) of special settlers from Belarus. He was the organizer and chairman of the first pioneer detachment in the village , who helped the communists in campaigning for the creation of a collective farm. The kulaks, opposing this, decided to disrupt the grain procurements. Pavlik, having accidentally learned about the plot, and not being afraid of his father (he was at one with the fists), exposed their intentions, for which, together with his younger brother, he was brutally killed by fists in the forest.
One of the methods of expanding the social base of Stalinism and ensuring mass support for repressions was the active propaganda of the ideas of the absolute priority of the interests of the party and class interests over the norms of human morality, family, comradely duty. Large-scale propaganda events, numerous rallies, where everyone had to vote for the death penalty, study meetings, where they had to denounce their comrades, friends, relatives, repent, swear allegiance to the party and intransigence towards its enemies, gradually shook the moral foundations of society.
Cooperation with the authorities in suppressing "enemies of the people" was presented as a patriotic and unequivocally noble act. As examples, the images of "heroes-whistleblowers" like Pavlik Morozov were raised on the shield.
The name of Pavlik Morozov was the first to be entered in the book of honor of the All-Union Pioneer Organization. Lenin. A.M. Gorky wrote: "The memory of him should not disappear - this little hero deserves a monument, and I am sure that the monument will be erected."
In 1948 in Moscow in the children's park. A monument was erected to the young hero Pavlik Morozov (sculptor I.A. Rabinovich), and the former Novovagankovsky lane was renamed Pavlik Morozov lane. Interestingly, in 1935-1936. The Politburo several times considered the issue of installing a monument to Pavlik Morozov near Red Square (Khlevnyuk O.V. 1937: Stalin, the NKVD and the Soviet society. M., 1992. P. 70).
N. Berdyaev, arguing about the socialist "religion", he says that "the revolution, by its spiritual nature, is a rupture of the paternal and son hypostasis."
Notes
) Regarding this statement, see the article below "Not "Pavlik", but Pashka".
1 ) We have given the traditional presentation of the plot. More about the tragedy in Gerasimovka is told by the editor of the department of the magazine "Man and Law" V. Kononenko in the essay "Pavlik Morozov: Truth and Fiction" (Komsomolskaya Pravda. 1990. April 5). She, in particular, cites a letter from Alexei Morozov, who writes: “What kind of trial did they arrange for my brother? It's embarrassing and scary. My brother was called an informer in the magazine. Lie it! Pavel always fought openly. Why is he insulted? Has our family suffered a little grief? Who is being bullied? Two of my brothers were killed. The third, Roman, came from the front disabled, died young. I was slandered during the war as an enemy of the people. He spent ten years in the camp. And then they rehabilitated. And now slander on Pavlik. How to endure all this? They doomed me to torture worse than in the camps. It is good that my mother did not live to see these days ... I am writing, but tears are choking. So it seems that Pashka is again defenseless on the road.
2 ) ON THE. Berdyaev (1874-1948) - Russian philosopher. In 1922 he was sent abroad.
Materials of the book were used: Torchinov V.A., Leontyuk A.M. around Stalin. Historical and biographical reference book. St. Petersburg, 2000
Not "Pavlik", but "Pashka"
Born in the family of a Belarusian migrant Trofim Sergeevich Morozov and Tatyana, nee Baidakova, and was the eldest son. There were 4 boys in the family. Father - a red partisan, later chairman of the Gerasimovsky village council. In 1928, he left the family and began to live with a certain Antonina Amosova. At the beginning of 1932, he was sentenced to 10 years for selling false certificates to special settlers (dispossessed from the Kuban) about their alleged belonging to the Gerasimov village council. At the end of the same year, after the murder of his son, he was shot.
According to the official version, Pavlik Morozov, being a conscious pioneer, denounced his father to the authorities for ideological reasons, and then also systematically denounced the "kulaks" hiding grain from the state. Like, for this, he and his younger brother, 9-year-old Fedya, were stabbed to death by their own grandfather Sergei and cousin Danila at the instigation of the “fist” Arseniy Kulukanov (godfather and relative of Pavel). At a show trial held in the regional center of Tavda, Sergei and Danila Morozov, Arseny Kulukanov and Ksenia Morozova (Sergei's wife and Pavlik's grandmother, who was accused of non-information) were sentenced to death. The murder of Pavel was qualified as a counter-revolutionary terrorist act.
In fact, the official version reveals a number of inconsistencies with the real circumstances of that time.
According to the writer Yuri Druzhnikov, who interviewed in the 1970s. fellow villagers and relatives of Pavel, the latter was not a pioneer, since there was no pioneer organization in Gerasimovka at all (the nearest one was in the regional center of Tavda, 120 km from Gerasimovka). Memoirs depict Pavel as a physically weak, nervous, unbalanced, tongue-tied, pedagogically neglected and almost weak-minded child who, by the age of 14, barely managed to finish two classes, learned to read and write with difficulty.
According to the materials of the murder case, on November 25, 1931, Morozov Pavel, during the investigation of the previous case (on the fact that the Gerasimovsky village council had issued a certificate to a special settler), filed a statement with the investigating authorities that his father Morozov Trofim Sergeevich, being the chairman of the village council and being associated with local kulaks, is engaged in forging documents and selling them to kulaks-special settlers. Subsequently, Pavel also spoke at the trial, testifying after his mother, but was stopped by the judge due to his youth. It is believed that Pavel's mother taught him to make a denunciation, hoping to intimidate her husband and return him to the family. I emphasize: Pavel filed an application as part of the investigation into the issuance of a certificate by the Gerasimovsky village council to a special settler. A certificate with a fake signature of Trofim Morozov was issued after he left the post of chairman of the village council, but the testimony of Pavlik (to be precise, the villagers called him Pashka) made it possible to involve Trofim in this case.
Both before and later, Pavel really denounced the peasants who hid bread, unregistered weapons, etc. As follows from the materials of the case, in the winter of 1932 he denounced his uncle Arseniy Silin, who, “without completing a firm task, sold a cartload of potatoes to special settlers ", and the previous autumn - to the peasant Mizyukhin, in whose place his grandfather Sergei allegedly hid a "walker" (a cart; a search was made at Mezyukhin, but nothing was found). However, in fact, the main scammer in the village was his cousin Ivan Potupchik, who by that time had already become a candidate member of the CPSU (b) (an indicative feature of his moral decay was the rape of a pioneer committed later by the honorary pioneer Ivan Potupchik, for which he was convicted).
On September 2, 1932, Pavel and his 9-year-old brother Fedya, in the absence of their mother (who had left for the district center), went into the forest for cranberries; On September 6, their bodies were found in the forest with stab wounds. The murder was declared the result of a kulak conspiracy. In view of the obvious bias of the investigation and the court, the guilt of imaginary fists is in doubt. According to Yu. Druzhnikov, the murder with provocative aims was organized by Spiridon Kondrashov, an assistant to the OGPU commissioner, and Potupchik. At the same time, Druzhnikov is based on the protocol of interrogation of Potupchik, discovered by him, as a witness in the murder case, compiled by Kondrashov on September 4 (that is, 2 days before the official discovery of the fact of the murder).
Pavlik Morozov was declared a pioneer hero, an example of loyalty to communist ideals and patriotism. On his example, it was considered necessary to educate the younger generation; streets, schools, pioneer squads, etc. were named after him, monuments were erected to him (the first one was in Moscow in 1948)
It should also be noted that the form of the name "Pavlik" was invented by the journalists of Pionerskaya Pravda. During his lifetime, the boy was called "Pashka". And "Pavlik Morozov" is a character, rather a virtual one, who had nothing to do with a real person.
Especially for CHRONOS, an article about P. Morozov was sent by Pavel Shekhtman.
Enterprises, courts, schools, orphanages are named after him
Pavlik Morozov (1919-1932) - a teenager who denounced his father and was "canonized" by Soviet propaganda as a model for educating future builders of communism. He was portrayed as a victim of "fists" who took revenge on him for exposing their intrigues. But what really happened?
The Morozov family lived near the city of Tavda (now the Sverdlovsk region), in the village of Gerasimovka, where Pavlik's grandfather, Sergei Morozov, moved from Belarus at the end of the 19th century. Pavlik's father, Trofim Sergeevich, who served as chairman of the village council, left his wife Tatyana with four children and went to a neighbor. The rest were also not friendly: Pavlik's grandfather and grandmother did not like his daughter-in-law and grandchildren, and they paid the same.
According to some reports, it was Tatyana Morozova, wanting to take revenge on her ex-husband, who taught her son to write a denunciation against him. On November 25, 1931, the boy filed a statement with the police that Trofim Morozov, using his official position, was selling certificates to special settlers - dispossessed peasants from European Russia. Trofim was convicted and sent to serve his term in the Far North, where he died.
In September 1932 (that is, almost a year later), Pavlik and his younger brother Fedya went to the forest for berries and disappeared. The mother, who arrived from Tavda the next day, called a policeman; he gathered the people, and the whole village went in search. The brothers were found on the road; they were dead, there was blood all around and a pile of scattered cranberries.
The grandfather and grandmother of the dead children, their uncle Arseniy Kulukanov and cousin Daniil were accused of the murder. According to his mother's later testimony, during a search, Sergei Morozov "found a bloody shirt and pants." The grandfather allegedly brought the knife home and hid it behind the icon (strange behavior for those who want to hide the traces of the crime; the corpses could also not be left in a conspicuous place, but thrown into the swamp, where they would disappear without a trace). Later, “two knives, a shirt and pants stained with blood” were allegedly found in his house. Son Alexei told his mother that on the day of the murder, "he saw Daniil Morozov walking out of the forest"; policeman Poputchik testified that Daniil's pants, shirt and knife were found covered in blood. The same Aleksey reported to his grandmother Aksinya that she went for berries in the same direction as Pavlik and Fedya, and "could hold" them until the killers approached. What role the uncle played, the investigation did not come up with.
During the process, Tatyana's testimony was edited by someone. Now they already stated that the grandfather, grandmother and cousin of the killed, “this whole kulak gang ... gathered together as a group, and their conversations were about hatred for the Soviet power ... my son Pavel, no matter what he saw or heard about this kulak gang , always informed the village council or other organizations. In view of what the kulaks hated him and tried in every possible way to bring ... the young pioneer off the face of the earth. Thus, the murder of the Morozov brothers was attributed to the "intrigues of class enemies", which were found in the person of their closest relatives. Sergei, Aksinya and Daniil Morozov, as well as Arseny Kulukanov were shot.
This process was very useful for Soviet propaganda. On the eve of the Great Terror, when entire institutions and enterprises were declared “enemies of the people”, it was important to present an individual family as a terrorist group, to impress citizens that enemies could lurk everywhere. The cult of Pavlik Morozov taught Soviet citizens (especially children) to suspect everyone, even close relatives, of intent to harm, poison, blow up, and kill. The “meeting of the poor in the village of Gerasimovka”, which demanded “to apply capital punishment to the murderers”, became the prototype of mass “demonstrations of workers” and “letters from labor collectives”, calling for merciless reprisal against the “Trotskyist-Zinovievite rabble” and other enemies.
After the trial, Tatyana Morozova and her children were hated in the village. She herself recalled that the grave of Pavlik and Fedya "was trampled down, the star was broken, half the village went there to defecate." And although the authorities instilled her in a good house, the owners of which had been "dispossessed" before, Tatyana preferred to move to the regional center - away from her fellow villagers. The NKVD took the "hero's mother" to the barracks, she did not work. Later, Stalin ordered to settle her in the Crimea, in Alupka, appointed a personal pension. Pavlik's younger brother, Alexei, was accused of treason during the war, but thanks to his mother's efforts and kinship with the "hero" he escaped execution.
Pavlik himself had a reputation in the village as a bully, embittered and unscrupulous. Tongue-tied and sickly, he showed all the signs of retarded development. The future "pioneer-hero" entered the first class only a year before his death, and at the age of thirteen he hardly learned to read in syllables. “He spoke with interruptions, barking ... in a half-Russian-half-Belarusian language,” his teacher recalled. According to eyewitnesses, Pavlik was the dirtiest student in the school; he smelled of urine, since the Morozov children used to urinate on each other to annoy or just have fun. He was presented by Soviet propaganda as a smart agitator, intelligibly explaining to the "dark" fellow villagers the policy of the party.
Pavlik's denunciation of his father was used by the Soviet authorities to instill morality that denied all biblical commandments - primarily the commandment to honor parents. After the Morozov case, special groups of pioneers began to form, called upon to watch over their parents and neighbors. Young scammers were rewarded with new boots, bicycles, and trips to the Artek pioneer camp. By the way, there is no evidence that Pavlik Morozov was a member of a pioneer organization.
Enterprises, courts, schools, orphanages, and other, mostly children's, institutions were named after this wretched teenager. Many false performances, films, musical works, poems and stories have been created about him. A street in Moscow even in the new district of Yuzhnoye Butovo is named after the parricide, who is also largely fictional.
The black book of names that have no place on the map of Russia. Comp. S.V. Volkov. M., "Posev", 2004.
Literature:
Yu.I. Druzhnikov. Informer 001, or the Ascension of Pavlik Morozov. (Published in the Moshkov Library, as well as at http://www.unilib.neva.ru/dl/327/Theme_10/Literature/Drujnikov/index.html)
The book "Informer 001, or the Ascension of Pavlik Morozov", written by the writer, professor at the University of California Yuri Druzhnikov, according to the annotation, is "the first independent investigation into the brutal murder of a teenager who denounced his father, and the process of creating the most famous Soviet hero from a boy, carried out through fifty years after the tragic and mysterious events by a Moscow writer who dared to compare the official myth with historical documents and the testimony of the last eyewitnesses.
The émigré writer did not confine himself to exposing Stalin's propaganda, which made a pioneer hero out of a victim, but tried to mold him into an "exemplary" traitor anti-hero, presenting him in the most unattractive light. Apparently, he understood that, otherwise, the sympathies of a normal person would be on the side of a child who was brutally murdered along with his younger brother. Therefore, Yuri Druzhnikov tried to present Pavlik Morozov as a mentally handicapped, moral monster who “knocked” on his relatives and neighbors. At the same time, he was guided by the image of a scammer, a traitor, traditionally negative in the public mind. However, he does not provide any evidence of denunciations, except for Soviet propaganda materials, which he himself recognized as false.
Review from the site http://sarmata.livejournal.com/132057.html?view=1862617#t1862617
Pavlik Morozov was a role model for the pioneers. He was born on November 14, 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka. His parents were peasants. Pavlik became an active participant in the process of dispossession and led the first pioneer detachment in his village.
Soviet history says that this boy, during the period of collectivization, exposed his father as a kulak. He testified against his dad, who was sentenced to 10 years. He also told about the hidden bread from a neighbor, about the theft of state grain, which was committed by his uncle. Pavlik Morozov took an active part in the actions and, together with the chairman, searched for the hidden property of fellow villagers.
In court, the boy did not speak out against his father and did not write a denunciation against him. The only thing he did was confirm the words of the mother, who made the main accusations. Trofim Morozov, Pavlik's father, beat his wife and often brought home things he received for issuing false documents, he also kept a large amount of grain.
According to the official version, the grandfather and cousin uncle killed the boy in 1932 in the forest. Mother at this time briefly left on business in the city. The murderers were sentenced to death, Pavlik's father was also shot, although he was far away at that time. His mother received an apartment in the Crimea as compensation for her son's death. Many collective farms, schools and pioneer squads received the name - "Pavlik Morozov".
The story of this boy's life was known throughout the Union. Songs and poems were composed about him, an opera of the same name was created, and Eisenstein even tried to make a film, but his idea could not be realized. Today, various sources provide such different information that the question arises as to whether Pavlik Morozov existed at all? In half the cases, his feat was attributed to denunciations and he himself was called a traitor. But we all still believe that he existed.
At first, Pavlik Morozov, who imprisoned his father, was considered a national hero. Pionerskaya Pravda wrote about him: “Pavlik spares no one. Father got caught - he betrayed him, uncle, grandfather - he betrayed them too, Shatrakov hid weapons, Silin speculated on vodka - Pavlik exposed them all. He was brought up in and therefore grew up a Bolshevik.
The story of the murder of Pavlik Morozov was immediately picked up by Soviet propaganda. He was represented by a bold peony
erom, who denounced his father-fist. Also, his name was entered in the Book of Honor of the Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization. But half a century later, the image began to change, since this story was already unattractive. Dissertations were written from which it was said that Pavlik was not a hero at all, but simply denounced absolutely everyone.
For the fact that he betrayed his own father, Stalin said about him: "Of course, the boy is a bastard, but the country needs heroes." At that time it was necessary to educate a generation of informers and informers, and this boy became an example.
Today, Pavlik Morozov is considered neither a hero nor a traitor. He is just a victim of a harsh and difficult time. This boy died for speaking the truth. If you understand this story, you can understand that it is very distorted and changed for the convenience of the authorities of that time.
The key figure in this story is Pavlik's father Trofim Sergeevich Morozov. He was a hero of the civil war, the commander of a red partisan detachment. And the chairman of the village council of this very village. And a member of the CPSU (b). That is, he was the Soviet government. At the same time, a gang of the Purtov brothers operated in the Tavdinsky district, with which Morozov was associated. Being the chairman of the Gerasimov village council since 1930, he sold food and false documents to bandits.
It would be a mistake to think that the Purtovs were ideological fighters against the Soviets, avenging their desecrated freedom. In 1919, Osip, Mikhail and Grigory Purtov were mobilized into the Kolchak army, but they immediately surrendered to the Reds and were released home. In 1921, Gregory was drafted into the Red Army, but he deserted from there three days later. Soon a peasant uprising broke out in Siberia, and the Purtovs, who put together a gang, became famous for the bloody reprisals against supporters of the Soviet regime. On March 10, 1921, caught in their lair in the forest, the bandits surrendered without a fight to a detachment of seven Bolsheviks from the Yelan party cell.
The voice of reason tells me that it was necessary to slap the bandits on the spot, and write in the report that, they say, they put up desperate resistance and were eliminated. But the Yelan Bolsheviks turned out to be humanists and decided to do everything according to the law: first the trial, and then the execution. The court turned out to be fantastically lenient towards a gang of murderers and robbers: taking into account the poor origin and crocodile tears of repentant bandits, they were given only 10 years in the camps.
But they did not stay in the camps either. Two years later, they were released as reformed and because of the alleged illness of their father. Returning home, the brothers immediately returned to their robbery. They were detained, but escaped from custody. With the beginning of collectivization, the dispossessed from the European part of the country began to be exiled to Siberia, and this contingent willingly joined the Purtov gang.
Remarkably, until the beginning of the 1930s, the bandit families were not persecuted, and only in 1931, by decision of the Sverdlovsk Regional Court, the Purtovs' father with his younger sons Peter and Pavel and their wives were evicted from their native village. The youngest son of Purtov, Peter, received five years in prison for harboring his older brothers, but six months later he escaped and returned to his native places, where he lived under false documents. Pavel also escaped from exile and joined the gang.
The Purtov gang, which accounted for at least 20 corpses, was liquidated only in 1933. The last straw that overflowed the patience of the authorities was the very brutal murder of Pavlik and Fedya Morozov, which received a wide response. The Purtovs were not directly involved in this, but the very fact of the existence of a gang in the area, which enjoyed elusive fame, looked defiant. An operational group of the OGPU under the command of an experienced security officer Krylov was sent to the area, which completed the task.
So, such a long epic of the Purtov gang became possible thanks to, as they would say now, corruption, since the bandits have established close ties with the heads of local village councils, including Trofim Morozov. As they say, money does not smell, so the chairman put the trade in certificates of the poor on a grand scale - they were bought by dispossessed fellow villagers and exiled special settlers (the presence of a certificate allowed them to leave their place of exile).
The security officers seized the certificates issued by Trofim Morozov from captured bandits and found them in bandit caches. So they took the “corrupt” chairman under white hands, no denunciation of Pavlik was required for this. There was no point in locking Trofim Sergeevich.
You ask - what does Pavlik Morozov have to do with it? The fact is that his father was illiterate, and all the certificates that he traded were written in a neat childish handwriting by his son Pavlik. That is, it turns out that the father "surrendered" his son, and not vice versa. Pavlik only confirmed his father's confession to the district representative of the OGPU.
There was no trial at which, according to legend, the young pioneer delivered a diatribe. According to the Tyumen local historian and writer Alexander Petrushin, who unearthed this story, “the fate of Trofim Morozov was decided by the meeting of the“ troika ”at the Plenipotentiary Representation of the OGPU in the Urals on February 20, 1932. It is indicated: “He was engaged in the fabrication of forged documents with which he supplied members of the K / R of the insurgent group and persons hiding from the repression of Soviet power.” Resolution of the "troika": "Imprison him in a labor camp for a period of ten years."
For the attention of the schoolchildren: the corrective labor camp is not a prison and not the Kolyma zone. The convict was only sent to work at one of the many construction sites of socialism, where he lived and worked without protection. The whole difference with an ordinary worker was that he could not quit before the end of the term of the ZK ITL, and part of his earnings was confiscated in favor of the state. These are the "atrocities" committed by the Soviet government!
Trofim Sergeevich Morozov was lucky - he got to the construction of the White Sea Canal, where he showed himself from the best side, and not only was released three years later, but was even awarded an order. After his release, he lived and worked in Tyumen.
So why were Pavlik Morozov and his four-year-old brother stabbed to death? The fact is that Pavel's father left his family (wife with four children) and began to cohabit with a woman who lived next door - Antonina Amosova. And then he decided to divorce his old wife and marry a twenty-year-old girl. According to the then law, in this case, all the land and other property went to the father in a new family. And the old wife, along with the children, became homeless.
The wife, of course, demanded the division of property before the divorce. And - again, according to the then legislation - for three male children (Pavlik with a small brother and brother Alexei) they had to cut off a noticeable piece of land allotment from the father's plot, who, although he was the chairman of the village council, could not so clearly shove against the law, but when he was arrested, his father's relatives realized that the partition was about to happen.
It was then that the plan was ripe to bang the kids - after which the divorce would be left without land. It was not possible to bang all three at once - but it is clear that Alexei would also have been taken. According to the recollections of Pavel's teacher, his father regularly beat and beat his wife and children both before and after leaving the family. Grandfather Pavlik also hated his daughter-in-law because she did not want to live with him on the same farm, but insisted on a division. According to Alexei (Pavel's brother), the father "loved only himself and vodka", he did not spare his wife and sons.
Suspicions immediately fell on the family of the father of those killed. Yes, in fact, they are not particularly hidden. According to Tatyana Baidakova, “when my slaughtered children were brought from the forest, grandmother Aksinya met me on the street and said with a grin: “Tatyana, we made meat for you, and now you eat it!”. The initiator of the murder was the uncle of Pavlik and Fedya Arseniy Kulukanov, and the 76-year-old grandfather Sergey and 19-year-old Danila, the cousin of Pavlik and Fedya, became the direct perpetrators of the murder. Grandma Aksinya helped hide the evidence.
In general, a typical "dispute between business entities", as they would say now. A special piquancy to which is given by the fact that all this was done by BELARUSIANS, who came to Siberia according to the Stolypin recruitment even under the sovereign emperor.
This is what the happy Stalinist USSR looked like in real life. Corruption, which even the heroes of the civil war did not disdain, banditry and the merging of local authorities with bandits, lawlessness, murders based on hostility or property claims, and all on such a scale that the authorities did not know what to grab onto - if they put everyone in jail, then half of the country should be sent to the camps.
Now you can appreciate what Stalin had to deal with, and from what pipets he dragged the country. At the same time, it will become more clear where the prisoners in the camps came from, all these “innocent inmates” who were screaming about rehabilitation. Even 68 years later, the Prosecutor General’s Office, after checking the investigative case, decided “to recognize Sergey Sergeevich Morozov and Daniil Ivanovich Morozov as reasonably convicted in this case for committing a counter-revolutionary crime and not subject to rehabilitation” - everything is so obvious in this case from the evidence.
100 years ago, in November 1918, the most controversial pioneer hero of the Land of the Soviets, Pavlik Morozov, was born. And he, according to some sources, was not a pioneer, and his heroism is highly doubtful. After his tragic death, Soviet propagandists tried to make him a symbol of the struggle of the pioneers with the fists.
After perestroika, on the contrary, they charged Pavlik with all the sins, declared him a traitor to his father, family and the whole old way of life. But both myths did not really take root. The story of this boy was too complex and personal.
Village Detective
On September 2, 1932, Pavel Morozov's mother went from Gerasimovka to Tavda to sell a calf. On the same day, Pavel took his younger brother Fedya and went with him into the forest to pick berries. The guys were going to spend the night in the forest and return the next day. However, when Tatyana Morozova arrived home on the 5th, they were not there yet. Frightened, Tatyana asked her countrymen to look for children in the forest. On the morning of September 6, their bloodied corpses were found in an aspen forest near Gerasimovka. The boys were slaughtered. Beside them were baskets of berries. Pavel Morozov was not even 14 years old at that time, Feda was only eight. Distraught with grief, Tatyana was met on the street by her mother-in-law and, grinning, said: “Tatyana, we made meat for you, and now you eat it!”In hot pursuit, the grandfather, grandmother and paternal cousin of the Morozov boys were arrested. In the house of the grandfather and grandmother, they found clothes all stained with blood. The killers almost did not unlock. Their show trial shocked not only Gerasimovka, but the entire Soviet Union.
The house in the village of Gerasimovka, where Pavlik Morozov was born and lived
background
The brutal murder of two children was the culmination of a difficult family drama and a continuation of the previous high-profile criminal case. A year before, Pavel's father, Trofim Morozov, was arrested and put on trial. A former red commander, after the Civil War he became chairman of the village council of Gerasimovka. In his new post, he began to take bribes, straighten certificates and other documents for money. In domestic terms, he also “decomposed” - he constantly beat his wife and four children, then left them and went to another woman, drank a lot and rowdy.Trofim's relatives stood behind him like a wall and unanimously hated his wife and children. Trofim's father beat his grandchildren and daughter-in-law in front of the whole village. When Trofim was arrested, his parents and brother decided that Pavel was to blame for everything, having slandered his own father.
However, despite all subsequent legends, Paul never wrote any statement about his father. Information about this appeared due to the inaccurate wording of the investigator Elizar Shepelev, who investigated the murder of Pavel and Fedya Morozov.
In fact, in 1931, the boy simply spoke at the trial of Trofim, confirming that he regularly beat his wife and children, and also took bribes from peasant kulaks. Then the judge did not even let him finish - the boy was considered a minor and could not testify. In the documents on the case of his father, no testimony of Pavel was recorded at all.
The court sentenced Trofim to ten years in prison. When the father was taken to the zone, hell began for Pavel. Grandfather, grandmother and godfather called him a "kumanist" and directly threatened to kill him. Tatyana, who stood up for him, was beaten by mortal combat.
In August, just a week before his death, Pavel even filed a complaint with the police about threats from his grandfather. However, no one protected him. On September 3, his grandfather Sergei and cousin Danila finished the harrowing, took agricultural knives and went to the aspen forest, where Pavel and Fedya were picking berries.
Ideological battle
The case of Pavlik Morozov was replicated by Soviet propaganda. Journalists promoted the boy as a true pioneer who fought with his fists. We do not know for sure whether Pavlik was a pioneer, only one photograph of him has come down to us. On it he is without a pioneer tie. Although poverty in Gerasimovka reigned such that a tie could well be an unaffordable luxury.The revelations of the kulaks allegedly made by Pavel, his denunciations to the OGPU, his search for peasants who hid grain - all this is a later invention of journalists. The only thing we know for sure is that he confirmed in court that his father severely beat his mother and all the children. Yes, the trial of Morozov did not need his testimony: the people to whom Trofim issued fake certificates for bribes were arrested, interrogated, and the whole case was based on their testimony.
It turns out that Pavlik Morozov was neither a hero nor a traitor. He was a victim of family violence and hellish morals that reigned in impoverished Gerasimovka. There are, of course, questions to the local authorities. It is strange that it never occurred to anyone to somehow defend Morozov's wife and son, who testified against him in open court. They could well have been helped with the move, and then the tragedy could have been avoided. For example, Tatyana Morozova, after the death of her sons, simply moved to the Crimea and lived quietly in Alupka until 1983.
But the true story of the boy from Gerasimovka - a chain of mistakes, crimes and accidents - was of no interest to anyone. From Pavlik Morozov began to make a cult.
Monuments were erected to him, schools, streets, parks, houses of pioneers were named after him. Schoolchildren learned the biography of the "pioneer-hero", in which there was almost not a word of truth. Sergei Mikhalkov wrote poems about "Pasha the Communist", they were set to music, and the result was a song that was sung by the pioneers of the whole country.
Pavlik Morozov (in the center, in a cap) with classmates, on the left - his cousin Danila Morozov, 1930The most famous director of the USSR, Sergei Eisenstein, began to shoot the film "Bezhin Meadow" based on the story of Pavlik Morozov. However, there he so vividly portrayed the pogrom of the local church, organized by the peasants, that it shocked even Stalin. The unfinished film was ordered to be destroyed, and Eisenstein had to repent for a long time before he was allowed to atone for his guilt by filming Alexander Nevsky.
All this time, in parallel with the Soviet cult of Pavlik Morozov, there was an anti-Soviet myth about a boy who betrayed his own father. “Killing children is terrible,” argued dissident writer Viktor Nekrasov. - But informing on the father, knowing that this will also lead to death, is it not less terrible? .. [Pavlik Morozov] ... calls on his descendants-peers to follow his example. Watch the fathers, eavesdrop on what they are talking about, peep what they are doing, and immediately inform the authorities: the father is the enemy, grab him!”
In the era of perestroika, this myth triumphed. A 13-year-old boy was accused of having brought his relatives to a crime by his betrayal. He was blamed for the fact that after his death Gerasimovka became a collective farm, and strong peasant kulaks were ruined. Almost all the mistakes and crimes of the Soviet government were hanged on him. They tried not to remember about the eight-year-old Fedya, slaughtered along with Pavel - this death at the hands of “strong peasants” looked too scary.
Pavlik Morozov again became a victim of ideology - just before they made a hero out of him, and now a villain. As in Soviet times, no one was interested in his real life and terrible death. This is probably the saddest thing in his history.
Many people mention it very often, but often know very little. And if they know, it is not the fact that the truth. He twice became a victim of political propaganda: in the era of the USSR, he was presented as a hero who gave his life in the class struggle, and during perestroika, as an informer who betrayed his own father.
Modern historians question both myths about Pavlik Morozov, who became one of the most controversial figures in Soviet history.
The main attraction of the village of Gerasimovka, Sverdlovsk region. - Museum and grave of Pavlik Morozov. Up to 3 thousand people come here a year. And everyone is almost ready to tell how it all happened, so this image is imprinted in our consciousness ... 
The story of the murder of Pavlik Morozov over 80 years has acquired a lot of myths, but until recently there were two main versions. According to one of them, Pavlik wrote a denunciation of his father, a kulak, and then on other kulaks who hid grain from the state. Grandfather and uncle did not forgive him for this, they waylaid him with his brother Fedya in the forest and slaughtered him. A demonstration trial took place over the grandfather, uncle and relatives of the children. Some were accused of murder, others of covering up a crime. Sentences - the death penalty or long terms of imprisonment. 
According to another version, Pavlik was killed by the OGPU: allegedly, the system needed a hero to justify the repressions. A child killed with fists was perfect for this role. 
Meanwhile, the director of the Pavlik Morozova Museum, Nina Kupratsevich, told us her version of this story. After many years of research, work with archival documents, meetings with Pavlik's relatives, Nina Ivanovna is absolutely sure: the boy did not betray any of his relatives and it was by no means relatives and not employees of the OGPU who killed him, but completely different people.
In all this tragic story, the figure of the father, Trofim Sergeevich Morozov, is very important. According to Kupratsevich, in fact, he was a literate, respected person in the village, otherwise he simply would not have been elected to the chairmanship of the village council. What Trofim was later accused of would today be called corruption. He illegally issued certificates of registration to dispossessed peasants and their families exiled to Gerasimovka. Without them, they had no right to leave the village. People worked in logging, starving, dying, and many wanted to leave. Of course, at that time it was considered a crime, but, in fact, Trofim Morozov saved people. The criminal case was initiated precisely because of fake certificates: two peasants were detained with them at the station in Tavda ...
Resentment for the mother. 
Kupratsevich believes that an illiterate thirteen-year-old boy could not “lay down” his father. At the time of the trial, Trofim had already left the family, lived with a cohabitant for a long time, and his son was simply not aware of his affairs. Secondly, the small, thin Pavlik stuttered and simply could not give out that “anti-Kulak” monologue that Soviet propagandists attributed to him. And this monologue sounded like this (according to the writer Pavel Solomein): “Uncle judges, my father created a clear counter-revolution, I, as a pioneer, am obliged to say this, my father is not a defender of the interests of October, but is trying in every possible way to help the kulak escape, stood behind him with a mountain, and not as a son, but as a pioneer, I ask that my father be held accountable, because in the future I will not give the habit to others to hide their fist and clearly violate the line of the party ... " 
[The house where Pavlik Morozov lived, 1950]
Yes, he had a reason to be offended by his father - for his mother. After all, Trofim went to a strange woman. Pashka stayed behind the owner in a family with four children, he didn’t even have time to study.
- On that day, Pavlik and Fedya went to the swamp for cranberries, - Nina Kupratsevich tells her version of those events. - The Morozovs' house was extreme, and, apparently, the grandfather, later accused of murder, saw them. But then the whole village went to those places for cranberries! Pavlik's grandfather, who was over 80, could not be so bad as to kill his grandson in front of possible witnesses. Did he not understand that the children would scream? And they were screaming! You read the protocol of examination of corpses: the brothers were cut with knives, their hands were injured. Apparently, they grabbed the blades, called for help. It doesn't look like a premeditated murder at all. Everything suggests that the guys were killed in a state of extreme fear. I think that these were dispossessed peasants-special settlers who lived in a dugout and hid in the forest from the authorities. Fearing that the boys would betray them, they grabbed their knives...
"Participation not proven" 
Kupratsevich also does not believe in the version about the OGPU: “Do you really think that the authorities would not have found a suitable village closer to the center? How long did you travel to us? Three hours from Yekaterinburg? And at that time there was no direct road at all, it was necessary to get across the river by ferry. And when “myth-making” began, people began to be driven to the collective farm, it turned out very conveniently: the kulaks took the lives of two little brothers. And in fact, from scratch, the image of a pioneer hero was created. Maxim Gorky himself at the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers said: “Relatives by blood, strangers by class killed Pavlik ...”
In fact, Pavlik was not a pioneer - a pioneer organization appeared in their village only a month after his murder. The tie was later simply added to his portrait. 
[Pioneers visit the site of the death of Pavlik Morozov, 1968]
Meanwhile, in the late 90s, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation came to the conclusion that the murder of Pavlik Morozov was purely criminal in nature, and the criminals were not subject to rehabilitation for political reasons. However, retired Colonel of Justice Alexander Liskin, who took part in an additional investigation of the case in 1967 and worked with the KGB archives, concluded in 2001 that the participation of the people accused in the death of Pavlik was not proven. Moreover, he claims that Pavlik appeared in court in his father's case as a witness. And there are no denunciations in this case.
By the way… 
[Monument to Pavlik Morozov in the Sverdlovsk region, 1968. Pavlik's mother Tatyana Morozova with her grandson Pavel, 1979]
The fate of Pavlik's relatives developed in different ways. His godfather Arseny Kulukanov and cousin Danila were shot. Grandfather Sergey and grandmother Xenia died in prison. Trofim Morozov received ten years in the camps, worked on the construction of the White Sea Canal, where he died. According to other information, he remained alive, was released and spent his last days somewhere in the Tyumen region. Pavlik's brother Alexei Morozov fought at the front, but in 1943 he recklessly praised the brand of some German aircraft and spent 10 years near Nizhny Tagil. “I met with him. A very positive, wonderful person, ”Kupratsevich recalls. Mom Tatyana Semyonovna Morozova moved to the Crimea, to Alupka, where Nadezhda Krupskaya secured an apartment for her. She was given a small pension. She lived modestly, instead of a signature, she put a cross all her life.
P.S.
No matter how the story of Pavlik Morozov is interpreted, his fate does not become less tragic. His death served the Soviet government as a symbol of the struggle against those who do not share its ideals, and in the perestroika era it was used to discredit this government.