22.11.2014 3 16489
This 13-year-old boy's name has become a symbol twice. First - a symbol of the struggle of pioneer heroes against the “counter-revolution” and “kulaks”. Then - a symbol of betrayal, denunciation and meanness.
The paradox is that neither one nor the other interpretation has practically anything to do with the true history Pavlika Morozova. A teenager who simply cared about his mother and younger brothers and was not afraid to speak the truth, even under pain of death.
Today, as a rule, Ural schoolboy Pavlik Morozov is mentioned in a humorous or condemning context. Everyone seems to know that he “betrayed his father”, “wrote a denunciation”, but no one remembers the details of the case itself.
Soviet propaganda instantly placed Pavlik on a pedestal as a pioneer hero. In modern times, with the same fervor and the same haste, he was branded as a traitor.
In both cases, the boy's name was used as a political slogan.
The real background to those September events of 1932 has long been forgotten.
Only “whistleblowers” who are greedy for sensations periodically try to give a new interpretation of old events.
But it was all quite simple.
Village corruption
Pavlik Morozov was born a year after the October Revolution, on November 14, 1918. His childhood occurred during the most difficult time - the first years of the formation of Soviet power.
The harshest blow of the transition period - the Civil War and subsequent military communism - was borne by the peasants.
The residents of the village of Gerasimovka, Tobolsk province, endured hardships just like everyone else. There, in the family of the chairman of the local village council, Pavel was born - the eldest of the five children of Trofim and Tatyana Morozov. They lived peacefully: the father often beat both the mother and the children. Not because he was too harsh in character, but simply because these were the usual village morals of that time.
But Trofim Morozov, even if he wanted to, could not be called a good person. He eventually left his family and began to live with his mistress next door. Moreover, he did not stop beating his wife and children. And he actively used his position as chairman of the village council for personal enrichment. For example, he appropriated property confiscated from dispossessed people.
A separate source of his income was issuing illegal certificates to special settlers. This category of citizens appeared in the early 30s, when “kulaks” and “sub-kulaks” were sent to special settlements without trial or investigation. There they had to live like exiles, observing a strict schedule and working in logging, mining, and so on.
Of course, there was no talk of any freedom of movement. It was possible to leave the special settlement only with the permission of the commandant. Some special settlers tried to escape such a life. But for this, a certificate of registration with some village council was required. So that the competent authorities at your new place of residence do not have questions about where you came from, what you did before.
It was these certificates that Morozov was selling. Moreover, he continued to do this even after he was removed from his post as chairman of the village council in 1931. He got burned on them. Over time, Gerasimovka began to receive requests one after another from various factories and factories, as well as from the construction of Magnitogorsk. Vigilant production managers were interested: did the new workers who arrived to them really live in Gerasimovka before?
Too often, special settlers began to come across with false certificates in their pockets. And in November 1931, at the Tavda station, a certain Zvorykin was detained with two blank forms on which were stamped the Gerasimov village council. He honestly admitted to the police officers that he paid 105 rubles for them. A few days later, several people were arrested in connection with the case of forged certificates, including Trofim Morozov.
Fictional denunciation
From this moment the same story of Pavlik Morozov begins. And it starts right away with contradictions. Investigator Elizar Shepelev, who subsequently investigated the boy’s murder, wrote the following in the indictment: “Pavel Morozov filed a statement with the investigative authorities on November 25, 1931.” This refers to a statement in which Pavlik allegedly accused his father of illegal activities.
However, many years later, Shepelev openly admitted in an interview: “I can’t understand why on earth I wrote all this; there is no evidence in the case that the boy contacted the investigative authorities and that it was for this that he was killed. I probably meant that Pavel testified to the judge when Trofim was tried...”
Journalist Evgenia Medyakova, who tried to get to the bottom of the truth in the early 1980s, did not find any traces of Pavlik’s testimony in the case of Trofim Morozov. The testimony of his mother is available, but the boy is not. True, he apparently did speak at the trial, but it is unlikely that he said anything new or valuable. Nevertheless, this was enough to arouse hatred towards him among his father’s relatives. Especially after the court sentenced Trofim to 10 years in the camps and sent him to build the White Sea-Baltic Canal.
Looking ahead, let's say that Trofim Morozov did not serve his entire sentence. He returned three years later, with an order for shock labor. But by that time, his two sons - Pavel and Fedor - had been killed.
It must be emphasized that after Trofim left the family, Pavel became the eldest man in the family. He took care of his mother and younger brothers and maintained the household as best he could. And in the eyes of adults, it was he, and not Tatyana, who bore all the responsibility for Trofim’s “betrayal.” Pavel was especially hated by his grandfather Sergei, who was fully supported in this by his wife and grandmother Aksinya (or Ksenia).
Another sworn enemy was Danil's cousin. Finally, his godfather and Trofim’s sister’s husband, Arseny Kulukanov, did not have any warm feelings for the boy. According to one version, Pavel mentioned his name in his speech at the trial, calling him “fist.” These four people eventually found themselves in the dock as accused of the murder of Pavel and Fyodor Morozov.
Ordinary atrocity
The following is known about the murder itself. In early September 1932, Pavel and Fedor went into the forest to pick berries. Having learned about this, Kulukanov persuaded Danila to follow them and kill the boys. And he even allegedly paid him 5 rubles for it. Danila did not commit the crime alone, but went to his grandfather Sergei for advice.
He calmly stood up and, watching his accomplice take the knife, said: “Let’s go kill, don’t be afraid.” They found Pavlik and eight-year-old Fyodor quite quickly. Danila dealt fatal blows to both, but grandfather Sergei did not allow the younger boy to escape.
Since Pavel and Fyodor were planning to go into the forest for the night, they were not missed right away. Moreover, my mother was also away. When Tatyana returned to the village, she found out that the children had not returned for the third day. Alarmed, she roused the people to search, and the next day the bodies of the slaughtered children were discovered.
The grief-stricken mother later told the investigator that on the same day on the street she met grandmother Aksinya, who told her with an evil laugh: “Tatyana, we made you meat, and now you eat it!”
The investigation quickly found the killers. The main evidence was a utility knife and Danila’s bloody clothes, which Aksinya had soaked but did not have time to wash (at first they claimed that he had slaughtered a calf the day before). Danila admitted his guilt almost immediately and completely. Grandfather Sergei constantly changed his testimony and got confused, then admitting and then denying what had been done.
Aksinya and Arseny Kulukanov did not admit to anything until the very end. Nevertheless, it was Arseny, together with Danila, who received the most severe punishment - execution. Aksinya and Sergei Morozov, due to their advanced age (the old men were already 80 years old), were sent to live out their lives in prison.
Symbol in a red tie
This would have been the end of this essentially simple story of domestic feud. If only Soviet propaganda had not taken over the matter. The boy, killed by his relatives for two careless words spoken at a court hearing, was not needed by anyone. But the pioneer hero, who fearlessly exposed the kulaks and subkulakists and fell in an unequal battle, is the right story.
Therefore, in the very first note on this topic, published in the Ural Worker newspaper on November 19, 1932, Pavlik’s story was told as follows:
“...And when Pasha’s grandfather, Sergei Morozov, hid the kulak property, Pasha ran to the village council and exposed his grandfather. In the winter of 1932, Pasha brought the kulak Arseny Silin out into the fresh water, who did not fulfill a firm assignment and sold a cart of potatoes to the kulaks. In the fall, the dispossessed Kulukanov stole 16 pounds of rye from the village Soviet field and again hid them with his father-in-law, Sergei Morozov.
Pavel again exposed his grandfather and kulukanov. At meetings during sowing, at the time of grain procurements, everywhere the pioneer activist Pasha Morozov exposed the intricate machinations of the kulaks and subkulak members...”
The already difficult life of a simple village teenager, abandoned by his father and carrying a load of household chores, suddenly turned into an endless battle with “kulaks and kulak podkulakniks” who endlessly carried out their “machinations” in little Gerasimovka.
Need I say that there are no documents confirming such active activities of the “whistleblower” Pavlik Morozov? But it was no longer a shame to name a pioneer detachment after such a hero. How to erect a monument to him.
“To some now Pavlik seems like a boy stuffed with slogans in a clean pioneer uniform. But because of our poverty, he never even saw this uniform; he didn’t take part in pioneer parades, didn’t wear Molotov’s portraits, and didn’t shout “toast” to the leaders,” school teacher Larisa Isakova, who observed almost the entire history with her own eyes, later recalled.
But the propaganda machine was already working at full capacity. Poems, books, plays and even one opera were written about Pavlik Morozov! Fewer and fewer people remembered what exactly and why happened in Gerasimovka in the fall of 1932, and only a few tried to understand the details.
Long arms of the OGPU?
But times have changed, and the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Equally powerful and uncontrollable. People who thirsted for the truth sought to expose all the myths of Soviet ideology. At the same time, I was too lazy to delve seriously into the question. Very often they followed the path of least resistance: if something was declared good by the Soviet state, it means that it is actually bad.
This is exactly what happened with Pavlik Morozov. He deserved the dirty brand of “traitor” no more than the gold medal of “hero.”
Tatyana Morozova (Pavlik’s mother) with her grandson Pavel Morozov. Photo from 1979.
Everything was now called into question. Was Trofim Morozov such a terrible person? Was he deservedly sent to the camp? Did Pavlik write or not write the unfortunate denunciation against his father? At the same time, for some reason, the simplest and most terrible question was constantly missed: is it possible to kill children?
At the same time, in the excitement of revealing, some authors literally reached the point of absurdity. In 1987, the writer Yuri Druzhnikov published a book in the UK with the catchy title “Informer 001, or the Ascension of Pavlik Morozov.” In it, he literally turned the whole situation upside down.
According to Druzhnikov, Pavlik was a puppet of the all-powerful security officers who sought to organize a show trial with political overtones. This was necessary, in particular, in order to finally organize a collective farm in Gerasimovka, which the villagers had previously actively resisted.
The author of the book names the real organizers and perpetrators of the murder as assistant commissioner of the OGPU Spiridon Kartashov and Pavel’s cousin Ivan Potupchik, who collaborated with the authorities. This version was criticized many times and literally dismantled to its bones.
And not only by domestic researchers. Oxford University professor Catriona Kelly, for example, noted that Druzhnikov very selectively uses the materials of the official investigation, recognizing as authentic only those that fit into his theory.
Despite the extremely weak argumentation, Druzhnikov nevertheless quite accurately points out the weaknesses in the official version of the investigation. It is truly unclear why the killers did not bother to hide the knife and bloody clothes.
Grandfather Sergei served as a gendarme in the past, grandmother Aksinya once made a living as a horse theft. That is, both should have had a good idea of what the investigation and evidence are. However, they made it surprisingly easy and simple to arrest themselves.
However, no matter how much 80-year-old documents are shuffled, this will not change the main thing. Two boys, Pavel and Fyodor Morozov, are neither heroes nor traitors. And the unfortunate victims of circumstances and hard times.
Victor BANEV
Pavel Trofimovich Morozov (Pavlik Morozov; November 14, 1918, Gerasimovka, Turinsky district, Tobolsk province, RSFSR - September 3, 1932, Gerasimovka, Tavdinsky district, Ural region, RSFSR, USSR) - a Soviet schoolboy, a student of the Gerasimov school of the Tavdinsky district of the Ural region, who became famous in Soviet times exist as a pioneer a hero who opposed the kulaks in the person of his father and paid for it with his life.
Biography
Origin and family
Pavlik Morozov was born on November 14, 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka, Turinsky district, Tobolsk province, to Trofim Sergeevich Morozov and Tatyana Semyonovna Baidakova. My father was an ethnic Belarusian and came from Stolypin settlers who settled in Gerasimovka in 1910. Pavlik was the eldest of five children, he had four brothers: Georgy (died in infancy), Fedor (born approximately 1924), Roman and Alexey.
Pavlik's father was the chairman of the Gerasimovsky village council until 1931. According to the recollections of Gerasimovites, soon after taking this position, Trofim Morozov began to use it for personal gain, which is mentioned in detail in the criminal case filed against him subsequently. According to witness testimony, Trofim began to appropriate for himself things confiscated from the dispossessed. In addition, he speculated on certificates issued to special settlers.
Soon, Pavel’s father abandoned his family (his wife and four children) and began cohabiting with a woman who lived next door, Antonina Amosova. 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. Pavlik’s grandfather also hated his daughter-in-law because she did not want to live in the same household with him, but insisted on a division. According to Alexei (Paul's brother), father “I loved only myself and vodka”, did not spare his wife and sons, not like other immigrants from whom “I tore three skins for forms with stamps”. The father’s parents also treated the family abandoned by their father to the mercy of fate: “Grandfather and grandmother were also strangers to us for a long time. They never treated me to anything or greeted me. My grandfather didn’t let his grandson, Danilka, go to school, all we heard was: “You’ll get by without a letter, you’ll be the owner, and Tatyana’s puppies will be your farmhands.”.
In 1931, the father, who no longer held office, was sentenced to 10 years for “being the chairman of the village council, he was friends with the kulaks, sheltered their farms from taxation, and upon leaving the village council, he contributed to the escape of special settlers by selling documents”. He was charged with issuing false certificates to dispossessed people about their membership in the Gerasimovsky village council, which gave them the opportunity to leave their place of exile. Trofim Morozov, while in prison, participated in the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and, after working for three years, returned home with an order for shock work, and then settled in Tyumen.
According to Pavlik Morozov’s teacher L.P. Isakova, cited by Veronica Kononenko, Pavlik’s mother was “pretty-faced and very kind”. After the murder of her sons, Tatyana Morozova left the village and, fearing a meeting with her ex-husband, for many years did not dare to visit her native place. Ultimately, after the Great Patriotic War, she settled in Alupka, where she died in 1983. According to one version, Pavlik’s younger brother Roman died at the front during the war; according to another, he survived, but became disabled and died shortly after its end. Alexey became the only child of the Morozovs who got married: from different marriages he had two sons - Denis and Pavel. Having divorced his first wife, he moved to his mother in Alupka, where he tried not to talk about his relationship with Pavlik, and only spoke about him in the late 1980s, when a campaign of persecution against Pavlik began at the height of Perestroika (see his letter below).
Life
Pavel’s teacher recalled poverty in the village of Gerasimovka:
The school she was in charge of worked in two shifts. At that time we had no idea about radio or electricity; in the evenings we sat by a torch and saved kerosene. There was no ink either; they wrote with beet juice. Poverty in general was appalling. When we, teachers, started going from house to house to enroll children in school, it turned out that many of them didn’t have any clothes. The children were sitting naked on the beds, covering themselves with some rags. The kids climbed into the oven and warmed themselves in the ash. We organized a reading hut, but there were almost no books, and local newspapers arrived very rarely. To some now Pavlik seems like a boy in clean clothes stuffed with slogans. pioneer uniform. And because of our poverty this form I didn’t even see it.
Forced to provide for his family in such difficult conditions, Pavel nevertheless invariably showed a desire to learn. According to his teacher L.P. Isakova:
He was very eager to learn, he borrowed books from me, but he had no time to read, and he often missed lessons because of work in the fields and housework. Then I tried to catch up, I did well, and I also taught my mother to read and write...
After his father left for another woman, all the worries about the peasant farm fell on Pavel - he became the eldest man in the Morozov family.
Murder of Pavlik and his younger brother Fyodor
Pavlik and his younger brother went into the forest to pick berries. They were found dead from stab wounds. From the indictment:
Morozov Pavel, being a pioneer throughout the current year, led a devoted, active struggle against the class enemy, the kulaks and their subkulakists, spoke at public meetings, exposed kulak tricks and stated this repeatedly...
Pavel had a very difficult relationship with his father's relatives. M.E. Chulkova describes the following episode:
…One day Danila hit Pavel’s hand with a shaft so hard that it began to swell. Mother Tatyana Semyonovna stood between them, and Danila hit her in the face so that blood came out of her mouth. The grandmother came running and shouted:
Kill this snotty communist!
Let's skin them! - Danila yelled...
On September 2, Pavel and Fyodor went to the forest, planning to spend the night there (in the absence of their mother, who had gone to Tavda to sell a calf). On September 6, Dmitry Shatrakov found their corpses in an aspen forest.
The brothers' mother describes the events of these days in a conversation with the investigator as follows:
On September 2, I left for Tavda, and on September 3, Pavel and Fyodor went into the forest to pick berries. I returned on the 5th and found out that Pasha and Fedya had not returned from the forest. I began to worry and turned to a policeman, who gathered people, and people went into the forest to look for my children. They were soon found stabbed to death.
My middle son Alexey, he is 11 years old, said that on September 3rd he saw Danila walking very quickly out of the forest, and our dog was running after him. Alexey asked if he had seen Pavel and Fyodor, to which Danila did not answer anything and only laughed. He was dressed in homespun pants and a black shirt - Alexey remembered this well. It was these pants and shirt that were found on Sergei Sergeevich Morozov during the search.
I cannot help but note that on September 6, when my slaughtered children were brought from the forest, grandmother Aksinya met me on the street and said with a grin: “Tatiana, we made you meat, and now you eat it!”
The first act of examining the bodies, drawn up by local police officer Yakov Titov, in the presence of the paramedic of the Gorodishchevo medical post P. Makarov, witnesses Pyotr Ermakov, Abraham Knigi and Ivan Barkin, reports that:
Pavel Morozov lay 10 meters from the road, with his head to the east. There is a red bag on his head. Pavel was dealt a fatal blow to the stomach. The second blow was delivered to the chest near the heart, under which there were scattered cranberries. One basket stood near Paul, the other was thrown aside. His shirt is torn in two places, and there is a purple blood stain on his back. Hair color is light brown, face is white, eyes are blue, open, mouth closed. There are two birch trees at the feet (...) The corpse of Fyodor Morozov was located fifteen meters from Pavel in a swamp and shallow aspen forest. Fedor was hit in the left temple with a stick, his right cheek was stained with blood. The knife dealt a fatal blow to the abdomen above the navel, where the intestines came out, and also cut the arm with a knife to the bone.
The second inspection report, made by the city paramedic Markov after washing the bodies, states that:
Pavel Morozov has one superficial wound measuring 4 centimeters on the chest on the right side in the area of the 5-6th rib, a second superficial wound in the epigastric region, a third wound from the left side in the stomach, subcostal area measuring 3 centimeters, through which part of the intestines came out, and the fourth wound on the right side (from the Poupart ligament) measuring 3 centimeters, through which part of the intestines came out, and death followed. In addition, a large wound 6 centimeters long was inflicted on the left hand, along the metacarpus of the thumb.
Pavel and Fyodor Morozov were buried at the Gerasimovka cemetery. An obelisk with a red star was erected on the grave hill, and a cross was buried next to it with the inscription: “On September 3, 1932, two Morozov brothers died from the evil of a man from a sharp knife - Pavel Trofimovich, born in 1918, and Fyodor Trofimovich.”
Trial of the murder of Pavlik Morozov
During the investigation of the murder, its close connection with the previous case against Pavlik’s father, Trofim Morozov, became clear.
Early trial of Trofim Morozov
Pavel testified at the preliminary investigation, confirming his mother’s words that his father beat his mother and brought into the house things received as payment for issuing false documents (one of the researchers, Yuri Druzhnikov, suggests that Pavel could not have seen this, because his father had not been married for a long time lived with his family). According to Druzhnikov, in the murder case it is noted that “On November 25, 1931, Pavel Morozov submitted a statement to the investigative authorities that his father Trofim Sergeevich Morozov, being the chairman of the village council and being associated with local kulaks, was engaged in forging documents and selling them to kulaks - special settlers." The statement was related to the investigation into the case of a false certificate issued by the Gerasimovsky village council to a special settler; he allowed Trofim to be involved in the case. Trofim Morozov was arrested and tried in February of the following year.
In fact, in the indictment for the murder of the Morozovs, investigator Elizar Vasilyevich Shepelev stated that “Pavel Morozov filed a statement with the investigative authorities on November 25, 1931.” In an interview with journalist Veronica Kononenko and senior justice adviser Igor Titov, Shepelev said:
| I can’t understand why on earth I wrote all this; there is no evidence in the case file that the boy contacted the investigative authorities and that it was for this that he was killed. I probably meant that Pavel gave evidence to the judge when Trofim was tried... It turns out that because of my inaccurately written words the boy is now accused of informing?! But is it a crime to help the investigation or act as a witness in court? And is it possible to blame a person for anything because of one phrase? |
Trofim Morozov and other village council chairmen were arrested on November 26 and 27, the day after the “denunciation.” Based on the results of a journalistic investigation by Evgenia Medyakova, published in the Ural magazine in 1982, it was found that Pavel Morozov was not involved in his father’s arrest. On November 22, 1931, a certain Zvorykin was detained at the Tavda station. He was found to have two blank forms with stamps from the Gerasimovsky Village Council, for which, according to him, he paid 105 rubles. The certificate attached to the case states that before his arrest Trofim was no longer the chairman of the village council, but “the clerk of the Gorodishche general store.” Medyakova also writes that “Tavda and Gerasimovka have more than once received requests from the construction of Magnitogorsk, from many factories, factories and collective farms about whether the citizens (a number of names) are really residents of Gerasimovka.” Consequently, verification of holders of false certificates began. “And most importantly, Medyakova did not find the boy’s testimony in the investigative case! Tatyana Semyonovna’s testimony is there, but Pavlik’s is not! Because he did not make any “statements to the investigative authorities!”
Pavel, following his mother, spoke in court, but in the end was stopped by the judge due to his youth. In the case of Morozov’s murder it is said: “During the trial, son Pavel outlined all the details about his father, his tricks.” The speech delivered by Pavlik is known in 12 versions, mostly dating back to the book by journalist Pyotr Solomein. In a recording from the archive of Solomein himself, this accusatory speech is conveyed as follows:
| Uncles, my father created a clear counter-revolution, I, as a pioneer, am obliged to say about this, my father is not a defender of the interests of October, but is trying in every possible way to help the kulak escape, he stood up for him like a mountain, and I, not as a son, but as a pioneer, ask that my father be brought to justice , because in the future I will not give others the habit of hiding the kulak and clearly violating the party line, and I will also add that my father will now appropriate kulak property, took the bed of the kulukanov Arseny Kulukanov (husband of T. Morozov’s sister and Pavel’s godfather) and wanted to take it from him a haystack, but Kulukanov’s fist did not give him the hay, but said, let him take it better... |
Prosecution version
The version of the prosecution and the court was as follows. On September 3, fist Arseny Kulukanov, having learned about the boys going out to pick berries, conspired with Danila Morozov, who came to his house, to kill Pavel, giving him 5 rubles and asking him to invite Sergei Morozov, “with whom Kulukanov had previously conspired,” to also kill him. Having returned from Kulukanov and having finished harrowing (that is, harrowing, loosening the soil), Danila went home and conveyed the conversation to his grandfather Sergei. The latter, seeing that Danila was taking a knife, left the house without saying a word and went with Danila, telling him: “Let’s go kill, don’t be afraid.” Having found the children, Danila, without saying a word, took out a knife and hit Pavel; Fedya rushed to run, but was detained by Sergei and also stabbed to death by Danila. " After making sure that Fedya was dead, Danila returned to Pavel and stabbed him several more times with a knife.».
The murder of Morozov was widely publicized as a manifestation of kulak terror (against a member of the pioneer organization) and served as the reason for widespread repression on an all-Union scale; in Gerasimovka itself it finally made it possible to organize a collective farm (before that, all attempts were thwarted by the peasants). In Tavda, in the club named after Stalin, a show trial of the alleged murderers took place. At the trial, Danila Morozov confirmed all the charges; Sergei Morozov behaved contradictorily, either confessing or denying guilt. All other defendants denied guilt. The main evidence was a utility knife found on Sergei Morozov, and Danila’s bloody clothes, soaked but not washed by Ksenia (allegedly, Danila had previously slaughtered a calf for Tatyana Morozova).
Verdict of the Ural Regional Court
By the decision of the Ural Regional Court, their own grandfather Sergei (father of Trofim Morozov) and 19-year-old cousin Danil, as well as grandmother Ksenia (as an accomplice) and Pavel’s godfather Arseny Kulukanov, who was his uncle, were found guilty of the murder of Pavel Morozov and his brother Fyodor (as a village kulak - as the initiator and organizer of the murder). After the trial, Arseniy Kulukanov and Danila Morozov were shot, eighty-year-old Sergei and Ksenia Morozov died in prison. Pavlik’s other uncle, Arseny Silin, was also accused of complicity in the murder, but during the trial he was acquitted.
Version of Yu. I. Druzhnikov and criticism of the version
Druzhnikov's version
According to the statements of the writer Yu. I. Druzhnikov, who published the book “Informer 001, or the Ascension of Pavlik Morozov” in the UK in 1987, many circumstances related to the life of Pavel Morozov are distorted by propaganda and are controversial.
In particular, Druzhnikov questions the idea that Pavlik Morozov was a pioneer. According to Druzhnikov, he was declared a pioneer almost immediately after his death (the latter, according to Druzhnikov, was important for the investigation, as it brought his murder under the article of political terror).
Druzhnikov claims that by testifying against his father, Pavlik deserved to be in the village "universal hatred"; they began to call him “Pashka the Kumanist” (communist). Druzhnikov considers the official statements that Pavel actively helped identify "bread squeezers", those who hide weapons, plot crimes against the Soviet regime, etc. According to the author, according to fellow villagers, Pavel was not "a serious informer", because “reporting is, you know, a serious job, but he was such a nit, a petty dirty trick”. According to Druzhnikov, only two such cases were documented in the murder case. "denunciation" .
He considers the behavior of the alleged murderers illogical, who did not take any measures to hide the traces of the crime (they did not drown the corpses in the swamp, throwing them near the road; they did not wash bloody clothes in time; they did not clean the knife from traces of blood, putting it in the place where they look first during a search). All this is especially strange, considering that Morozov’s grandfather was a gendarme in the past, and his grandmother was a professional horse thief.
According to Druzhnikov, the murder was the result of a provocation by the OGPU, organized with the participation of assistant commissioner of the OGPU Spiridon Kartashov and Pavel’s cousin - informant Ivan Potupchik. In this regard, the author describes a document that, according to him, he discovered in the materials of case No. 374 (about the murder of the Morozov brothers). This paper was drawn up by Kartashov and represents the protocol of the interrogation of Potupchik as a witness in the case of the murder of Pavel and Fedor. The document is dated September 4, that is, according to the date, it was drawn up two days before the discovery of the corpses.
According to Yuri Druzhnikov, expressed in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta:
| There was no investigation. The corpses were ordered to be buried before the arrival of the investigator without an examination. Journalists also sat on stage as prosecutors, talking about the political importance of shooting kulaks. The lawyer accused his clients of murder and left amid applause. Different sources report different methods of murder, the prosecutor and the judge were confused about the facts. The murder weapon was a knife found in the house with traces of blood, but Danila was cutting a calf that day - no one checked whose blood it was. The accused grandfather, grandmother, uncle and cousin of Pavlik Danila tried to say that they were beaten and tortured. The shooting of innocent people in November 1932 was the signal for massacres of peasants throughout the country. |
Criticism and refutation of Druzhnikov's statements
Outrage between brother and teacher
| What kind of trial was held over my brother? It's a shame and scary. The magazine called my brother an informer. This is a lie! Pavel always fought openly. Why is he being insulted? Has our family suffered little grief? Who is being bullied? Two of my brothers were killed. The third, Roman, came from the front as an invalid and died young. During the war I was slandered as an enemy of the people. He served ten years in a camp. And then they were rehabilitated. And now the slander against Pavlik. How to withstand all this? They doomed me to torture worse than in the camps. It’s good that my mother didn’t live to see these days... I’m writing, but the tears are choking me. It seems that Pashka is again standing defenseless on the road. ...The editor of "Ogonyok" Korotich on the radio station "Svoboda" said that my brother is a son of a bitch, which means that my mother is too... Yuri Izrailevich Alperovich-Druzhnikov got into our family, drank tea with his mother, sympathized with us, and then published London, a vile book - a clot of such disgusting lies and slander that, after reading it, I had a second heart attack. Z. A. Kabina also fell ill, she kept wanting to sue the author in international court, but where could she - Alperovich lives in Texas and chuckles - try to get him, the teacher’s pension is not enough. Chapters from the book “The Ascension of Pavlik Morozov” by this scribbler have been replicated by many newspapers and magazines, no one takes my protests into account, no one needs the truth about my brother... Apparently, there’s only one thing left for me to do - pour gasoline on myself, and that’s the end of it! |
Criticism of the author and his book
Druzhnikov’s words contradict the memories of Pavel’s first teacher, Larisa Pavlovna Isakova: “I didn’t have time to organize the pioneer detachment in Gerasimovka then; it was created after me by Zoya Kabina<…>. One day I brought a red tie from Tavda, tied it on Pavel, and he ran home joyfully. And at home, his father tore off his tie and beat him terribly. [..] The commune fell apart, and my husband was beaten half to death by fists. Ustinya Potupchik saved me and warned me that Kulakanov and his company were going to be killed. [..] It’s probably since then that Pavlik hated Kulakanova; he was the first to join the pioneers when the detachment was organized.”. Journalist V.P. Kononenko, with reference to Pavel Morozov’s teacher Zoya Kabina, confirms that “it was she who created the first pioneer detachment in the village, which was headed by Pavel Morozov” .
Yuri Druzhnikov stated that Kelly used his work not only in acceptable references, but also by repeating the composition of the book, the selection of details, and descriptions. In addition, Dr. Kelly, according to Druzhnikov, came to the exact opposite conclusion about the role of the OGPU-NKVD in the murder of Pavlik.
According to Dr. Kelly, Mr. Druzhnikov considered Soviet official materials unreliable, but used them when it was beneficial to bolster his case. According to Catriona Kelly, Druzhnikov published, instead of a scientific presentation of criticism of her book, a “denunciation” with the assumption of Kelly’s connection with the “organs.” Dr. Kelly did not find much difference between the books' conclusions and attributed some of Mr. Druzhnikov's criticisms to his lack of knowledge of the English language and English culture.
Investigation of the Main Military Prosecutor's Office, personal inquiries of Alexander Liskin
Alexander Alekseevich Liskin took part in an additional investigation of the case in 1967 and requested murder case No. N-7825-66 from the archives of the KGB of the USSR. In an article published between 1998 and 2001, Liskin pointed to the “massacre” and “falsification” on the part of Inspector Titov, revealed during the investigation. In 1995, Liskin requested official certificates about the alleged criminal record of Pavlik’s father, but the internal affairs bodies of the Sverdlovsk and Tyumen regions did not find such information. Liskin suggested checking the “secret corners of dusty archives” to find the real killers of the Morozov brothers.
Liskin agreed with the arguments of the department editor of the magazine “Man and Law” Veronica Kononenko about the witness nature of Pavlik’s speech at his father’s trial and about the absence of secret denunciations.
Decision of the Supreme Court of Russia
In the spring of 1999, co-chairman of the Kurgan Memorial Society Innokenty Khlebnikov, on behalf of Arseny Kulukanov’s daughter Matryona Shatrakova, sent a petition to the Prosecutor General’s Office to review the decision of the Ural Regional Court, which sentenced the teenager’s relatives to death. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office came to the following conclusion:
The verdict of the Ural Regional Court dated November 28, 1932 and the ruling of the cassation board of the Supreme Court of the USSR dated February 28, 1933 in relation to Arseniy Ignatievich Kulukanov and Ksenia Ilyinichna Morozova are amended: to reclassify their actions from Art. 58-8 of the Criminal Code of the USSR at Art. 17 and 58-8 of the Criminal Code of the USSR, leaving the previous penalty.
Recognize Sergei Sergeevich Morozov and Daniil Ivanovich Morozov as reasonably convicted in the present case for committing a counter-revolutionary crime and not subject to rehabilitation.
The General Prosecutor's Office, which is involved in the rehabilitation of victims of political repression, came to the conclusion that the murder of Pavlik Morozov is purely criminal in nature, and the killers are not subject to rehabilitation on political grounds. This conclusion, together with the materials of an additional audit of case No. 374, was sent to the Supreme Court of Russia, which decided to deny rehabilitation to the alleged killers of Pavlik Morozov and his brother Fedor.
Boris Sopelnyak claimed that he participated in the work of the Department for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression when considering Klebnikov’s petition.
Opinions on the Supreme Court decision
According to Boris Sopelnyak, “at the height of perestroika hysteria [..] the so-called ideologists who were allowed in to the dollar trough tried most of all [to knock out love for the Motherland from young people].” According to Sopelnyak, the Prosecutor General's Office carefully reviewed the case.
According to Maura Reynolds, Matryona Shatrakova died three months before the Supreme Court's decision arrived in 2001, and the postman refused to give the decision to her daughter.
Perpetuation of the name
- On July 2, 1936, a resolution was adopted by the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on the construction of a monument to Pavlik Morozov in Moscow at the entrance to Red Square.
- Morozov's name was given to Gerasimov and other collective farms, schools, and pioneer squads.
- Monuments to Pavlik Morozov were erected in Moscow (1948, in the children's park named after him on Krasnaya Presnya; demolished in 1991), the village of Gerasimovka (1954) in Sverdlovsk (1957), the village of Russky Aktash, Almetyevsky district of the Republic of Tatarstan, in Ostrov and in Kaliningrad.
- Novovagankovsky Lane in Moscow was renamed Pavlik Morozov Street in 1939, and a club named after him was organized in the Church of St. Nicholas on Three Mountains.
- The name was given to the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Puppet Theater.
- Poems and songs were written about Pavlik Morozov, and an opera of the same name was written.
- In 1935, film director Sergei Eisenstein began working on the script “Bezhin Meadow” by Alexander Rzheshevsky about Pavlik Morozov. The work could not be completed because, based on the draft version of the film, Eisenstein was accused of “deliberately downplaying ideological content” and “exercising in formalism.”
- Maxim Gorky called Pavlik “one of the small miracles of our era.”
- In 1954, composer Yuri Balkashin composed the musical poem Pavlik Morozov.
- In 1955, he was listed under No. 1 in the Book of Honor of the All-Union Pioneer Organization named after. V.I. Lenin. Kolya Myagotin was listed under No. 2 in the same book.
- In Yekaterinburg there is a park named after Pavlik Morozov. In the park there was a monument depicting Pavlik. In the 90s, the monument was torn from its pedestal, lay in the bushes for some time and disappeared.
- In Turinsk, Sverdlovsk region, there was a Pavlik Morozov square; in the center of the square there was a monument depicting Pavlik in full height and with a pioneer tie. In the 90s, the monument was stolen by unidentified persons. Now the square has been renamed “Historical Square”.
- In Chelyabinsk on the Malaya Yuzhno-Uralskaya Railway there is a station named after Pavlik Morozov.
- In the Children's Park of Simferopol there is a bust of P. Morozov on the Alley of Pioneer Heroes.
- In the Children's Park of the city of Ukhta (Komi Republic), a monument to P. Morozov was unveiled on June 20, 1968. According to other sources, in 1972. The author is the sculptor A.K. Ambrulyavius.
Many streets in cities and villages of the former Soviet Union are named in honor of Pavlik Morozov, many streets still bear this name: in Perm and Krasnokamsk (streets), in Ufa (street and lane), Tula (street and passage), Ashe - the regional center Chelyabinsk region,
Pavel Timofeevich Morozov was born in 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka, Sverdlovsk region. He organized the first one in his native village and actively campaigned for the creation of a collective farm. The kulaks, which included Timofey Morozov, actively opposed Soviet power and hatched a conspiracy to disrupt grain procurements. Pavlik accidentally learned about the sabotage that was being prepared. The young pioneer stopped at nothing and exposed the kulaks. The villagers, who learned that the son had handed over his own father to the authorities, brutally dealt with Pavlik and his younger brother. They were brutally killed in the forest.
Many books have been written about the feat of Pavlik Morozov, songs and poems have been written about him. The first song about Pavlik Morozov was written by the then unknown young writer Sergei Mikhalkov. This work made him overnight a very popular and sought-after author. In 1948, a street in Moscow was named after Pavlik Morozov and a monument was erected.
Pavlik Morozov was not the first
There are at least eight known cases where children were killed for denunciations. These events occurred before the murder of Pavlik Morozov.
In the village of Sorochintsy, Pavel Teslya also denounced his father, for which he paid with his life five years earlier than Morozov.
Seven more similar incidents occurred in different villages. Two years before the death of Pavlik Morozov, informer Grisha Hakobyan was stabbed to death in Azerbaijan.
Even before Pavlik’s death, the newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda reported cases in which young informers were brutally killed by fellow villagers. The texts of the children’s denunciations, with all the details, were also published here.
Followers of Pavlik Morozov
Brutal reprisals against young informers continued. In 1932, three children were killed for denunciations, in 1934 - six, and in 1935 - nine.
Noteworthy is the story of Prony Kolybin, who denounced his mother, accusing her of stealing socialist property. A poor woman collected fallen ears of corn on a collective farm field in order to somehow feed her family, including Pronya himself. The woman was imprisoned, and the boy was sent to rest in Artek.
Mitya Gordienko also noticed a couple on the collective farm field collecting fallen ears of corn. As a result, following the denunciation of the young pioneer, the man was shot, and the woman was sentenced to ten years in prison. Mitya Gordienko received an award watch, “Lenin’s grandchildren,” new boots and a pioneer suit as a gift.
A Chukotka boy, whose name was Yatyrgin, learned that reindeer herders were planning to take their herds to Alaska. He reported this to the Bolsheviks, for which the enraged reindeer herders hit Yatyrgin on the head with an ax and threw him into a pit. Thinking the boy was already dead. However, he managed to survive and get to “his people.” When Yatyrgin was solemnly accepted as a pioneer, it was decided to give him a new name - Pavlik Morozov, with which he lived to old age.
Pavel Trofimovich Morozov, who in Soviet times was a role model for pioneers, according to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, was born on November 14, 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka in a peasant family. During the period of collectivization, the boy, according to the official version, became an active participant in the fight against the kulaks, organized and led the first pioneer detachment in his native village.
Official Soviet history says that at the end of 1931, Pavlik convicted his father Trofim Morozov, then the chairman of the village council, of selling blank forms with a seal to special settlers from among the dispossessed. Based on the teenager’s testimony, Morozov Sr. was sentenced to ten years. Following this, Pavlik reported about bread hidden from a neighbor, accused his aunt’s husband of stealing state grain and stated that part of the stolen grain was in the possession of his own grandfather, Sergei Morozov. He spoke about the property hidden from confiscation by the same uncle, and actively participated in the actions, looking for hidden goods together with representatives of the village council.
According to the official version, Pavlik was killed in the forest on September 3, 1932, when his mother left the village for a short time. The killers, as determined by the investigation, turned out to be Pavlik’s cousin, 19-year-old Danila, and Pavlik’s 81-year-old grandfather, Sergei Morozov. Pavlik’s grandmother, 79-year-old Ksenia Morozova, was declared an accomplice to the crime, and Pavlik’s uncle, 70-year-old Arseny Kulukanov, was recognized as its organizer. At a show trial in a district club, they were all sentenced to death. Pavlik’s father, Trofim, was also shot, although at that time he was far in the North.
After the boy’s death, his mother, Tatyana Morozova, received an apartment in Crimea as compensation for her son, part of which she rented out to guests. The woman traveled a lot around the country with stories about Pavlik’s feat. She died in 1983 in her apartment, filled with bronze busts of Pavlik.
The name of Morozov was assigned to Gerasimovsky and other collective farms, schools, pioneer squads and was the first to be included in the Book of Honor of the All-Union Pioneer Organization named after V.I. Lenin. Monuments to Pavlik Morozov were erected in Moscow (1948), the village of Gerasimovka (1954) and Sverdlovsk (1957). Poems and songs were written about Pavlik, an opera of the same name was written, and the great Eisenstein tried to make a film about him. However, the director's idea was not realized.
The myth of the “pioneer hero” created by Soviet propaganda lasted for decades. However, at the end of the 1980s, publications appeared that not only debunked the myth about Pavlik Morozov, who began to be called a traitor and informer, but also questioned the very existence of a person with that name. First of all, doubts about the existence of the “hero” arose due to discrepancies with the dates of birth and death. His speech at the trial, in which he exposed his father, exists in 12 versions. In fact, it is impossible to even restore the appearance of Pavlik Morozov, since there are many different descriptions. A number of publications questioned the fact that the teenager really was a pioneer.
In 1997, the administration of the Tavdinsky district decided to insist on a review of the criminal case regarding the murder of Pavlik Morozov, and in the spring of 1999, members of the Kurgan Memorial Society sent a petition to the Prosecutor General's Office to review the decision of the Ural Regional Court, which sentenced the teenager's relatives to death.
His teacher Lyudmila Isakova presented her version of the story of Pavlik Morozov. Moreover, this version was confirmed by Pavel’s younger brother Alexey. According to Isakova’s story, Pavlik’s father drank, abused his sons and, in the end, left the family for another woman. Perhaps it was precisely this purely everyday motive that explained the desire of the “pioneer hero” to take revenge on his father.
The General Prosecutor's Office, which is involved in the rehabilitation of victims of political repression, came to the conclusion that the murder of Pavlik Morozov is purely criminal in nature, and, therefore, the criminals are not subject to rehabilitation on political grounds. In April 1999, the Supreme Court agreed with the opinion of the Prosecutor General's Office.
In Chelyabinsk, a children's railway bears the name of Pavlik Morozov; his bas-relief adorns the alley of pioneer heroes on the Scarlet Field. In Moscow, the monument to the “pioneer hero”, which stood in the children’s park of the same name on Druzhinnikovskaya Street, was demolished in 1991, and a wooden chapel was built in its place.
Facts from the life of Pavel Morozov
According to the latest conclusions of historians, Pavel Morozov was not a member of the pioneer organization. In the Book of Honor of the All-Union Pioneer Organization named after. V.I. Lenin, he was listed only in 1955, 23 years after his death.
At the trial, Pavel Morozov did not speak against his father and did not write denunciations against him. During the preliminary investigation, he gave evidence that his father beat his mother and brought into the house things received as payment for issuing false documents.
Trofim Morozov was subjected to criminal prosecution not for concealing grain, but for falsifying documents that he supplied to members of a counter-revolutionary group and persons hiding from Soviet power.
The material was prepared based on information from open sources
Who is he, Pavlik Morozov? In the post-war years, many controversies flared up around his legendary personality. Some saw a hero in his face, others argued that he was an informer and had not accomplished any feat. The information that has been reliably established is not enough to restore all the details of the event. Therefore, many of the nuances were added by the journalists themselves. Official confirmation is only the fact of his death from a knife, the date of birth and death. All other events serve as a reason for discussion.
Official version
The memories of his fellow countrymen indicate that he studied well and was a leader among his peers. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia contains information that Pavel Morozov organized the first pioneer detachment in his village. The boy grew up in a large family. At an early age, he lost his father, who left for another woman, leaving the children in the care of his mother. Despite the fact that many worries fell on Pavel’s shoulders after his father left, he showed a great desire to study. His teacher L.P. Isakova later spoke about this.
At his young age, he firmly believed in communist ideas. In 1930, according to the official version, he reported on his father, who, as chairman of the village council, forged certificates for kulaks stating that they were allegedly dispossessed.
As a result, Father Pavel was sentenced to 10 years. The boy paid with his life for his heroic act: he and his younger brother were stabbed to death in the forest while the boys were picking berries. All members of the Morozov family were later accused of the massacre. His own paternal grandfather Sergei and 19-year-old cousin Danila were found guilty of murder, as well as grandmother Ksenia (as an accomplice) and Pavel’s godfather, Arseny Kulukanov, who was his uncle (as a village kulak - as the initiator and organizer of the murder) . After the trial, Arseniy Kulukanov and Danila Morozov were shot, eighty-year-old Sergei and Ksenia Morozov died in prison. Pavlik’s other uncle, Arseny Silin, was also accused of complicity in the murder, but during the trial he was acquitted.
It is interesting that Pavlik’s father, convicted of forgery of documents, returned from the camps three years later. He participated in the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and, after working for three years, returned home with an order for shock work, and then settled in Tyumen.
The Soviet government regarded the action of Pavel Morozov as a feat for the good of the people. He believed in a bright future and made a significant contribution to the building of communism, for which he paid with his life. They made Pavlik a real hero, while hiding some dubious facts from his life. Over time, this whole story turned into a legend, which became an example for many compatriots.
Heroism or betrayal?
In the post-war years, historians, raising archives, ran into serious contradictions. A version has emerged that Pavlik did not inform on his father, but simply gave testimony. And law enforcement agencies detained my father, as they say, “in the heat of the moment.” Considering that his father was practically a stranger to him, who left his family and did not care about it at all, the action becomes understandable from a logical point of view. Perhaps, with his testimony, Pavel was simply trying to take revenge.
Today, Pavlik’s act is viewed by some as a betrayal. In any case, this story has not yet been fully revealed, so many still adhere to the official version.