The Morozov case, Stalin's "child martyr"

The Pioneer Organization was something like the Soviet version of the American Boy Scouts. If they had three million members in 1973, at the same time the pioneers numbered twenty-five million. Not that signing up was mandatory, but not signing up made you a suspect to the authorities. They went on excursions, camped and did sports and cultural activities. They were like scouts. But instead of God, his oath of allegiance was “to the cause of Lenin and Stalin.”

That is, to the cause of the working class, which was the important thing; even more than the family itself. Hence the legend of Pavlik Morózov (1918-1932), who was called “Pioneer 001”.

The story was told at summer camps. At night and around a bonfire, the monitor would ask: “Does anyone know who Pavlik Morozov is?” Of course they knew, but the children loved to hear that story that, in the dark, and in the middle of a forest, must have been very scary.

Pavel Morózov – or Pavlik, as his family called him – was born in Gerasimovka, a small town 350 kilometers northeast of Yekaterinburg, the capital of the vast Ural region. It was, as they say, a place in the middle of nowhere. A dense forest separated him from the world, and the closest city – to say the least – was Tavdá, about 40 kilometers away. This, the remoteness, allowed the richest peasants to escape the collectivization of land initiated by Stalin in 1928. Some had a lot and others very little, and little Pavel rebelled against it.

He was an exemplary student and, as a member of the Pioneers, a leading activist for collectivization, and he was only thirteen years old. One day he found out that his father, Trofim Morozov, was the worst criminal. Taking advantage of his position as chairman of the local kolkhoz (collective farm), he had been forging documents to help the kulaks. “Kulak” was the way of referring to peasants who owned land, those who hired workers and accumulated wealth; that is to say, true anti-communists and enemies of the State.

Although it was his father, Pavel denounced him to the authorities, who took him into custody. “It’s me, your father!” He yelled at him during the trial, to which the boy replied: “I’m not acting like a son, but like a pioneer.”

A year later, on September 3, 1932, a young man from the village discovered the bodies of Pavel and his little brother, Fedya, who was barely eight years old. Someone had stabbed them while picking berries.

The police concluded that they had been killed by members of their own family, in revenge for the tip-off. Arseni Kulukanov, the uncle, was the instigator, and Ksenia Morozova, the grandmother, had covered up the crime. The material authors were Sergei Morózov and Danila Morózov, grandfather and cousin of the children respectively. They were the “rich” part of the Morózovs, some landowners who, since Trofim disappeared, had tried to live by exploiting Pavel, his brothers and his mother.

A spectacular trial was held in Tavda, with journalists from all over the USSR. All four were sentenced to die by firing squad, and his father was taken out of the gulag he was in and shot. So far the story as it was told in the Pioneer camps.

It became popular after a speech by the writer and politician Maxim Gorky in 1933, in which he said that Pavlik had understood that “a person who is a blood relative may well be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person should not be saved.”

Schools, youth clubs, streets and squares throughout the Eastern Bloc were named after the “martyred boy”, and statues, books, songs (like this one below) and even an opera (gruesome, by the way) were made for him.

It was a way of encouraging young people to denounce their elders, which the party exploded to exhaustion. That made many fear to talk about certain things in front of their children. Not so much because they were mistrusted as because at school they were led to say what they heard at home.

Now, as the historian Orlando Figes explained in Those Who Whisper: The Repression in Stalin’s Russia (2007), despite the official discourse, betraying one’s own family was never well seen. Even Stalin himself thought so, who privately said this about Pavlik: “What a little pig, denouncing his own father.” The intentional accusations – the minority – generally came from broken families; It was the excuse of some wayward son to get rid of his parents.

Still, Pavlik was officially a hero, and every so often the newspapers reported young people who had followed his example. But nothing lasts forever. In the mid-1980s, when communism was showing signs of exhaustion, Mikhail Gorbachev began a process of political (glásnost) and economic (perestroika) opening.

So, the writer Yuri Druzhnikov (1933-2008) asked himself a question: did the famous Pavel Morozov really denounce his father? The first contradiction was obvious: no two photos of Pavlik were the same. Of course, he was always blond and blue-eyed, beauty in the Slavic style. In addition, the story differed significantly depending on who told it, and it is well known that lies collapse because of the details.

He couldn’t see the investigative reports because the KGB didn’t give him access, so he went to Gerasimovka to meet the witnesses who were still alive. She was told no, that Pavlik was not a pioneer, much less a communist activist.

He also spoke with Spiridon Kartashov, a former OGPU agent (the former KGB) who was involved in the murder investigation. He found him living in a rickety apartment, two hundred kilometers from Gerasimovka.

The old spy remembered that case with pride. According to what he told the writer, at that time the OGPU gave bonuses to its agents based on the peasants who “deskulakizaran”; that is to say, that they dispossessed and that they inserted in collective farms. In that area of ​​the Urals, collectivization was not going well at all, but after the execution of the four Morozovs it was easy to get the other neighbors on the side. Kartashov cashed his check, and his superiors congratulated him.

Seeing this, Druzhnikov deduced that the boy was most likely murdered by the OGPU agents themselves; maybe that Kartashov he interviewed. It was about finding an excuse to exterminate some kulaks and scare the rest into accepting collectivization. By the way, by turning the dead into a pioneer, they were giving propaganda a “martyred child” that would feed the culture of the tip-off.

He explained it in Informer 001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov (1988), a book first published in the UK and arriving in Russia immediately after the dissolution of the USSR. The reaction there was furious, with a plethora of journalists calling him a liar.

The one who took the longest to deny it was the journalist Veronika Kononenko. She did have access to the reports drawn up on site by the investigators. It was a surprise to find that all the interrogations are transcribed. In them, three of the condemned clearly recognize their involvement. The only one who didn’t was Arseni Kulukanov, the uncle.

Danila and Sergei, the cousin and grandfather, explained that they plunged a knife into Pavlik’s belly and then ran after the brother. This is consistent with the autopsy, which Kononenko found among the documents of “Case 374”. Pavlik was lying on the ground, with two wounds – on the chest and on the stomach – and with a bag over his head; according to the killers, they put it on him to make sure he died. About fifteen meters away was the body of Fedya. He had a cut on his hand – he fought for his life – and another on his belly, through which his guts came out. As if this were not enough, at the Morózovs’ house the agents found a shirt and pants stained with blood.

Another thing that Kononenko questioned is Druzhnikov’s way of selecting his interviewees, those who told him that Pavlik was an ignorant and rather troublesome teenager and that his father was not an evil kulak. The journalist spoke with Alekséi, Pavlik’s brother. He told him that he was a hero for daring to denounce his own father, that for this reason some kulaks murdered him, and that anyone who denied it was a liar.

Who is to be believed? Either he was the intelligent communist and pioneer leader or the illiterate and troublesome child. Either he was killed by his family as a sneak or he was the OGPU. Everything at once is impossible.

The umpteenth person who came up with this story was Catriona Kelly, a professor at Cambridge University specializing in Russian history. As Kononenko did, she went for the case file; this time, to the Federal Security Service (FSB), heir to the KGB. She, however, obtained unpublished reports, those that were in the FSB file with the “secret” stamp.

The first thing that struck him was how poorly written they were, with abundant misspellings and childish syntax. There were also no fingerprints taken or anything to indicate serious police work.

This is what could be expected from Bykov, the Tavda police chief, who was the first to take up the investigation. It was a provincial police officer with hardly any studies. The same can be said of the OGPU agents, who were not sophisticated spies from Moscow, but what the agency had stationed in that remote region.

None of these men had the authority or the intelligence to organize a conspiracy and murder a child without a trace. Also, as Kelly points out, they didn’t need it either. Although suggestive, Druzhnikov’s theory ignores that those were years of Stalinist terror. Since August 1932, moreover, a law authorized them to arrest and execute rebellious kulaks without the need for evidence. If they wanted to go after those who opposed collectivization, that was as easy as that.

So who killed Pavlik? Before answering that, one might ask why. The official version claimed that because he denounced his father. However, in the judicial files of Tavdá there is not a single proof of that denunciation. Neither of that spectacular trial in which Pavlik blurted out the famous “I’m not acting like a son, but like a pioneer!”

It is impossible that a story like that – perfect for official discourse, as it encouraged denunciation – was not used by propaganda. But it was not until a year later that the news of the infanticide broke that the trial against Trofim began to be discussed.

Most likely, Kelly believes, the father left town of his own free will. In those years, being the chairman of a kolkhoz was a dangerous position. To get around the draconian guidelines of collectivization, many forced the laws, exposing themselves to lawsuits. Maybe he left before they arrested him.

Then there is the matter of the kulaks. Reading the hagiographies of “Pioneer 001”, it almost seems that the Morozovs – his grandparents, uncle and cousin – were tsarist-style landowners, living off the misery of others.

The reality is that everyone in Gerasimovka was just as miserable. We are talking about a newly created people, made up of landless peasants from Belarus and European Russia. In 1868, at the initiative of the then government of the tsars, millions of settlers crossed the Urals to start anew in Siberia. The most fertile lands fell into the hands of the former, and the latter had to settle for areas such as the Tavdá district.

There, a harsh winter gave way to the mud season, when everything became muddy from the thaw. It was the time of greatest famine, with the last harvest practically exhausted.

In Gerasimovka there was no electricity, no running water, and no telephone. From the inventories carried out by the police, it can be deduced that in the entire town there was only one mattress. Those Morozovs whom the propaganda described as landowners were distinguished from the rest only by the fact that they had two head of cattle, instead of one. That they resisted collectivization is certain. The whole village did it, which is why the Tavda region was known among the authorities as a “nest of kulaks”. As Orlando Figes explains in his book, it is normal for them to fight to keep what little they had and that they had worked so hard to earn.

As for the boy, he was not a pioneer, because there was no such organization or anything like it there. Gerasimovka barely had a school, which only opened from figs to figs, when some teacher had the bad luck of being sent to that godforsaken place.

Pavlik could hardly be the convinced communist and persuasive activist, for he was illiterate. Rumor had it that he had gotten into the habit of reporting people, but Kelly thinks he did it out of survival instincts. He was a malnourished child, as seen in the only surviving authentic photograph of him. The time she wasn’t helping his mother was spent trying to put something in her mouth. Hence the berries they found next to his body.

Being on good terms with the authorities might give you a little perk, and that’s where Kelly’s theory goes. There is something in the reports that Kononenko did not notice. A few weeks before the murder, Pavlik had denounced a family in the village, the Shatrakovs, for illegal possession of a weapon. Then there are their fights. On the same days he had a notorious run-in with his cousin Danila over a horse’s harness.

At first, the police officers followed that line of investigation. In fact, Efrem Shatrakov came to admit that he had killed him over the gun issue. However, then the strategy of the agents changed radically. It’s an oddity Kononenko missed because he read the transcripts uncritically.

There is something that a chekist would never write down: torture, which was the usual method of the OGPU. Danila Morozov claimed to be innocent, until something made him change his testimony. Who knows what happened in that shed, but Kelly discovered a medical report regarding her grandmother, Ksenia Morozova, who had to have an ovary removed.

Reading between the lines of the dossier, the writer was able to get a rough idea of ​​what happened. At first, the Tavda police targeted the two most likely suspects, Danila Morozov and Efrem Shatrakov, who were at odds with the boy over a harness and a pistol respectively. However, as soon as the OGPU took over the investigation, they put forward the theory that the killers had to be kulaks.

The Shatrakovs left the scene simply because they were too poor to be kulaks. Only the Morózovs remained, whom they decided to turn into the bad guys, using torture if necessary.

Anyway, it is possible that Danila, Efrem, or both of them together killed the child, but it would have been because of a trivial dispute. Or perhaps he was a wild animal, or an escaped prisoner from the many labor camps in the region. Who knows. The point is that the witnesses ended up telling the agents what they wanted to hear, not what they knew. The OGPU got its “kulaks” and incidentally invented the story of denouncing the father and the pioneer child, pure gold for propaganda.

It remains to be seen why Alekséi, Pavlik’s brother, clung to the official version all his life. He took the secret to his grave, but the truth is that when that happened he was too young to remember. More important, perhaps, is that his life and his mother’s life improved dramatically when they became the family of a martyr.

Also that of the inhabitants of Gerasimovka, which became an international tourist destination (in the Eastern Bloc). The road was paved, electricity and telephones arrived, and a model museum and collective farm were opened.

They were sweet years, which ended when the USSR fell. It would have been a good time for the FSB to tell what it knew, but no. The usual version was kept.