A Designer Childhood

Moscow Times ^ | August 19, 2005 | Jamey Gambrell

[Tailgunner Joe]

Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero
By Catriona Kelly
Granta Books
352 pp. 17.99 pounds

Every society has models of childhood that express the aspirations and fears of the culture at large. They may be cautionary tales or sagas of triumph. Elaborated in stories that generally contain elements of both legend and contemporary life, these narratives arise over time through a natural process of accretion. New details are gradually layered over ancient plots, subtly altering storylines or shifting the moral emphasis.

What happens, then, when a society tries to come up with its own models from scratch? This, in essence, is the subject of Catriona Kelly's new book, "Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero," which examines the historical evidence surrounding the life and death of the Soviet Union's most famous child, Pavel Morozov. He was, the story went, an exemplary Young Pioneer in the 1930s, whose devotion to the Soviet cause was so great and so righteous that he denounced his own father, chairman of the village soviet, to the authorities for hoarding grain. The vicious denouement of this generational conflict secured the boy a place in Soviet history: He was murdered by a group of "kulak" relatives, allegedly in revenge for his denunciation.

Generations of Soviet citizens grew up with the Morozov story, in one version or another. Illustrated biographies of Pavlik were written for children, poems and songs were composed, movies were made and Socialist Realist paintings contributed iconic images of the boy to the national subconscious. After World War II, statues of Pavlik were erected all over the country, and playgrounds, streets and schools were named for him. Almost anyone born before 1980 has heard of Pavlik and his heroic deeds. Few, however, may recall much more than the general outline of the Morozov affair. This is because, as Kelly's book amply shows, the "factual" details changed over time, becoming essentially irrelevant. Fact was a relative concept in the Soviet Union; it was subject to constant adjustment, even complete metamorphosis, to suit the ideological requirements of the moment.

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

As it turns out -- not surprisingly -- there are few if any facts in the Morozov affair that can be taken at face value. There is no record of Pavlik's famous denunciation of his father, Trofim; no proof, indeed, that Trofim was ever tried for anything. There is only scant evidence that the boy's father served as chair of the village soviet, and even then, not at the time of the alleged denunciation. Gossip and hearsay suggest that Trofim left his wife and children to live with another woman. There is, however, plenty of evidence in official records of animosity between Pavlik's paternal relatives and his mother.

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

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

This turned out to be an unexpectedly difficult, tedious process, as Kelly's book relates. Pavlik's image had to be cleaned up and required constant adjustment. His hair color, given in the coroner's report as dark, became blond and "shining," making him more classically "Russian." Though he was probably barely literate -- a school was opened in the village only a year or two before his death, and much of his family was demonstrably illiterate -- he became a fastidious, outstanding student who helped other children with their schoolwork. He was said to have been the life support of his mother and three younger brothers, his father having been "exiled" after Pavlik's denunciation. He was likewise portrayed as an active Young Pioneer, though no established Pioneer group is on record in his village. In some versions of the story, Pavlik denounced his father for hoarding grain; in others for forging documents.

Turning fairy tales into reality (a favorite slogan of the Soviet 1930s) was far easier than turning reality into a fairy tale. Despite the support of such titans as Maxim Gorky, who wanted to see a monument to Pavlik on Red Square, the Morozov myth never took off quite as it was meant to. The age-old taboo against betraying family members ran deep -- even Josef Stalin reportedly disliked the notion of making a hero out of a boy who acted against his father. However, the story was never completely shelved, either, and enjoyed something of a renaissance in the post-Stalin era (one wonders if the tale of filial betrayal for society's greater good was deemed more acceptable after Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 speech denouncing Stalin's crimes). Ultimately, "the fact that Pavlik's supreme act was denunciation," Kelly writes, "proved embarrassing even to Soviet patriots." Fiction, specifically the wildly popular 1940 series "Timur and His Team" by children's writer Arkady Gaidar, proved far more pliable and successful in promoting model behavior for Soviet youth.

These days, if young Russians have heard of Pavlik Morozov, it's probably through chastushki, traditional Russian folk limericks. The entire pantheon of Soviet leaders and heroes, from Vladimir Lenin to Yury Gagarin, made its way into the chastushka. Most of the political ones range from bawdy to bizarrely obscene; others, like the one about Pavlik that Kelly quotes, have the black humor of "Lizzie Borden took an axe / and gave her mother forty whacks. / And when she saw what she had done / she gave her father forty-one." Like the Lizzie Borden doggerel, the rhyme has the story wrong, but that is no doubt the way it will remain in popular memory:

Daddy's lying in the street,
Soaked with blood from head to feet.
His little son -- oh what a shame!
Was playing a Pavlik Morozov game!

[SunkenCiv]

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