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Pavlik Morozov betrayed his father. The true story of Pavlik Morozov (1 photo)

7 August 2017, 10:06

Pavlik Morozov was born on November 14, 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka, Turin 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 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 extradition fake certificates dispossessed of their belonging to 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 ex-husband, for many years I didn’t dare visit my native places. 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 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 spoke about him only in the late 1980s, when a campaign of persecution against Pavlik began at the height of Perestroika

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 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 him younger brother went to 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, right cheek 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 per chest from the right side in the area of 5-6 ribs, the second superficial wound in the epigastric region, the 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 from the right side (from the Poupart ligament) measuring 3 centimeter, through which part of the intestines came out, and death followed. In addition, at the left hand, along the metacarpus thumb, a large wound 6 centimeters long was inflicted.

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, people died from the evil of sharp knife two Morozov brothers - 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.

Pavel testified preliminary investigation, confirming the mother’s words that the father beat the 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 see this because the father had not lived with the family for a long time). 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 in February next year we judge.

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 didn’t 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...

The version of the prosecution and the court was as follows. On September 3, the fist Arseny Kulukanov, having learned about the boys leaving for berries, conspired with Danila Morozov, who came to his house, to kill Pavel, giving him 5 rubles and asking him to invite also Sergei Morozov, “with whom Kulukanov had previously conspired,” for the murder. 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).

Uralsky Rabochiy correspondent V. Mor presented the version of the prosecution as generally accepted. In addition, a similar version was put forward in an article by Vitaly Gubarev in Pionerskaya Pravda.

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 Danila, 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 he was acquitted during the trial.

According to the statements of the writer Yuri 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 conceal weapons, plot crimes against Soviet power etc. According to the author, according to fellow villagers, Pavel was not "serious informer", because “to inform is, you know, serious work, and he was such a nit, a little 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 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 two sibling Pavel - informant of 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. Various sources report different ways murders, 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.

After the release of Druzhnikov’s book, Veronica Kononenko spoke in the newspaper “Soviet Russia” and the magazine “Man and Law” with harsh criticism of this literary investigation, assessing Druzhnikov’s book as slanderous and full of fraudulently collected information. In support, she cited a letter from Alexei Morozov, the brother of the late Pavel Morozov, according to which Pavel’s teacher Z. A. Kabin wanted to sue Druzhnikov in an international court for distorting her memories.

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 were 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!

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; Zoya Kabina created it after me. 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”

According to an article by Vladimir Bushin in the newspaper Zavtra, Druzhnikov’s version that the killers were “a certain Kartashev and Potupchik,” the first of whom was an “OGPU detective,” is slanderous. Bushin refers to Veronica Kononenko, who found “Spiridon Nikitich Kartashov himself” and Pavel Morozov’s brother, Alexey. Pointing out that real name Druzhnikova - Alperovich, Bushin claims that in addition to using the “beautiful Russian pseudonym Druzhnikov,” he “earned the trust” of Pavel Morozov’s former teacher Larisa Pavlovna Isakova, using another name - his editorial colleague I.M. Achildiev. Along with asserting Kartashov’s non-involvement in the OGPU, Bushin accuses Alperovich-Druzhnikov of deliberate distortions and manipulation of facts to suit his views and beliefs.

In 2005, Oxford University professor Catriona Kelly published the book Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero. Dr. Kelly argued in the ensuing controversy that “although there are traces of silence and concealment of minor facts by OGPU workers, there is no reason to believe that the murder itself was provoked by them.”

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 conclusions of the books and attributed some of Mr. Druzhnikov's criticisms to his lack of knowledge 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 out the “massacre” and “falsification” with sides 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 editor of the department of the magazine “Man and Law” Veronica Kononenko regarding the witness nature of Pavlik’s speech at his father’s trial and the absence of secret denunciations.

e with the materials of additional verification 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.

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.

On November 14, 1918, Pavlik Morozov, perhaps the most famous pioneer hero, was born. For this date, we have put together five main facts from the biography of this boy, who went down in history as a traitor to his own relatives.
Parents
Pavel Morozov was born in the village of Gerasimovka, Turin district, Tobolsk province. The mother of the future “hero,” according to friends, was “pretty-faced and very kind.” His father Trofim often beat his wife and children. And then he left his family completely, going to another woman who lived nearby. The Soviet government gave Trofim Morozov the post of head of the local village council. He openly abused this position: he took for himself things confiscated from the dispossessed, and sold certificates allowing the “kulaks” to leave their place of exile. It was one of these inquiries that Trofim Morozov was caught in 1931. He was put under investigation and tried. 13-year-old Pavlik was a witness at the trial; he testified against his father. Here is an excerpt from them:
“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 father, 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 from him take a haystack..."
Trofim Morozov was found guilty and given 10 years in the camps. The indictment stated:
“As chairman of the village council, he was friends with the kulaks, sheltered their farms from taxation, and after leaving the village council, he contributed to the escape of special settlers by selling documents.”
Trofim Morozov was sent to the construction of the White Sea Canal. Three years later he was released - “for hard work.” Upon his release, he settled in Tyumen.
Life

Pavlik Morozov (in the center, in a cap) with classmates; next to it, with a flag - Danila Morozov (1930)
Pavel’s teacher recalled poverty in their village:
“The school that I 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 sat 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, local newspapers arrived very rarely.”
In such difficult conditions, Pavel Morozov had to provide for his family; after his father left, he found himself the eldest man in the house.
Betrayal
After Pavlik’s father was imprisoned, the boy performed a number of other “feats” in relation to his own loved ones. He reported “to the right place” about the bread that the neighbor had hidden. He accused his aunt's husband of stealing government grain and stated that his grandfather had some of the stolen goods. He said that his uncle hid part of his property from confiscation. Following his reputation, the teenager, together with representatives of the village council, participated in actions to search for “food surpluses” subject to confiscation from the “kulaks.”
Death
According to the official version, on September 3, 1931, Pavlik’s mother left the village to sell a calf. The teenager, along with his brother Fyodor, went into the forest to pick berries, where they were later found - stabbed to death.
From the incident scene inspection report:
“Pavel Morozov was lying 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 the arm was also cut to the bone with a knife.”
The investigation established that the killers were Pavlik's cousin Danila, his grandfather Sergei Morozov and grandmother Ksenia Morozova. The organizer of the crime was recognized as the uncle of the pioneer hero. All of them were sentenced to to the highest degree. Father Pavlik was also shot, although at that time he was far away, in the North.
Memory
After the death of the children, Morozov’s mother was given an apartment in Crimea as compensation. She traveled a lot around the country with stories about her son’s exploits. She died in her apartment, filled with busts of Pavlik.
The name of Pavlik Morozov was given to Gerasimovsky and other collective farms, schools, pioneer camps, squads and was listed first in the Book of Honor of the All-Union Pioneer Organization named after. V.I. Lenin. Monuments to the first pioneer hero were erected in Moscow, in the village of Gerasimovka and in Sverdlovsk. Poems and songs were written about him, an opera of the same name was written, and they even tried to make a movie. In Chelyabinsk, the children's railway still bears his name.
source

The key figure in this story is Pavlik’s father Trofim Sergeevich Morozov. He was a hero civil war, commander of the 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 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 the bandits.

It would be a mistake to think that the Purtovs were ideological fighters against the Soviets, avenging their violated freedom. In 1919, Osip, Mikhail and Grigory Purtov were mobilized into Kolchak’s army, but they immediately surrendered to the Reds and were sent 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 formed a gang, became famous for their bloody reprisals against supporters of Soviet power. 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 Elan party cell.

The voice of reason tells me that I should have slapped the bandits on the spot, and written in the report that, they say, they put up desperate resistance and were liquidated. But the Elan Bolsheviks turned out to be humanists and decided to do everything according to the law: first a trial, and then execution. The court turned out to be fantastically lenient towards the gang of murderers and robbers: taking into account the poor origin and crocodile tears of the repentant bandits, they were given only 10 years in the camps.

But they didn’t stay in the camps either. Two years later they were released as reformed and allegedly due to their father’s illness. Returning home, the brothers immediately returned to their robber trade. They were detained, but escaped from custody. With the beginning of collectivization, dispossessed people from the European part of the country began to be exiled to Siberia, and this contingent willingly joined the Purtov gang.

What is noteworthy is that until the beginning of the 30s, the families of bandits 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. Purtov’s youngest son Peter received five years in prison for harboring his elder brothers, but after six months he escaped and returned to his native place, where he lived on 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, the very brutal murder of Pavlik and Fedya Morozov, which received wide resonance, became the limit of the organs’ patience. The Purtovs had no direct connection to this, but the very fact of the existence of a gang in the area, which enjoyed the reputation of being elusive, looked provocative. An OGPU task force was sent to the area under the command of the experienced security officer Krylov, which completed its task.

So, such a long epic of the Purtov gang became possible thanks to, as they would now say, corruption, since the bandits established close ties with the heads of local village councils, including Trofim Morozov. As they say, money has no smell, so the chairman put the sale of certificates of poverty on a grand scale - dispossessed fellow villagers and exiled special settlers bought them (the presence of a certificate allowed them to leave their place of exile).

The security officers confiscated the certificates issued by Trofim Morozov from captured bandits and found them in bandit caches. So they took the “corrupt” chairman under his thumb; no denunciation from Pavlik was required for this. There was no point in locking Trofim Sergeevich away.

You may ask - what does Pavlik Morozov have to do with it? The fact is that his father was illiterate, and all the certificates he traded were written out by his son Pavlik in a neat child’s handwriting. That is, it turns out that the father “gave in” his son, and not vice versa. Pavlik only confirmed the recognition of his father to the OGPU district representative.

There was no trial at which, according to legend, the young pioneer made an accusatory speech. As Tyumen local historian and writer Alexander Petrushin writes, who dug up this story, “the fate of Trofim Morozov was decided by a meeting of the “troika” at the Plenipotentiary Representation of the OGPU in the Urals on February 20, 1932. It is stated: “He was engaged in the fabrication of false documents, which he supplied to members of the militant rebel group and persons hiding from the repression of Soviet power.” Resolution of the Troika: “Imprison in a forced labor camp for a period of ten years.”

For the information of schoolchildren: a correctional labor camp is not a prison or a Kolyma zone. The convict was simply sent to work on one of the many construction sites of socialism, where he lived and worked without security. The whole difference with an ordinary worker was that he could not quit before the end of his term, and part of his earnings was confiscated in favor of the state. These are the “atrocities” that the Soviet government committed!

Trofim Sergeevich Morozov was lucky - he got to work on the construction of the White Sea Canal, where he proved himself with the best side, and not only was released after three years, but was even awarded the order. After his release, he lived and worked in Tyumen.

So why were Pavlik Morozov and his four-year-old brother killed? The fact is that Pavel’s father left his family (his wife and four children) and began to cohabit with the 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 law of that time, in this case, all land and other property went to the father in new family. And the old wife and children became homeless.

The wife, naturally, demanded the division of property before the divorce. And - again, according to the legislation of that time - for three male children (Pavlik with his little brother and brother Alexei) they had to cut off a noticeable piece of land from the plot of their father, who, although he was the chairman of the village council, could not so clearly go against the law, but when he was arrested, his father’s relatives realized that partition was about to happen.

That’s when the plan to ruin the kids came into being - after which the divorcee would be left without land. It was not possible to kill all three at once - but it is clear that Alexei would have been killed too. 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), the father “loved only himself and vodka,” and did not spare his wife and sons.

Suspicion immediately fell on the family of the father of those killed. Yes, in fact, they weren’t really hiding. According to the testimony of Tatyana Baidakova, “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 initiator of the murder was Pavlik and Fedya’s uncle Arseny Kulukanov, and the direct perpetrators of the murder were 76-year-old grandfather Sergei and 19-year-old Danila, Pavlik and Fedya’s cousin. Grandma Aksinya helped hide the evidence.

In general, a typical “dispute between economic entities,” as they would say now. What gives it a special piquancy is that all this was done by BELARUSIANS, who came to Siberia under Stolypin’s recruitment during the reign of the Emperor.

This is what happy looked like Stalin's USSR V real life. Corruption, which even the heroes of the civil war did not shun, 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 imprisoned everyone, then half the country need to be sent to camps.

Now you can appreciate what Stalin had to deal with, and what a mess he dragged the country out of. At the same time, it will become more clear where the prisoners in the camps came from, all these “innocent prisoners” screaming about rehabilitation. Even 68 years later, the General Prosecutor’s Office, after checking the investigative case, decided “to 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” - everything in this case is so obvious from the evidence.

Many people mention it very often, but often know very little. And even if they do know, it’s not a fact that it’s true. He twice became a victim of political propaganda: during the Soviet era, 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 have questioned 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 much is this image imprinted in our consciousness...

The story of the murder of Pavlik Morozov has become overgrown with a lot of myths over the past 80 years, but until recently there were two main versions. According to one of them, Pavlik wrote a denunciation against his father, a kulak, and then against other kulaks who were hiding grain from the state. His grandfather and uncle did not forgive him for this, they waylaid him and his brother Fedya in the forest and stabbed him to death. A show trial was held against the children's grandfather, uncle and relatives. Some were accused of murder, others of concealing a crime. Sentences - death penalty or long terms conclusions.

According to another version, Pavlik was killed by OGPU officers: supposedly the system needed a hero to justify the repressions. The child killed by fists was perfect for this role.

Meanwhile, the director of the Pavlik Morozov 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 not his relatives or OGPU employees who killed him, but completely different people.
In all this tragic story The figure of the father is very important - Trofim Sergeevich Morozov. According to Kupratsevich, in fact he was a competent, respected person in the village, otherwise he simply would not have been elected as chairman of the village council. What Trofim was later accused of would today be called corruption. He illegally issued registration certificates to dispossessed peasants and their families exiled to Gerasimovka. Without them they had no right to leave the village. People worked in logging fields, starved, died, and many wanted to leave. Of course, at that time it was considered a crime, but, in essence, Trofim Morozov saved people. A criminal case was opened precisely because of forged 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 “mortgage” his father. At the time of the trial, Trofim had already left the family, for a long time he lived with his partner, and his son was simply not aware of his affairs. Secondly, 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 version of the writer Pavel Solomein): “Uncle judges, 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 we will not give others the habit of hiding their fists and clearly violating the party line...”

[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 remained the master of a family with four children; he didn’t even have time to study.
“That day Pavlik and Fedya went to the swamp to get cranberries,” Nina Kupratsevich tells her version of those events. - The Morozovs’ house was on the outskirts, and, apparently, the grandfather, later accused of murder, saw them. But then the whole village went to those places to buy cranberries! Pavlik’s grandfather, who was over 80, could not be so bad as to kill his grandson in front of possible witnesses. Didn't he realize that the children would scream? And they screamed! You read the protocol for examining the corpses: the brothers were cut with knives, their hands were wounded. Apparently, they grabbed the blades and called for help. This doesn't look like premeditated murder at all. Everything suggests that the guys were killed in a state of extreme fright. I think that these were dispossessed peasant 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 has not been proven"

Kupratsevich also doesn’t believe in the version about the OGPU: “Do you really think that the authorities wouldn’t have found a suitable village closer to the center? How long did it take you to get to us? Three hours from Yekaterinburg? And at that time there was no direct road at all; you had to get across the river by ferry. And when the “myth-making” began, people began to be driven into the collective farm, it turned out very convenient: the fists took the lives of two little brothers. And practically from scratch the image of a pioneer hero was created. Maxim Gorky himself said at the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers: “Kind 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 the additional investigation of the case in 1967 and worked with the KGB archives, concluded in 2001: the participation of the people accused of Pavlik’s death has not been proven. Moreover, he claims that Pavlik appeared in court in his father’s case as a witness. And there are no denunciations in this matter.
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 turned out differently. His godfather Arseny Kulukanov and cousin Danila were shot. Grandfather Sergei and grandmother Ksenia 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 served 10 years near Nizhny Tagil. “I met him. A very positive, wonderful person,” recalls Kupratsevich. Mom Tatyana Semyonovna Morozova moved to Crimea, to Alupka, where Nadezhda Krupskaya secured an apartment for her. She was given a small pension. She lived modestly and put a cross instead of a signature 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 as a symbol for the Soviet government of the struggle against those who do not share its ideals, and during the perestroika era it was used to discredit this government.

During the investigation and trial of the father who abandoned their family, the chairman of the Gerasimovsky village council, Trofim Morozov, testified against him in support of the testimony of his mother. A few months after this, Pavel and his 8-year-old brother Fedor, who went into the forest to pick berries, were found dead with stab wounds.

Their own grandfather Sergei (father of Trofim Morozov) and 19-year-old cousin Danil were accused of murder, as well as grandmother Ksenia (as an accomplice) and Pavel’s godfather, Arseny Kulukanov, who was his uncle (as a village “fist” - as the initiator and the 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 he was acquitted during the trial.

According to the official version, the young pioneer Pavlik Morozov bravely exposed the crimes of the kulaks against Soviet power and was killed by them out of revenge.

Biography

Official portrait of Pavlik Morozov. Made on the basis of a photograph with classmates - the only one in his life.

Family

Born into the family of Trofim Morozov, a Red partisan, then chairman of the village council, and Tatyana Semyonovna Morozova, née Baidakova. The father, like all the residents of the village, was an ethnic Belarusian (a family of Stolypin migrants, in Gerasimovka with). Subsequently, the father abandoned his family (his wife and four sons) and started a second family with Antonina Amosova; As a result of his departure, all the worries about the peasant farm fell on his eldest son, Pavel. According to the recollections of Pavel’s teacher, his father regularly drank 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, Pavel’s brother, his father “loved only himself and vodka,” and did not spare his wife and sons, let alone foreign settlers, from whom “he tore three skins for forms with seals.” Pavel’s grandfather and grandmother treated the family abandoned by their father to the mercy of fate in the same way: “Grandfather and grandmother were also strangers to us for a long time. They never treated me to anything or greeted me. 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 master, but Tatiana's puppies you have farm laborers."

According to the memories collected and presented in his book by Yuri Druzhnikov, Pavel was a physically weak, sickly, nervous and unbalanced boy. According to Solomein’s recording, Pavlik “loved to hooligan, fight, quarrel, sing bad songs, smoke.” Druzhnikov, referring to the words of Zoya Kabina, writes that Pavel studied poorly and rarely attended school, loved to play cards for money and sing criminal songs. He loved to tease and poison someone: “No matter how much you persuade, he will take revenge, do it his way. He often fought out of anger, simply out of a tendency to quarrel.” Due to the family's poverty, he walked around in bast shoes and his father's tattered coat; was the dirtiest in the class, rarely washed. He was tongue-tied: he spoke intermittently, gekaya, not always clearly, in half-Russian-half-Belarusian, like: “But there’s no way around it.” Druzhnikov points out that in 1931 Pavel entered the first grade for the third time and in the middle of the year was transferred to the second, as he had finally learned to read and write. However, it should be taken into account that Pavel often had no time for studying - as the eldest in the family, he had to work hard to feed the food left by his father. large family and try to escape poverty.

Pavel’s teacher recalled the general appalling 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 form I didn’t even see him, I didn’t take part in Pioneer parades, I didn’t wear Molotov’s portraits like Amlinsky, and I didn’t shout “toast” to the leaders.

Forced in such difficult conditions to provide for his family instead of his father, Pavel nevertheless invariably showed a desire to study. 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...

Death

Pavel and Fyodor went to the forest, planning to spend the night there on September 2 (in the absence of their mother, who had gone to Tavda to sell a calf). On September 6, their corpses were found. The protocol drawn up by local police officer Yakov Titov reports:

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, and 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.

Trial

The case of the murder of pioneer Pavel Morozov
Show trial of the chairman of the village council. Gerasimovka, Tavdinsky district, Trofim Morozov gathered hundreds of people.
The indictment was read out. The interrogation of witnesses began. Suddenly the condensed silence of measured progress trial a sonorous child's voice pierced:
- Uncle, allow me to tell you!
There was a commotion in the hall. The spectators jumped up from their seats, the back rows rushed towards those sitting, and there was a stampede at the doors. The chairman of the court had difficulty restoring order...
- It was I who filed a lawsuit against my father. As a pioneer, I refuse my father. He was creating a clear counter-revolution. My father is not a defender of October. He helped the kulukanov Arsentiy in every possible way. It was he who helped the fists escape. It was he who hid the kulak property so that it would not go to the collective farmers...
“I ask that my father be brought to severe responsibility so that others are not given the habit of defending the kulaks.”
12-year-old pioneer witness Pavel Morozov finished his testimony. No. This was not testimony. It was a merciless indictment of the young defender of socialism against those who stood on the side of the frenzied enemies of the proletarian revolution.
Unmasked by his pioneer son, Trofim Morozov was sentenced to 10 years in prison for connections with local kulaks, fabricating false documents for them, and hiding kulak property.
After the trial, pioneer Pavel Morozov came to the family of Morozov’s grandfather Sergei. The fearless whistleblower was greeted unkindly in the family. A blank wall of hidden hostility surrounded the boy. The pioneer detachment was my family. Pasha ran there as if on his own family of origin, shared joys and sorrows there. There they taught him a passionate intolerance of kulaks and their followers.
And when Pasha’s grandfather, Sergei Morozov, hid the kulak property, Pasha ran to the village council and exposed his grandfather.
In the winter, Pasha brought out the kulak Arseny Silin, 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 a village soviet field and again hid it 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 kulaks and subkulakists...
And gradually, thoughtfully, they began preparing for a terrible and bloody reprisal against the pioneer activist. First Danila Morozov, Pavel’s cousin, and then his grandfather, Sergei, were drawn into the criminal conspiracy. For a fee of 30 rubles, Danila Morozov, with the help of his grandfather, undertook to finish off his hated relative. The Kulukanov fist skillfully fueled the hostility of Danila and his grandfather towards Pavel. Pavel was increasingly met with brutal beatings and unambiguous threats.
“If you don’t leave the detachment, then I, the damned pioneer, will still kill you,” Danila wheezed, beating Pavel until he lost consciousness...
On August 26, Pavel filed a statement of threats to the local police officer. Either due to political myopia, or for other reasons, the local police officer did not have time to intervene in the case. On September 3, on a clear autumn day, Pavel, together with his 9-year-old brother Fedya, ran into the forest to pick berries...
In the evening, calmly in full view of everyone, Danila Morozov and grandfather Sergei finished their harrowing and sat down and headed home.
The road unnoticeably turned into the forest. We met Fedya and Pasha very close...
The reprisal was short. The knife stopped the rebellious heart of the young pioneer. Then, just as quickly, they dealt with an unnecessary witness - nine-year-old Fedya. Danila and his grandfather calmly returned home and sat down to dinner. Grandma Ksenya also calmly and busily began to soak the bloody clothes. They hid a knife in a dark corner behind holy images...
One of these days, the case of the murder of pioneer activist Pavel Morozov and his nine-year-old brother will be heard on the spot as a show trial.
Sitting in the dock are the active masterminds of the murder - kulaks Kulukanov, Silin, murderers Sergei and Danila Morozov, their accomplice Ksenya Morozova...
Pavel Morozov is not alone. There are legions of people like him. They expose the bread squeezers, the plunderers of public property, they, if necessary, bring their kulak fathers to the dock...

Morozov's role in his father's case is not entirely clear. Together with his mother, he testified at the preliminary investigation, stating that his father beat his mother and brought into the house things received as payment for issuing false documents (in fact, he could not see this, because his father had not lived with the family for a long time). The murder case notes 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 special settler kulaks.” The denunciation was connected with 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.

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 allegedly 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:

The background, it is believed, was domestic: Tatyana Morozova wanted to take revenge on her husband who abandoned her and hoped, by intimidation, to return her to the family.

Official version of the accusation

The version of the prosecution and the court was as follows. On September 3, “kulak” Arseny Kulukanov, having learned about the boys leaving to pick berries, conspired with Danila Morozov, who came to his house, to kill Pavel, giving him 30 rubles and asking him to invite also Sergei Morozov, “with whom Kulukanov had previously conspired,” for the murder. Returning from Kulukanov and finishing harrowing (i.e., harrowing, loosening the soil), Danila went home and conveyed the conversation to grandfather Sergei. The latter, seeing that Danila was taking the 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 presented 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. According to other sources, he did not confess to the murder at all. 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 (before that, Danila had killed a calf for Tatyana Morozova). Of the accused, Arseny Silin was acquitted, the rest were sentenced to death; Kulukanov and Danila were shot, eighty-year-old Sergei and Ksenia Morozov died in prison.

Version by Yuri Druzhnikov

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.

Decision of the Supreme Court of Russia

However, the attempt to present the murderers of the Morozov brothers as victims of political repression and subject to immediate rehabilitation ended in failure. The General Prosecutor's Office of Russia, having carefully examined the case, studied all the documents, weighed all the pros and cons, taking into account all the relevant circumstances, 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 RSFSR dated February 28, 1933 in relation to Arseny Ignatievich Kulukanov and Ksenia Ilyinichna Morozova are amended: to reclassify their actions from Art. 58-8 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR at Art. Art. 17 and 58-8 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, 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.

This conclusion, together with the materials of additional verification of case No. 374, was sent to the Supreme Court of Russia, which in 1999 made a final decision and denied rehabilitation to the killers of Pavlik Morozov and his brother Fedor.

Reaction to Druzhnikov’s book

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.

Disagreements

Veronica Kononenko claims, with reference to Morozov’s teacher Zoya Kabina, “that it was she who created the first pioneer detachment in the village, which was headed by Pavel Morozov.” According to the testimony of University of California professor Yuri Druzhnikov, however, Kabina told him: “There was no talk of pioneers. I couldn’t tell Solomein anything about being accepted as a pioneer.” He also cites a phrase from Solomein’s archive: “And if you adhere to historical truth, then Pavlik Morozov not only never wore, but also never saw a pioneer tie,” which contradicts the memories of Pavel’s first teacher Larisa Isakova: “I didn’t have time to organize the pioneer detachment in Gerasimovka then, Zoya Kabina created it after me, but I also told to the guys about how children fight for better life in other cities and villages. 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.” It is also possible that Pavel did not see the pioneer tie, but the pioneer form: “To some now Pavlik seems like a boy stuffed with slogans in a clean pioneer uniform form. And because of our poverty this form I didn’t even see it..."

Druzhnikov claims that after the events described, Morozov earned universal hatred in the village; they began to call him “Pashka the Kumanist” (communist). According to official biographies, Pavel Morozov actively helped identify bread grabbers, those who were hiding weapons, plotting crimes against the Soviet regime, etc. Druzhnikov considers these descriptions to be too exaggerated both in terms of the quantity and duration of Pavel’s cooperation with the authorities; according to fellow villagers, Pavel was not a serious informer, since “informing is, you know, a serious job, but he was just that, a nit, a petty dirty trick.” In the murder case, only two such denunciations were documented: “In the winter of 1932, Pavel Morozov informed the village council that Silin Arseny<его дядя>, having failed to complete the firm assignment, he sold a cart of potatoes to the special settlers.” Another denunciation was against the peasant Mizyukhin, in whom Pavel’s grandfather Sergei allegedly hid a “walker” (cart; they searched Mezyukhin’s house, but found nothing).

In fact, the main informant in the village was Pavel’s cousin Ivan Potupchik (later an honorary pioneer; convicted of raping a minor).

Similar processes

During the days of the campaign associated with the murder of Pavlik, another well-known case was launched about the murder with fists on October 25 of a pioneer in the village of Kolesnikovo Kurgan region Koli Myagotina. 12 people were convicted in this case, 3 of them were shot. In 1996, the convicts were rehabilitated, as it turned out that Kolya, who had never been a pioneer, was shot at night by a soldier-guard while stealing sunflower seeds. Yuri Druzhnikov counted in 1932 (after the murder of Pavel and Fedya) - 3, in 1933 - 6, in 1934 - 6 and in 1935 - 9 cases of murders of children, which the authorities classified as murders of pioneers for denunciations; just for Stalin era he noted 56 such cases.

Among the “pioneer heroes” of this kind, there were also simply fictitious figures, like Grisha Hakobyan from Ganja, allegedly killed by “kulak sons” in October 1930 (invented on the instructions of the Central Committee of the Komsomol of Azerbaijan).

Praise

Pavlik Morozov denounces his father. Rice. from the newspaper "Pionerskaya Pravda"

Morozov's name was given to Gerasimov and other collective farms, schools, and pioneer squads. Monuments were erected to Pavlik Morozov in Moscow (, in children's park named after him on Krasnaya Presnya; demolished in ), the village of Gerasimovka () and in Sverdlovsk (). 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 by Alexander Rzheshevsky “Bezhin Meadow” about Pavlik Morozov. The job could not be completed. Maxim Gorky called Pavlik “one of the small miracles of our era.”

Pavlik Morozov in the public consciousness

Assessments of the personality of Pavlik Morozov and especially the propaganda campaign around his name have always been ambiguous. Along with the glorification, there was widespread negative attitude towards him, although in Soviet times this could not be expressed publicly.

Among adults, the attitude towards Pavlik Morozov was determined by the fact that he became a symbol of such a phenomenon that permeated Soviet society as denunciation. So, Galina Vishnevskaya wrote:

And a worthy role model appears - the twelve-year-old traitor Pavlik Morozov, “who fell heroically in the class struggle,” awarded monuments and portraits for his betrayal, glorified in songs and poems on which they will be brought up next generations. Pavlik Morozov, who is still praised today by millions of Soviet children for denouncing his own father and grandfather. As in Hitler's Germany They taught German children to inform on their parents, and in Russia we began to consciously raise a generation of informers, starting from school.

With the beginning of perestroika, this attitude found public expression and became dominant. Pavlik Morozov began to act as a symbol of betrayal, along with Judas. In this spirit, for example, he is mentioned in a sermon on the topic of Judas of sin by Pastor Stanislav Vershinin: “Nevertheless, few people want to see Judas Iscariot in themselves - it is better to admit the presence in one’s self of the nature of a murderer, Cain, than such a vile traitor ! Is this true? Have you never betrayed yourself or your neighbor? Isn’t Pavlik Morozov among us?". In the song of the same name by the rock band “Crematorium” Pavlik Morozov is presented as an ineradicable evil, passing from one era to another:

Not everything is for sale here, but everything is Buy or rent. On occasion, a janitor can become a prince, And the killer becomes a judge. All new poems are torn from the old ones, The new priests blame everything on the dead. And all because Pavlik Morozov is alive, Pavlik Morozov is alive, Pavlik Morozov is alive, Pavlik Morozov is more alive than all the living...

Nowadays, the dominant perception is that of Pavlik Morozov as a victim of political “games” of adults. It must be emphasized that the vast majority of those arguing are extremely politically engaged and biased individuals who are not interested in establishing an objective picture of what happened.