Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Maxim Gorky acclaimed the martyr: “Pavlik Morozov’s heroic action . . . could have had very broad social and educational significance in the eyes of Pioneers. Many of them would probably realize that if a ‘blood’ relative is an enemy of the people, he is no longer a relative, but just an enemy and there are no further reasons to spare him.” Every Soviet child for the next fifty years would be indoctrinated with the Morozov legend.

The real story was unearthed in a thorough and very brave investigation by Iuri Druzhnikov from the 1950s to the 1980s, when witnesses in the Morozov affair were still alive.³³

Pavlik Morozov’s father, Trofim, was for a time the chairman of the village council, trying to balance the authorities’ demands for grain against the villagers’ desire to survive. Gerasimovka was surrounded by camps for displaced kulaks from southern Russia who were desperate to flee and offered bribes for false papers. Meanwhile, the prosperous peasants of Gerasimovka were themselves being deported to the Siberian tundra. In November 1931, Pavlik denounced Trofim to OGPU for protecting kulaks; Trofim went to a camp for ten years.

Pavlik did not benefit by his actions—his own family’s property was confiscated as part of Trofim’s punishment—but he began to denounce any villager hoarding grain, selling potatoes, or expressing discontent. He was ostracized by the villagers until his reign of terror ended on September 4, 1932, when his body and that of his brother Fedia were found under cranberry bushes deep in the forest.

The authorities acted with alacrity: the boys were buried with no autopsy. After three months’ imprisonment, their grandparents (in their eighties), a nineteen-year-old cousin, and an uncle were put on trial in the village hall—to which journalists and an audience from the nearest town were bused. The defense counsel abandoned his clients; the prisoners, admitting nothing, nevertheless pleaded guilty. The prosecution berated kulaks generally. After the verdict, the four were led to a pit, undressed, and shot. Trofim Morozov was apparently shot in the camps after hacking out his grave in the permafrost.

Pavlik and Fedia Morozov were, most likely, dispatched by the bayonet and rifle butt of an OGPU killer, Spiridon Kartashov.³⁴ The order to stage such a murder must have come from Iagoda, and probably from Stalin; such a fabrication was too important to be left to local initiative. The subject remained very sensitive for the Soviet censors; when Sergei Eisenstein made a film about the child martyr, using the title of Turgenev’s story Bezhin Meadow,

Stalin was furious at the iconographic portrayal of Pavlik Morozov and his uncle as Isaac and Abraham and the film was largely destroyed. Stalin henceforth forbade making any film without every word in the script being vetted.

There were more Pavlik Morozovs. Druzhnikov found fifty-seven cases in the 1930s. Denunciations overwhelmed the NKVD: some denouncers asked for a month’s stay in a sanatorium as a reward for their tireless efforts. Adults even denounced children. Childish absurdities were taken seriously. For instance, on July 5, 1935, little Niura Dmitrieva from Volsk on the lower Volga sent Stalin a ten-page letter listing in detail “all the children who have been teasing, hitting, and making fun of me.” Niura also denounced her teacher for assigning too much homework. Stalin had a commission sent to Volsk to punish the guilty and bring the girl to an elite boarding school in Moscow.³⁵

Pigs in the Parlor, Peacocks on Parade

A GENERATION OF CHILDREN had grown up in the USSR with no memories of life before the revolution. Their education, apart from exposing them to a few Russian classics, gave them no hint that there was any morality, let alone conscience, outside Stalin’s Communist Party by which they should be governed. They grew up believing, many of them fanatically, that foreigners were spies, that the children of the bourgeoisie, the rich peasantry, and the clergy were renegades, that all political prisoners were guilty, that the NKVD and the courts were infallible.