Societa' Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea

COMRADE PAVLIK: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero by Catriona Kelly Granta £17.99 pp384 Of all the odd legends and weird myths produced by the propaganda machine of what used to be the Soviet Union, the story of Pavlik Morozov is in retrospect one of the hardest to understand. In real life, Morozov was a semi-literate, dark-haired teenager, born at the time of the revolution in Gerasimovka, a Russian village of stunning backwardness. Nothing about him would have seemed worthy of notice: he was neither bright nor attractive, and he may even have been mentally unstable. But in 1931, in the midst of Stalin’s brutal campaign to collectivise the Soviet peasantry, Morozov took the shocking step of denouncing his father to the authorities. According to the original text of the denunciation, obtained by Catriona Kelly and translated to reflect the original grammatical mistakes, he told investigators that, “My father were up to blaytunt counter-revolutionary tricks . . . I’me obliged to tell you, my father int no defender of the interests of October . . . as a Pioneer, not as his son I ask you to bring my father to strict ackount for his actions . . .” Not long after that denunciation, 15-year-old Pavlik and his nine-year-old brother Fyodor were brutally murdered by relatives, who were, it was alleged, exacting revenge. Those are the simple facts of what became an infamous case. But Kelly, who had access to the original investigative file, discovered that the reality was much more complicated. The era of Soviet collectivisation in fact involved a great deal of violence, not only between the authorities and villagers, but among villagers themselves. Groups of peasants often took the law into their own hands, making decisions about who deserved to be arrested and deported. Local quarrels and personal disputes became politicised. The Morozov case was a classic story of this kind, involving prior fights between different parts of the family, drunkenness and guns. Pavlik’s father turns out to have been an abusive alchoholic. Perhaps the child made the denunciation in order to avenge his mother, or to protect himself, or simply to rid himself of a hated father. But whatever the facts, the story quickly took on a life of its own. Within months, local newspapers in the Urals, and later the national press, had told and retold the story, ultimately departing from the truth altogether. Soviet writers and artists turned Pavlik from an ill- educated thug into a revolutionary martyr, a superb student, a handsome blond, and an exemplary child who rightly considered the revolution more important than even the life of his own father. He became the subject of stories, poems, plays, a full-length opera and a film, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, in which a fanatical blond boy leads his village in an assault on the local church. The Pioneers, the Soviet communist childrens’ organisation, adopted him as their model and mascot. Every Soviet school child read his biography. To us, and to modern Russians, it now seems thoroughly unnatural, even perverse, to celebrate a child who denounced his father. But this is precisely why Kelly was right to focus on it. The Pavlik Morozov legend is indeed one of the keys to understanding the truly radical nature of Soviet ideology, since its moral was so terrifyingly clear: in the Soviet Union, old loyalties — including the natural loyalty that children feel to parents — were to be discarded, replaced by new loyalties. The authority of the state, of Pioneer leaders, of the secret police, and of the party, was to be greater than the authority of the family. And in the 1930s, when there was still a good deal of authentic ideological fanaticism in the USSR, this kind of propaganda did seem to have worked, at least up to a point. Kelly points out that there is archival evidence of copycat cases, of other children denouncing their parents, their teachers or their peers. Upon hearing the announcement that a group of leading Bolsheviks had been arrested during the purges of 1937, one Leningrad father grumbled that, “If they’re enemies of the people, then I’m a Japanese spy.” His daughter rushed off to tell the authorities. But by the 1960s and 1970s, the power of the myth had most definitely worn off. Kelly quotes one woman, born in 1975, who remembers her father telling her to ignore what she had been taught about Morozov, since “a person can’t be a hero if he betrays his parents”. Eventually, the Morozov story became nothing more than a symbol of the sick lengths to which the Soviet regime went to brainwash children. And now, perhaps, it should be read as a symbol of propaganda’s limits: the state could not, in the end, change human nature quite so radically. A new morality could not be so quickly and easily imposed from above. Kelly, although she sometimes gets bogged down in the details of her story, in the end uses the Morozov story to make this point extremely well.