1. Pavlik Morozov's story, dated to 1932, is that of a 13-year-old boy who denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family.
18 Facts About Pavlik Morozov
1. 2.
Pavlik Morozov's story was a subject of reading, songs, plays, a symphonic poem, a full-length opera, and six biographies.
3.
Pavlik Morozov's politicized and mythologized story was used to encourage Soviet Bloc children to inform on their parents.
4.
The most popular account of the story is as follows: born to poor peasants in Gerasimovka, a small village 350 kilometres north-east of Yekaterinburg, Morozov was a dedicated communist who led the Young Pioneers at his school and supported Stalin's collectivization of farms.
5.
In 1932, at the age of 13, Pavlik Morozov reported his father to the political police.
6.
Trofim Pavlik Morozov was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp, where his sentence was changed to death, which was fulfilled.
7.
The Gerasimovka school that Pavlik Morozov attended, became a shrine, and children from all over the Soviet Union went on school excursions to visit it.
8.
The USSR widely distributed a painting of Pavlik Morozov stating "I accuse my father not as his son, but as a Pioneer" while standing underneath a painting of Lenin at a courthouse.
9.
Maxim Gorky spoke to the Communist youth organization in 1933 of "the heroic deed of Pioneer Pavlik Morozov, the boy who understood that a person who is a relative by blood may well be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person is not to be spared".
10.
Pavlik Morozov's father was the chairman of the local soviet, not a kulak like the Soviet propaganda had claimed.
11.
Pavlik Morozov determined the evidence is sketchy, based mostly on second-hand reports by alleged witnesses, and that Pavlik did not inform on his parents but was murdered after a mundane squabble.
12.
In some accounts, the method of Pavlik Morozov's death was decapitation by saw.
13.
Roman Brackman claims that Pavlik Morozov's mother encouraged him to report on his father because she was hoping that it would intimidate him into leaving his mistress and return to them, but this backfired after the State Political Directorate instructed Pavlik Morozov on how to incriminate his father in court while testifying.
14.
Pavlik Morozov informed on neighbours when they did something wrong, including his father, who left the family for another woman.
15.
Pavlik Morozov was not a Pioneer, although he wanted to be one.
16.
Kelly believes there is no evidence that the family was involved in the murder of the boy, and that it probably was the work of some teenagers with whom Pavlik Morozov had a squabble over a gun.
17.
Some villagers from Gerasimovka who claim to have known Pavlik Morozov described him as a "shithead", who "did nothing but cause trouble".
18.
Pavlik Morozov's story was the basis of Bezhin Meadow, an unreleased film from 1937 that was directed by Sergei Eisenstein, as well as the 2015 Latvian film Dawn.