Pavlik Morozov (Pavel Trofimovich Morozov)

Pavlik Morozov (Pavel Trofimovich Morozov) was a Soviet schoolboy who became known in Soviet propaganda as a Pioneer-hero, opposing the pillaging of socialist property and the kulaks embodied by his father, Trofim Morozov, and who paid with his life for this. He was born on 14 November 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka. His father was a peasant. During collectivization, Pavlik, according to the official account, actively fought against the kulaks. He founded and led the first Pioneer squad in his village.

At the end of 1931 Pavlik accused his father, Trofim Morozov (who held the post of chairman of the village council), of selling forms stamped with the council seal to those who had been dekulakized. Pavlik’s testimony became the basis for his father’s conviction and a ten-year prison sentence.

According to the official version, Pavlik was killed in the woods on 3 September 1932 while his mother was briefly away from the village. The killers, as established by the investigation, were Pavlik’s cousin — 19-year-old Danila — and Pavlik’s 81-year-old grandfather, Sergey Morozov. Pavlik’s grandmother, 79-year-old Ksenia Morozova, was declared an accomplice to the crime, and the organizer was identified as Pavlik’s uncle, 70-year-old Arseny Kulukanov. At a show trial in the district club, all of them were sentenced to death by firing squad. After the boy’s death, his mother, Tatyana Morozova, received an apartment in Crimea as compensation for her son, part of which she rented out to lodgers. The woman traveled widely around the country recounting the story of Pavlik’s deed. The name Morozov was given to the Gerasimovka and other collective farms, schools, and Pioneer squads and was entered first in the Book of Honor of the All-Union Pioneer Organization named after V. I. Lenin. Monuments to Pavlik Morozov were erected in Moscow (1948), the village of Gerasimovka (1954) and Sverdlovsk (1957).