The pioneer who betrayed his father. Why Pavlik Morozov becomes either a hero or a traitor - Rossiyskaya Gazeta

Pavel Timofeevich Morozov was born in 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka Sverdlovsk region. He organized the first one in his native village and actively campaigned for the creation of a collective farm. The kulaks, which included Timofey Morozov, actively opposed Soviet power and hatched a conspiracy to disrupt grain procurements. Pavlik accidentally learned about the sabotage that was being prepared. The young pioneer stopped at nothing and exposed the kulaks. The villagers, who learned that the son had handed over his own father to the authorities, brutally dealt with Pavlik and his younger brother. They were brutally killed in the forest.

Many books have been written about the feat of Pavlik Morozov, songs and poems have been written about him. The first song about Pavlik Morozov was written by the then unknown young writer Sergei Mikhalkov. This work made him overnight a very popular and sought-after author. In 1948, a street in Moscow was named after Pavlik Morozov and a monument was erected.

Pavlik Morozov was not the first

There are at least eight known cases where children were killed for denunciations. These events occurred before the murder of Pavlik Morozov.

In the village of Sorochintsy, Pavel Teslya also denounced his father, for which he paid with his life five years earlier than Morozov.

Seven more similar cases happened in various villages. Two years before the death of Pavlik Morozov, informer Grisha Hakobyan was stabbed to death in Azerbaijan.

Even before Pavlik’s death, the newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda reported cases in which young informers were brutally killed by fellow villagers. The texts of the children’s denunciations, with all the details, were also published here.

Followers of Pavlik Morozov

Brutal reprisals against young informers continued. In 1932, three children were killed for denunciations, in 1934 – six, and in 1935 – nine.

Noteworthy is the story of Prony Kolybin, who denounced his mother, accusing her of stealing socialist property. A poor woman collected fallen ears of corn on a collective farm field in order to somehow feed her family, including Pronya himself. The woman was imprisoned, and the boy was sent to rest in Artek.

Mitya Gordienko also noticed a couple on the collective farm field collecting fallen ears of corn. As a result, following the denunciation of the young pioneer, the man was shot, and the woman was sentenced to ten years in prison. Mitya Gordienko received an award watch, “Lenin’s grandchildren,” new boots and a pioneer suit as a gift.

A Chukotka boy, whose name was Yatyrgin, learned that reindeer herders were planning to take their herds to Alaska. He reported this to the Bolsheviks, for which the enraged reindeer herders hit Yatyrgin on the head with an ax and threw him into a pit. Thinking the boy was already dead. However, he managed to survive and get to “his people.” When Yatyrgin was solemnly accepted as a pioneer, it was decided to give him a new name - Pavlik Morozov, with which he lived to old age.

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 All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). 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 there was a fire in Siberia peasant revolt and the Purtovs, who formed a gang, became famous for their bloody reprisals against supporters of the Soviet regime. 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 early 30s, the families of bandits were not persecuted, and only in 1931, by decision of Sverdlovsky regional court The Purtovs' father with his younger sons Peter and Pavel and their wives were evicted outside their native village. Younger son Purtova Peter received five years in prison for harboring his elder brothers, but six months later 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 that overflowed the patience of the authorities was the very brutal murder of Pavlik and Fedya Morozov, which received wide resonance. The Purtovs had nothing to do with this direct relationship, however, the very fact of the existence of a gang in the area, which enjoyed the reputation of being elusive, looked defiant. 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 with a hand, 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 “surrendered” 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.”

Note to schoolchildren: correctional labor camp– this is not a prison or the Kolyma zone. The convict was simply sent to work at 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 their father’s plot, 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 Alexey (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, actually, 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 - cousin Pavlik and Fedya. 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 it was all 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.

Pavel Trofimovich Morozov (Pavlik Morozov; November 14, 1918, Gerasimovka, Turin district, Tobolsk province, RSFSR - September 3, 1932, Gerasimovka, Tavdinsky district, Ural region, RSFSR, USSR) - Soviet schoolboy, student of the Gerasimovskaya school in the Tavdinsky district Ural region, V Soviet time who gained fame as a pioneer hero who opposed the kulaks in the person of his father and paid for it with his life.

Biography

Origin and family

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 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), 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 issuing false certificates to dispossessed people about their membership in 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, long 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 only spoke about him in the late 1980s, when a campaign of persecution against Pavlik began at the height of Perestroika (see his letter below).

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 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. 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 fell on Pavel. peasant farming- 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 very difficult relationships with my 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, 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.

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, it became clear that he close connection with the previous case against Pavlik’s father, Trofim Morozov.

Early trial of Trofim Morozov

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:

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 did not 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:

Prosecution version

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).

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 Danil, as well as grandmother Ksenia (as an accomplice) and Pavel’s godfather Arseny Kulukanov, who was his uncle, were found guilty of the murder of Pavel Morozov and his brother Fyodor (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 during the trial he was acquitted.

Version of Yu. I. Druzhnikov and criticism of the version

Druzhnikov's version

According to the statements of the writer Yu. I. Druzhnikov, who published the book “Informer 001, or the Ascension of Pavlik Morozov” in 1987 in Great Britain, 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 hide weapons, plot crimes against the Soviet regime, etc. According to the author, according to fellow villagers, Pavel was not "a serious informer", because “to inform is, you know, serious job, 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:

Criticism and refutation of Druzhnikov's statements

Outrage between brother and teacher

Criticism of the author and his book

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; it was created after me by Zoya Kabina<…>. 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” .

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 scientific presentation criticism of her book “denunciation” with the assumption of Kelly’s connection with the “authorities”. Dr. Kelly did not find big difference between the conclusions of the books and attributed some points of criticism of Mr. Druzhnikov to his insufficient knowledge in English 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 to the “massacre” and “falsification” on the part of Inspector Titov, revealed during the investigation. In 1995, Liskin requested official certificates about the alleged criminal record of Father Pavlik, but the internal affairs bodies of Sverdlovsk and Tyumen regions We 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 department editor of the magazine “Man and Law” Veronica Kononenko about the witness nature of Pavlik’s speech at his father’s trial and the absence of secret denunciations.

Decision of the Supreme Court of Russia

In the spring of 1999, co-chairman of the Kurgan Memorial Society Innokenty Khlebnikov, on behalf of Arseny Kulukanov’s daughter Matryona Shatrakova, sent a petition to the Prosecutor General’s Office to review the decision of the Ural Regional Court, which sentenced the teenager’s relatives to death. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office 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 USSR dated February 28, 1933 in relation to Arseniy Ignatievich Kulukanov and Ksenia Ilyinichna Morozova are amended: to reclassify their actions from Art. 58-8 of the Criminal Code of the USSR at Art. 17 and 58-8 of the Criminal Code of the USSR, 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.

The General Prosecutor's Office, which is involved in the rehabilitation of victims of political repression, came to the conclusion that the murder of Pavlik Morozov is purely criminal in nature, and the killers are not subject to rehabilitation on political grounds. This conclusion, together 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.

Boris Sopelnyak claimed that he participated in the work of the Victim Rehabilitation Department political repression when considering Klebnikov's petition.

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 decision arrived Supreme Court in 2001, and the postman refused to convey the decision to her daughter.

Perpetuation of the name

• On July 2, 1936, a resolution was adopted by the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on the construction of a monument to Pavlik Morozov in Moscow at the entrance to Red Square.
• Morozov's name was given to Gerasimov and other collective farms, schools, and pioneer squads.
• Monuments to Pavlik Morozov were erected in Moscow (1948, in the children's park named after him on Krasnaya Presnya; demolished in 1991), the village of Gerasimovka (1954) in Sverdlovsk (1957), the village of Russky Aktash, Almetyevsky district of the Republic of Tatarstan, in Ostrov and in Kaliningrad.
• Novovagankovsky Lane in Moscow was renamed Pavlik Morozov Street in 1939, and a club named after him was organized in the Church of St. Nicholas on Three Mountains.
• The name was given to the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Puppet Theater.
• 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 “Bezhin Meadow” by Alexander Rzheshevsky about Pavlik Morozov. The work could not be completed because, based on the draft version of the film, Eisenstein was accused of “deliberately downplaying ideological content” and “exercising in formalism.”
• Maxim Gorky called Pavlik “one of the small miracles of our era.”
• In 1954, composer Yuri Balkashin composed the musical poem Pavlik Morozov.
• In 1955, he was listed under No. 1 in the Book of Honor of the All-Union Pioneer Organization named after. V.I. Lenin. Kolya Myagotin was listed under No. 2 in the same book.
• In Yekaterinburg there is a park named after Pavlik Morozov. In the park there was a monument depicting Pavlik. In the 90s, the monument was torn from its pedestal, lay in the bushes for some time and disappeared.
• In Turinsk, Sverdlovsk region, there was a Pavlik Morozov square; in the center of the square there was a monument depicting Pavlik in full height and with a pioneer tie. In the 90s, the monument was stolen by unidentified persons. Now the square has been renamed “Historical Square”.
• In Chelyabinsk on the Malaya Yuzhno-Uralskaya Railway there is a station named after Pavlik Morozov.
• In the Children's Park of Simferopol there is a bust of P. Morozov on the Alley of Pioneer Heroes.
• In the Children's Park of the city of Ukhta (Komi Republic), a monument to P. Morozov was unveiled on June 20, 1968. According to other sources, in 1972. The author is the sculptor A.K. Ambrulyavius.

Many streets in the cities and villages of the former Soviet Union, many streets bear this name even now: in Perm and Krasnokamsk (streets), in Ufa (street and lane), Tula (street and driveway), Asha - district center Chelyabinsk region,

Pavlik Morozov was born on November 14, 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka, Turin district Tobolsk province at 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 issuing false certificates to dispossessed people about their membership in 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 her ex-husband, for many years did not dare to visit her native place. 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 got 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 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. 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 his younger brother went into 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 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, 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.

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 on the chest on the right side in the area of ​​the 5-6th rib, a second superficial wound in the epigastric region, a 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 on the right side (from the Poupart ligament) measuring 3 centimeters, through which part of the intestines came out, and death followed. In addition, a large wound 6 centimeters long was inflicted on the left hand, along the metacarpus of the thumb.

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, two Morozov brothers died from the evil of a man from a sharp knife - 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 at the preliminary investigation, confirming his mother’s words that his father beat his 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 have seen this, because his father had not been married for a long time lived with his family). 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 and tried in February of the following year.

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 did not 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 better take x...

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 Danil, as well as grandmother Ksenia (as an accomplice) and Pavel’s godfather Arseny Kulukanov, who was his uncle, were found guilty of the murder of Pavel Morozov and his brother Fyodor (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 during the trial he was acquitted.

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, in Druzhnikov’s opinion, 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 hide weapons, plot crimes against the Soviet regime, etc. According to the author, according to fellow villagers, Pavel was not "a serious informer", because “reporting is, you know, a serious job, but he was such a nit, a petty 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 Pavel’s cousin - informant 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. 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.

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 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 “ingratiated himself into the trust” of former teacher Pavel Morozov to 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 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 of the 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.

Now, perhaps, we need to explain to young readers who we are talking about. And since childhood we knew who Pavlik Morozov was. All the preschool years of my life until the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (when the name Pavlik was replaced by new names) he was the main one in our minds positive hero, famous fighter for Soviet power and for the collective farm system, which did not spare his own father, who deceived this power and this system.

Pavlik, according to Soviet ideologists, brought his father to a fair trial in September 1932.

Then, during perestroika times, Soviet history began to reconsider. And this episode was also turned upside down (or upside down?). Pavlik Morozov was known as "Informer 001".

Maybe it’s time to shake off the memory of these verdicts and understand what happened in the village of Gerasimovka, Tobolsk province, in the family of the chairman of the local village council, Morozov, the father of five children, of whom the eldest, Pavlik, was 13?

My father was not without sin: he secretly appropriated property confiscated from the dispossessed, and issued false certificates to special settlers sent into exile so that they could get out.

Did Pavlik know about this? He knew it, just like everyone else around him.

Did you take these “anti-Soviet” machinations to heart? It’s unlikely: the boy had reasons to be offended by his father, apart from any politics - he left the family, lived with his mistress, and drank. Raising children was reduced to a single notation - there is no need to go to school, you don’t need a diploma! But Pavlik wanted to study.

Well, now to the point. Pavel did not write a denunciation against his father, but simply, during the course of the investigation, confirmed the facts that were already known to everyone.

My father received a sentence (he served time, worked and returned ahead of schedule with an order for valiant work).

Pavlik Morozov is neither a hero nor a traitor. He is a victim of crazy times. Isn't it time to just forget this story?

And Paul was announced young hero Soviet state, who did not spare their own father for the triumph of the collective farm system.

His relatives did not forgive him for this. They killed him a year later. The main killer was a cousin, who was executed for this by the authorities as a sworn enemy of the Soviet regime.

Many years later, meticulous historians tried to involve members of the Morozov family in the next consideration of the case.

The relatives refused, and I understand them.

Nothing can be corrected in this sad story, and there were enough such stories in terrible era Troubles.

Pavlik Morozov is neither a hero nor a traitor. He is a victim of crazy times.

Isn't it time to just forget this story?

And if you remember, then the story is not of a hero or a traitor, but of a child, innocently killed and innocently glorified. It is immoral to use his fate to prove horrors Soviet era. There are enough of these horrors without him. And, I’m afraid, that will be enough in the future, if another Troubles covers us and all of humanity.

But it’s better to leave Pavlik Morozov alone. He suffered his due: he paid with his life for both the carrot and the stick of frenzied propaganda.

Peace to his ashes.

Throughout the post-Soviet years, it was difficult for me to do two things: it is easy to pronounce the word “scoop” as a sentence to the idiots who once lived in the USSR. I was there too, lived, was a member. And put something like this into context: “another Pavlik Morozov has been found!” I can’t and I couldn’t. For one simple reason. Just imagine how cranberry bog his own grandfather kills two of his grandchildren with a knife - thirteen-year-old Pavlik and his eight-year-old brother Fedya.

There is a classic version: Pavlik dispossessed his own father, handed him over to the OGPU, the old man Morozov could no longer forgive this and put an end to his traitor grandson.

At the end of the 80s of the last century, another look at the Morozov tragedy appeared. This version was once brought from a perestroika business trip to Gerasimovka by my then colleague at Komsomolskaya Pravda, Valery Hiltunen. Almost a hundred pages of text seemed not entirely conclusive, somehow they did not sound even in the most daring newspaper of that time, against the backdrop of the general passion for overthrowing idols.

Attention: imagine a teenager, in front of whose eyes a drunken father beats his mother more than once, then leaves her with four children (Pavlik is the eldest, the whole household falls on him) and goes to live on the other side of the village with a young woman. What does collectivization and heroism have to do with it? The son somehow wanted to protect his mother and punish his father so that he would return to the family, but would not drink or beat him... Any psychologist would do this family drama would be called classic. Have you ever been on a helpline for teenagers, and you will hear this about cruelty and domestic violence!

Later I found out that a book was published in London in 1988 Soviet writer(now American professor) Yuri Druzhnikov "Informer 001, or the Ascension of Pavlik Morozov." Now it has been published in Russia, is often read and abundantly commented on by the Internet community. The author did a tremendous amount of documentary and research work to expose the myth, confirmed the drama of the Morozov family and proposed his own version of the crime: the murder of the unfortunate children was committed by OGPU employees in order to raise a propaganda wave of mass indignation against the kulaks.

I don’t know what kind of relationship there was in the Morozov family. I only know one thing: the testimony of a minor child cannot be interpreted against him by all normal legislation. Society suffered from dislocations during the famine, and to pay in public opinion For collectivization, they forced him to be just a boy.

The tragedy of Pavlik Morozov is that one system made him a martyr of the idea, the main pioneer of the country, while another system made him a young informer, a traitor to his own father.

But, gentlemen and comrades! The fact (not a version!) is indisputable: in 1932, two children were killed. And for this modern, free, democratic society the culprits were never assigned. At the same time, as easily as terminals - plus to minus, the understanding of the past changes. Always modern history serves actual truth rather than boring truth. Let historians study collectivization and write about the village of Gerasimovka and how a very young boy was appointed a hero of that era.

IN modern history not a single human rights activist, not a single believer was horrified out loud by this crime committed by whom? For what? Even if there are more complete answers to these questions, I still will not be able to remember in vain the names of innocently murdered children.