Pavlik Morozov is a pioneer whose name was glorified by the Soviet media. His feat consisted in the fact that he betrayed his own father to the authorities, having learned how he actively decided to resist the Soviet regime. His name has become a kind of collective image of a teenager, ready to do anything for the sake of a bright communist future. In the 30s of the XX century, more than 30 children are known who repeated the feat of Pavlik Morozov and became symbols of the young Soviet state.
Pavel Timofeevich Morozov was born in 1918 in the village of Gerasimovka, Sverdlovsk Region. He organized the first pioneer detachment in his native village and actively campaigned for the creation of a collective farm. The kulaks, including Timofey Morozov, actively opposed the Soviet regime and conspired to disrupt grain procurements. Pavlik accidentally learned about the impending sabotage. The young pioneer stopped at nothing and exposed his kulaks. The villagers, who learned that the son had surrendered 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 Pavlik Morozov's feat, songs and poems have been composed about him. The first song about Pavlik Morozov was written by the then unknown young writer Sergei Mikhalkov. This work made him a very popular and sought-after author overnight. 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 when children were killed for denunciations. These events took place before the murder of Pavlik Morozov.
In the Ukrainian village of Sorochintsy, Pavel Teslya also denounced his father, for which he paid with his life five years earlier Morozov.
Seven more similar cases occurred in various villages. Two years before the death of Pavlik Morozov, the informer Grisha Hakobyan was stabbed to death in Azerbaijan.
Even before Pavlik's death, the newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda told about cases when fellow villagers brutally killed young informers. It also published the texts of denunciations of children, with all the details.
Followers of Pavlik Morozov
The cruel reprisals against the young informers continued. In 1932, three children were killed for denunciations, in 1934 - six, and in 1935 - nine.
The story of Prony Kolybin, who denounced his mother, accusing her of stealing socialist property, is noteworthy. A beggar woman collected fallen spikelets 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. As a result, on 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, a subscription to the Leninskiye grandchildren newspaper, new boots and a pioneer costume.
A Chukchi boy named Yatyrgin learned that the reindeer herders were about to take their reindeer herds to Alaska. He informed the Bolsheviks about this, for which the furious reindeer herders hit Yatyrgin on the head with an ax and threw him into the pit. Thinking that the boy is already dead. However, he managed to survive and get to "his". When Yatyrgin was solemnly accepted as a pioneer, it was decided to give him a new name - Pavlik Morozov, with whom he lived to old age.
