Yuri Druzhnikov (1)

A brilliant piece of Russian history, deconstructing the life, times, death and legacy of Pavlik Morozov, a teenage boy who was murdered (along with his younger brother Fyodor) in Russia in 1932, supposedly because he denounced his father to the Soviet secret police. He subsequently became a national hero and a model for Soviet youth, but Druzhnikov proves that virtually every aspect of Pavlik's story is either grossly distorted or an outright lie. (He wasn't even called Pavlik!) The myth is show more as murky and sordid as only Soviet history can be.

I look forward to reading the other book about Pavlik, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero by Catriona Kelly. Druzhnikov wrote his in the early 1980s, just in time to interview surviving witnesses, but due to the repressive and secretive government he didn't have much access to records. Kelly wrote her book in the early 2000s, by which time all the witnesses were dead, but she found a lot of documents Druzhnikov wasn't able to see. I know she reached some quite different conclusions about Pavlik's murder than Druzhnikov did, and it'll be interesting to compare the two works. show less