Customer Reviews

Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an academic study of the Soviet hero cult that was manufactured around Pavlik Morozov, a boy who was stabbed to death with his brother in a backwards rural village in 1932.

It's a somewhat obscure story, which is part of what makes this book so interesting. This is raw early Soviet history, on the micro-level, and full of fascinating details that fleshed out my vague textbook knowledge of the era. Local Party officials come off as overworked and incompetent, rural life as cripplingly poor and often violent. The fabrication and transformation of the Morozov story is traced with similar attention through a variety of ideological distortions.

The primary source material Kelly obtained is thorough and revealing. (My favorite aside: an brief mention of a truly bizarre incident in which Leningrad officials purged "dozens of profoundly deaf individuals" on suspicions of a Fascist conspiracy, with the sole evidence an allegation of a Hitler postcard changing hands.)

The clearly fragmentary state of the evidentiary record surrounding the Morozov murders means that the book is somewhat speculative in its ultimate conclusions. The writing style is definitely academic, and the middle chapters are somewhat dense. On the whole, however, I would recommend the book to those with an interest in Soviet history and propaganda in particular.