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CATRIONA KELLY. Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero. London: Granta Books. 2005. Pp. xxxii, 352. 17.99

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.111.3.930

1937-5239

L. A. Kirschenbaum,

Soviet and Russian History

Pavlik Morozov was arguably the most famous child in Soviet history. Catriona Kelly's account of his life, death, and legend begins with a description of Soviet ten-year-olds gathered around a bonfire at a Young Pioneer camp, listening to the story for the first time: “Long ago, before you were born … back in the early 1930s, there was a little boy, not much older than you” (p. xxii) whose father was working against the collectivization of the Soviet countryside. When good little Pioneer Pavlik found out, he reported his father to the police. In retaliation, his relatives brutally murdered him and his younger brother. The rest of Catriona Kelly's wide-ranging and engaging book aims to destabilize and deconstruct every aspect of this campfire story. Kelly seeks to uncover Morozov's “real life” and to trace the creation, transmission, reception, mutation, and eventual eclipse of the Pavlik legend. The result is a book that is part murder mystery and part scholarly analysis of Soviet propaganda in the making that may hold as much appeal for real crime buffs as for historians of the Soviet Union and of childhood more generally.