A fourteen-year-old boy who had informed on his peasant father for hoarding grain—and was then murdered by outraged neighbors—was turned into a Soviet national hero. “Pavlik Morozov” statues were commissioned for parks and squares across the Soviet Union, so many in fact, that the statue’s sculptor was killed in an accident caused by the state’s production demands. No one stopped to consider the irony, and who could believe the rumors that the fourteen-year-old informer had, in fact, been murdered by the NKVD, who executed thirty-seven of his village neighbors, including Morozov’s grandfather,
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