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Yuri Druzhnikov
Informer 001
Chapter 14. To Inform, or Not to Inform?
How should the story of Pavlik Morozov be told today? Does the hero-informer remain the government's standard of citizen conduct that he had been in the 1930s? During Stalin's rule the magazine Ogonyok (Small Fire) declared that Morozov exemplified "the history of the motherland during the Stalin epoch." Has that epoch really come to an end?
The tyranny of the Stalinist era was officially condemned, along with the massive repressions it engendered. The 1965 Soviet Encyclopedia of History permits no interpretation other than a negative one to the role of such activists as Morozov; similarly, in the 1930s one could not avoid honoring such types. In the 1960s there were attempts (not crowned, it's true, with success) to publicly condemn the informants of the 1930s. Nevertheless, three years after Stalin's death something peculiar occurred; the name of Pavlik Morozov was "forever" entered into the All-Union Pioneer Organization Book of Honor under the title Number 001.
Statues of Stalin have long been removed, while monuments to the hero-informer in different cities still stand. Identical monuments of the Pioneer with the red banner are erected in many towns, a dismal bequest of socialist realism. Modern Soviet historical analysis rewrote the period of collectivization. These more recent compositions generally do not mention the fundamental task of the Party at that time as the annihilation of kulakdom, although they did mention the "education" of the peasants in a suitably florid style. There are works in which the word "kulak" does not appear at all. But what about informing?
Thomash Rzhezach, in his book The Spiral of Solzhenitsyn's Treason, released by the Soviet publishing house Progress in 1978, provides an epigraph taken from the words of Plutarch, "Traitors betray first and foremost themselves." Rzhezach believes that informing exists as a consequence of cowardice. He condemns Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom the book holds in shame, as an informer since childhood. According to Rzhezach, Solzhenitsyn "has informed and informed about anti-Soviet activities . . . on his wife . . . on his friends . . . on the chance fellow traveller . . . on people near and far." He maintains that when the writer was incarcerated during the war his term was reduced in exchange for information, and for that reason he became a secret informer for the camp administration. Soviet security agencies used this prisoner "only on the lowest rung--in the role of a camp stool pigeon." "Moral death" would be his ultimate reward.
The book is an obvious attempt to compromise the world-famous writer. Its author's inspiration is transparent--he is simply performing the task assigned him. Soviet power believes it could find no better way to compromise Solzhenitsyn's reputation than by spreading, by massive circulation, the rumor that he had been an informer. The book unequivocally presents the image of a Soviet citizen-collaborator as human scum, beneath contempt. Rzhezach's portrait of an informer implies animalistic cunning and moral turpitude of the lowest order. The informer, in short, evinces dramatically the most vulgar psychological characteristics of a criminal.
Revised official Soviet appraisal concerning the possible activities of contemporary Pavlik Morozovs suggest that it is, in principle, immoral to submit political accusations. I am prepared to embrace this point of view.
Throughout recent years propaganda concerning the heroic exploits of Pavlik Morozov was spread listlessly, hushed-up, even disparaged. It seems as if the powers that be are uncertain what to do with this boy. The second edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia maintained that Pavlik unmasked his father; the third, that Pioneers "exposed enemy activities of the kulaks." The third edition of The Condensed Soviet Encyclopedia, however, not only does not report that Pavlik informed on his father, but neglects his more generalized informing entirely. It turns out that "together with poor peasants [he] took part in the distribution of grain during the period of collectivization." In the preface to the first edition of The Children's Encyclopedia (1962) Nikita Khrushchev positively appraised Pavlik Morozov, referring to him as the "immortal of that age." In the second edition Morozov is moved aside in favor of a little-known hero, the child-correspondent of Pioner, Nikita Semin. By the third edition it foggily states that Pavlik and other such children "accomplished feats of labor and civic duty."
The shell of the myth remains while the essence changes. It is written that Morozov was simply a hero, and that he was killed for being one. Significantly, he is also called a "tragic hero." His merits are extolled in such vague formulations as "of noble, moral make-up," and "an example of selfless service to the people." The writer Gubarev published his memoirs in the magazine Molodoi Kommunist, generally revising the core of the matter. Indeed, it was not Morozov who betrayed his father, but the father who betrayed his son: "It was difficult to the point of tears for the boy to endure the treachery of the father." Later histories seldom mention the boy at all.
Despite the boy's apparent decline in popularity, the press recently termed the Pioneer organization "the Morozov Guard." Morozov has been ineradicably canonized as the well-tempered propaganda machine plays the same tune over and over. The anniversary of his death has entered into the government system of jubilees. Sacred oaths are sworn in his name, and in solemn ceremonies Pioneers take handfuls of earth from his grave. Sporting events in his honor, lessons of courage to the beat of a drum, and competitions for the right to light the bonfire on the day of the hero's death are organized. The name "Morozov" is adopted in the USSR and other socialist countries for a multitude of streets, schools, libraries, camps, parks, Pioneer troops, collective farms, cultural centers, Pioneer lodges, and even entire forests (doubtlessly in view of the fact that Pavlik and Fedya Morozov were murdered in the woods). A special resolution exists to establish a National Memorial Park in the village of Gerasimovka.
But how is he regarded in real life? People inwardly renounce the hero-informer--a practical consideration. By honoring the act of informing, the powers that be achieved results different from those they had intended. The government's complete lack of respect for individuals and individual property could not help but create reciprocal feelings in these same individuals toward the government and its property. Now, when every child knows where his mother secretly gets sausage, and his father nails and boards, it becomes even more difficult to find Pavliks in families. Is it necessary today to have child-betrayers as supervisors of the country? Soviet ideology demanded allegiance to an authoritative set of beliefs, but this very allegiance is inherently undermined by informants. Children of responsible workers of all ranks are eager to serve as Morozov had, and not for small change but for higher stakes, including the privilege of traveling abroad. When compelled to inform, it's understood that they will generally protect their families. Twofold morality becomes threefold: for oneself, for family and friends, and for others. But this ethical elasticity may be additionally relative under any given equation of situation, cultural standards, and internal taboos.
Recent circumstances dictate that the basic formula for informing is similarly obsolete; one must inform to a prescribed person, and against those deemed necessary. The very word "inform" today sounds unpleasant to the Russian ear; therefore newspapers employ the euphemism "warn." The system of recruiting informers became secret. Heroes are registered without publicity, but they receive real compensation. Surveillence equipment has been improved with the advent of Western computer technology. Technical advances have thus distanced the participants, incidentally making the activity less burdensome to the conscience of the informer.
In the eyes of the majority of citizens, the outmoded snitch-enthusiast has become a villain. In the company of an unfamiliar person they carefully ask whether he isn't a Pavlik Morozov. It would be difficult today to find from among a group of famous writers one who would take it upon himself to extol the activities of Informer 001.
Given all this, is it possible to part with the myth, to rehabilitate the victims of the Morozov trial, and to name the real killers? More generally, is it possible that we no longer need either new or class morals, but can return to a simpler norm, to human morals? No. One responsible Party worker explained to me that destroying such a concept of heroism would be devastating in its effects. As he saw it, these days many celebrities fight and become drunkards. Therefore, giving the names of living heroes to institutions is forbidden. But old heroes are proven. Pavlik has gotten a little older, concluded the Party worker, but he still proves useful.
The powerful in this country strongly encourage that practical reason conform to history; denouncing one's predecessors implies an improved historical and ethical perspective. A generation of functionaries the same age as Morozov is departing. These contemporaries of October possessed many of Pavlik's main qualities and occupied the key positions in the Party for ages. All that they possessed (and they possessed all) was attained thanks to the official Morozovian morality. It seems as if their hero is dead. But many among this present generation of leaders have made their way to power using the very same methods. Even now it is much easier to enter the ruling ranks if one cooperates with various secret agencies. And if tomorrow the powerful were to renounce Pavlik Morozov, the day after tomorrow they would replace him with a different myth. Epochs and leaders change, but denunciation and betrayal live on as instruments to power. Is this sad fact a matter of chance?
In all utopian models of government an important role is assigned to informants for protecting the model from any encroachment that threatens to destroy it. But here the utopian scheme is realized with neither the premise of freedom nor the promise of prosperity.
The second stage is advancing, one of universal disappointment and dissatisfaction. For the powers who have legitimized violence, the process of suppression is not technically serious; however, it does have distinct demographic implications. They can do away with undesirable ethnic groups, they can annihilate half the population, but they cannot destroy all the people, for then there would be no one over whom to rule. Furthermore, widespread civil war would lead to hunger and economic collapse. Gradually the general suppression of discontent will be exchanged for selective suppression. And, to this end, those agencies concerned with suppression will need information about what, or who, more specifically, remains defiantly unsuppressed.
The informant's social situation is unstable; whether out of fear or in accordance with natural inclination, he takes the bait in which he invariably finds a hook. The informer has built his happiness on others' misfortune. He fixes all of his devotion on his employers, but he is not his own man and the feeling is seldom reciprocated. Returning to the peace of a less complicated existence is impossible; his employers will not allow it. The legal status of informer is also hazardous. Within the agencies of coercion he is registered under a pseudonym, receiving compensation for his services under the table until a trade union for squealers is created to defend his interests. As a rule, he is compelled to use some other job as a cover for his informing; he may act the part of maintenance man or poet.
Democratic governments generally limit surveillance technology and monitor its use even when uncovering such highly illegal activites as terrorism. The legality of using such equipment for shadowing the favorite activities of an individual or other activities here is either lacking entirely or temporarily upheld. Unofficial intellectual life, underground economics, and other manifestations of daily life rouse the authorities to constantly expand their network of informants. Here, military administration, government management, and State security itself are literally set in motion by informants. In contrast to the selective nature of repression, participation under this system may theoretically reach one hundred percent. The grand finale: everyone in the country would be spying on each other.
Universal informing drives the remainder of the people into their individual shells. Society as a collection of human beings ceased to exist during the Stalinist era; the social fabric was destroyed, and people, forced to be deaf and dumb, were transformed into shadows--apathy became the only way to survive. It may be that, having reached its apogee, the protracted "heroism" campaign for informers quieted down at the end of the 1930s. Collaborators reached their maximum carrying capacity and began to receive more information than they could digest. They had almost attained the theoretical ideal.
Of course, at that time authority rested basically upon adult informers. Child informing was supplementary in terms of its practical use, but it was crucial for the education of future citizens. Children are much easier to persuade that this baseness in a new system is really a symbol of its greatness. It is not surprising that children's informing on adults was cultivated in Hitler's Germany and in the so-called sister socialist countries in Eastern Europe, in Cambodia, and in Communist China. The character of Soviet writer A. Prokhanov's book A Tree in the Downtown of Kabul, published when the Soviet army occupied Afganistan, reminds us of Pavlik Morozov.
The appearance of millions of Pavlik Morozovs is in conformity with the natural law of a system that, without its base of informers, would have toppled long ago. I know of no other hero who more accurately represents the essence of a system with one-party ideals.
In the 1920s the question of informing was discussed by leaders in the Soviet government. The director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, David Ryazanov, demanded as a goal of social enlightenment that "every citizen would know that informing to the court is not 'informing,' it is his duty. If you want to nurture a feeling of confidence, then develop an aptitude for informing and don't intimidate people to the point that they give a false report." Ryazanov himself was also arrested on the word of an informant and died in a prison camp. It is doubtful whether today a responsible worker could be found in an apparatus of power that publicly proclaims so harsh a position of guidance. But, in point of fact, informing will always be necessary, in periods of darkness and freeze as well as in times of brightening and thaw. It helps the old-timers tighten the screws, but it also helps the new group of leaders deal with their adversaries. Consider the implications of the following rhetorical question: Can one enter history without knocking? Note that in Russian the verb "to knock" is slang for "to inform."
During the Khrushchev thaw of the early 1960s, Pionerskaya Pravda openly searched for new Morozovs: "Where did my father get so much money?" wondered Pioneer Valery Zhelezny. "How does my father's friend live? Why, he doesn't work anywhere!" Valery came out against his father, and hid nothing from the court about his father's accomplices. The paper beamed, "We are proud of you, Valery."
Twenty years later, in the period of the Brezhnev stagnation, a 1982 edition of Pravda told of a mother who informed the proper authorities that her son had received a letter from abroad and that he also listened to foreign radio transmissions. Security agencies, the newspaper assured, had been tracking the young man for a long time and knew all of this already. The son was shot for espionage. The mother's informing was simply an expression of her moral duty. What has transpired here? While earlier Pavliks informed only on their parents, now they are grown and have become parents themselves, parents who inform on their children. The continuing tragedy of this generation persists as one of the most immoral in the history of humanity.
Glasnost (the "openness" to speak freely) has been proclaimed throughout the country, but for the KGB that word is understood to mean "glaznost" ("to see clearly"--people are using their freedom to speak out and inform on themselves as well as on others). Newspapers call on readers to report which of their neighbors are not living in the same style as everyone else, and secret police register every bit of information as evidence of the dissidence they must continue to stifle. Even now, they fatten up dossiers and revive the data cards of informants.
Riding this new wave of informing, which began with the Soviet press in the mid 1980s after Gorbachev came to power, Viktor Rozov's play By the Sea was performed in many theaters. The protagonist of the play is a tenth grader whose father seems to be a responsible V.I.P. but is tried for bribery, as was Pavlik Morozov's father. All of the author's sympathies are with the brave youth. The father is already in prison when the son composes not simply further incriminating information, but spends his whole summer reconstructing the minutiae of his father's activites in order to unmask him even more thoroughly than the authorities had, and thus lengthen his term of imprisonment. This otherwise completely normal and competent youth hysterically shouts to the entire audience that he will expose everyone who is like his father. The hero of By the Sea surpasses Pavlik, for he publicly denies not only his father but his mother as well, and leaves home to reeducate himself in the family of a simple proletarian laborer.
Is the conviction of the writer within the orthodoxy of Communist moral principles? Or is this evidence of the familiar aspiration to advance--only now on the pellucid wave of Glasnost?
Posssibly they are one and the same. One must understand that, first and foremost, in the Soviet Union ideological fetishes never die. Occasionally they are put on the shelf because they are not especially advantageous at the time. But this does not in any way mean that doctrine has become more humane.
Soviet ideology changed the rituals, but it was not capable of changing the postulates. This ideology corrupted, but it could not regenerate. "What might he have become?" pondered a newspaper about Pavlik on one of the previous anniversaries of the day of his death. "Today, would he raise unprecedented harvests in the Ural region or make super-strong steel?" We can't know what he would have done regarding steel, but even without Morozov's help, harvests have always been "unprecedented"--that is, poor. And I doubt that, as has been suggested by other authors, if Pavlik had lived until our epoch he would have become a cosmonaut.
Any doubt regarding Morozov's behavior always arouses hostility in the authorities. In V. Terentyeva's 1964 article, "Don't Dirty an Honored Name!" (subtitled "Our Answer to the Gentlemen Across the Ocean"), the Ural newspaper printed that Americans had slandered Pavlik Morozov in their school textbooks. The paper was disturbed by the statement, "A child must honor his father and his mother," found in the chapter titled "Political Arithmetic and Communist Morals" in the American textbook The Meaning of Communism:
Part of the efforts of the Soviet system of education is the affirmation in textbooks of "Communist morals." To the extent that Communism denies religion, it also denies Western moralistic criteria, which is founded mainly on religion. Consequently, Soviet children are taught to discern what is good and what is bad not on the basis of fundamental moral values as we understand them, but more on the basis of Soviet doctrine. So, to kill another person is bad, but it was entirely moral for Stalin to kill millions during the forced collectivization. A child must honor his mother and father, the Communists say, but in Moscow stands a monument in honor of eleven-year-old Pavlik Morozov, whose father was destroyed after young Pavlik informed . . . that he was concealing grain. A child must obey and respect his teacher, say the Communists, but is obliged to report if she is tolerant of expressions of religious views.
This excerpt from the American textbook is not accessible to Soviet readers without special permission, especially in the Urals. While not fully citing the authors' ideas, the newspaper charged the American professors William Miller and others, with "playing the role of Judas toward the children." The paper also compared them to the Gerasimovka kulaks, concluding that the kulaks were better people even if they were illiterate. In the Soviet paper's opinion, the American historians committed as despicable an act as the murder of Pavlik Morozov at the hands of the kulaks: "This is a transgression," the article solemnly pronounced. "We charge you with transgression against the name of Pavlik Morozov, gentlemen professors, with transgression against his honored memory. . . . A criminal court sentenced the kulaks to the firing squad. William Miller, Henry Roberts, Marshall Shulman, Harry Savage; any court of honor would sentence these names to death. Shame!"
Such militant defense of the morals of Morozov on an international scale showed that the boy remained at his post. "The foreign press lies that we raise our children according to the example of a betrayer of his father," contends the contemporary Soviet writer Balashov in a 1982 article published for the fiftieth anniversary of Pavlik Morozov's demise in the magazine Uralski Sledopyt (The Ural Pathfinder) under the title "The Boy with the Courage of a Man." In the article Balashov additionally maintains that Pavlik's life is yet awaiting its Shakespeare. The question remains: do they now raise children on the example of the betrayer or not?
Undoubtedly, to a large number of quite loyal yet thinking Soviet people the costs of the lie in practical terms are completely clear; if nothing is sacred, then nothing is sacred--neither the authorities nor their leaders. The cynicism of children of the following generation was massive. How could it be otherwise when the Party cultivated honesty on the example of meanness, and devotion on the example of betrayal?
Soviet leaders loved to repeat that throughout history there is no return route, that the progress of society cannot be turned back. But in the thirties those very Soviet leaders succeeded in turning back history as Russia returned to a wholesale oppression similar to that of the Middle Ages. The damage to people's morals turned out to be so severe that even after the death of Stalin, rumors spread of a massive destruction of people in Stalin's torture chambers--all on the basis of fabricated charges. The writer Vitaly Gubarev boasted in his memoirs, "For thirty years we pulled a lot of weeds." Where is the guarantee that tomorrow morning the next ruler of men's minds won't decide to occupy himself with weeding the garden he has managed to get his hands on? The Soviet poet Stepan Schipachev declared that Pavlik Morozov will be our contemporary "for all ages to come." This is a pleasant thought.
"To inform, or not to inform? That is the question." So every Soviet Hamlet must have asked himself. And the answer to the question is not as simple as it seems. A hooligan strikes a woman, grabs her purse, jumps on a motorcycle, and takes off. You see the motorcycle's license number and there is a telephone nearby. Should you report this to the police or not? In this case the answer is simple; your sense of justice dictates that you must report it. But this does not bear any relation to the problem I am discussing. It concerns political informing, which is immoral in principle. Now, concerning informing inside the family, contemporary morals, like Biblical morals, do not distinguish between informing in political cases, in criminal cases, or in simple family matters. Within the family and from within the family, it is said, any aspect of informing is immoral. Although in certain instances this philosophy does not serve the interests of society as a whole, it can serve the interests of the family. But without the family there is no society. In countries where there is no absolute conformity of ideas, where political informing doesn't exist as a "sacred duty," where the family is inviolable, every person answers this question himself. Informers exist by vocation, but generally they are no more powerful than those of other vocations. They are often superfluous.
Soviet power always needed political informers. All was well until they begin to recruit individuals personally. Having selected a victim, they would call your home, offer to meet you "at the Square"; they would send you to the special department they have in every enterprise and then lead you to "their" hotel room. They began with blackmail, threatening to damage your dissertation or to prevent your son's being accepted into the university. Peace in your family, career, and sense of the future would all be shaken. They would promise you a better job, the privilege of reading forbidden books. They would then ask you to explain some trifle: "What were the views of your neighbor?" Of course, it was better to remain quiet--but then they would make trouble for you. Could you talk and then go? Or should you take the middle road: "Yes, certainly I understand how this is important, but unfortunately I didn't hear anything. . ." But they don't believe you. And they summon you again and again because you, insignificant and lowly you, are "material," according to Lenin's expression. They are genuine Leninists, they are the government, they are the Party, they are the law and there is no escape.
But what a misfortune for them as well. Heaven forbid that they would stumble from the little office of the regional police to the rooms of the General Secretary. Then they themselves would become "material," and this would be the end of them. They themselves clearly understood that in this country there existed but one real law--tyranny. There also existed but one real right--to inform.
Let me return to the starting point of this narrative. Who, ultimately, was guilty of what happened in Gerasimovka? Pavlik Morozov himself? His ancestors? Family? School? The system? Historical conditions? Are they all to blame? Correspondingly, is no one to blame? Morozov seems least guilty of all; after all, he was but a child. One's identity begins with the ability to choose, and Pavlik and the other village children of the 1930s had no choice. If adults in those years lacked a stable set of moral criteria, what can be said of an undeveloped boy? Neither should Pavlik bear any responsibility for what, after his death, was done in his name.
The innocence of the boy-informer raises little doubt; children, after all, are victims of circumstance. The guilt redounds doubly on those who corrupt children in order to retain their power; these are the real criminals. As of late, the Party began an effort to disassociate itself from this matter, to shift the blame onto separate individuals, onto the criminal inclinations of Stalin, and onto the particular conditions that compelled them to destroy one part of society in order to stregthen the power of another part. In contrast to the national genocide that took place in Nazi Germany, the annihilation of "hostile classes" in the Soviet Union deserves its own term, which I would call "socialicide." And it is Pavlik Morozov who unwittingly became a symbol of Soviet socialicide, of the ideologically grounded terror organized and practiced by one party against an entire populace.
As the show trial concerning the matter of Pavlik Morozov's killers was in progress and the censorship battle directed against enemies of the people reached its peak, in 1932 in the newspaper Uralsky Rabochy an article appeared commemorating the three-hundredth birthday of Spinoza. I do not know whether it was the result of coincidence or intention, but this article notably quotes the great philosopher: "To what level will fear set people to folly?" Folly out of fright--this state more accurately than any other defines the life of the country during the events herein described.
But the tempered objectivity of the historian is amazed by something else; how did it happen that, ground under by the mighty wheel of terror driven by the Party and the authorities, all did not succumb to the monstrous pressure of becoming informers? The very fact that appeals to enlist "as Pavlik Morozov [had]" continued in use for more than fifty years attests to the fact that all did not enlist. This very book, which I worked on for several years in Moscow, proves it. The manuscript went into samizdat, or underground, publication in 1984. Since then it has been scrutinized by many writers, and no one, as far as I know, has suffered for it.
The fundamental task of Soviet literature, as is well known, was to create positive heroes, idealized role models who existed solely to bolster Soviet authority. Despite this programmed effort, however, no enemies could cause as much harm to authority as it wrought on itself; it is compromised by the very myths it creates. Time goes on. Pavlik Morozov may be tinted, condemned, withdrawn, restored, or altogether withdrawn--all evidence of the myth's malleability, its very fragility. They say that a Soviet man is trained to believe everything that he hears, sees, and reads. But this training doesn't insure that he will always act as he is ordered to act. Even in Stalin's and Hitler's prison camps unbroken people miraculously survived. In Soviet Russia the ordinary man demonstrated a front of unflagging solidarity. But what was he really thinking? He lied when they demanded lies; in his soul he yearned for truth. He gave way when, as in Dostoyevsky's expression, "they narrow[ed] him," but this pliancy was never complete. He confided little to the other narrowed people. And through all this, he constantly prayed that his children wouldn't inform on him.
Translated by Ilya Druzhnikov and Carolyn Waggoner
Transaction Publishers
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