History: For the generation of savage idealists who set out to remake Russia and the world after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, peasants were always going to be something of a problem. For Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, agricultural workers figured only as a remnant of the vanishing social order of feudalism, a class ultimately doomed to extinction yet still likely to take up reactionary positions and attempt to "roll back the wheel of history".
The revolution, of course, was not supposed to happen in backward Russia but in wealthy, advanced Germany. It is not quite true to say no one told Lenin this, for people were always telling him, but he was not inclined to listen; he was not, perhaps, the listening type. So the world's first successful proletarian revolution was launched in a country in which proletarians were a tiny minority and the peasantry was vast, far-flung and, so it seemed, ignorant and superstitious.
In the early days of the revolution, when what the comrades might have called "bourgeois legalism" still had to be accorded some attention and respect, the unfortunate imbalance between the numbers of progressive workers and potentially reactionary peasants was dealt with by the simple constitutional expedient of according the peasant one vote and the worker five. Later, when the parties the peasants might have wished to vote for had been liquidated, this kind of political creativity was no longer necessary.
Though politically marginalised, the "doomed class" still retained a certain economic importance throughout the 1920s and 1930s: Russia's towns and cities badly needed bread and the peasants were sitting on the grain. At first Stalin was in favour of a softly softly approach, while Trotsky, as ever, advocated "harsh measures". But eventually, faced with rationing in the cities and rocketing food prices, Stalin too came to see the need to crush peasant resistance. Agriculture would be collectivised and the wealthier peasants, the so-called kulaks, "liquidated as a class". The immediate result of this campaign was famine and the deaths of between five and 10 million people in the Ukraine in the early 1930s.
Catriona Kelly's book focuses on the killing of two children, Pavel (13) - also known as Pavlik - and Fyodor (11) Morozov, in the remote village of Gerasimovka, in western Siberia, in September 1932. The violent deaths of two insignificant peasant boys did not initially attract much attention in a region that was then spectacularly lawless.
Soon, however, it began to be noticed by the security apparatus and the national press, in particular that of the Pioneer (Soviet scouting) movement. The legend that emerged was the following.
Pavel Morozov was an enthusiastic Pioneer, strongly committed to the tasks of the revolution and in particular to the expropriation of the kulaks so that Soviet agriculture could be modernised and put to work for all the people. But his father, though chairman of the village Soviet, was secretly in league with the kulaks. Pavel discovered this and patriotically denounced his father to the secret police, the OGPU. And as is fitting, he was imprisoned for his crimes. Pavel's relations, however, secretly pledged vengeance and in due course exacted it, brutally stabbing the boy and his brother to death as they returned from a cranberry-picking expedition in the woods.
As Dr Kelly skilfully demonstrates, the reason this obscure case came to the attention of the wider authorities and was given so much publicity was that it contained all the essential elements for the propaganda battle then raging: backward, brutal and superstitious peasants desperately resisting progress only to be thwarted by a heroic exemplar of the new Russia, a young Pioneer so idealistic and fearless that he would denounce even his own father if he stood against the people.
As Pioneer Pravda put it: " A dark, unenlightened village, with age-old ignorance and illiteracy, all-pervasive religion, and property-grubbing attitudes. And suddenly into this dismal dump surges the radiant, heroic life of Pioneer Pavlik Morozov. The kulaks snarled like dogs and bared their fangs."
The reality, in so far as it is possible to establish it 70 years later, is somewhat more prosaic. Pavel may or may not have been a Pioneer, but he was certainly a young lad who liked denouncing people; the "kulaks" of Gerasimovka were not rich peasants but poor and miserable wretches; the real point at issue between Pavel and the villagers may not have been the denunciation of his father - which may not even have happened - but a squalid row over a single horse harness held back from "collectivisation". Also, of the four people executed for the boys' murder, all of whom were part of the Morozov extended family, possibly one was actually guilty of the crime.
Nevertheless, the martyr's legend of little Pavel Morozov was to survive in book, song and story to inspire, or more likely to irritate and bore, three generations of Soviet schoolchildren.
Dr Kelly disarmingly relates that in the course of her researches she encountered many Russians who were puzzled by the attention she was giving the Morozov case, including "taxi-drivers astonished that you could make good money by doing work like that".
Reluctantly, one is inclined to a sneaking sympathy for that rather philistine viewpoint, for while the material is interesting it is perhaps a little stretched and padded in the present treatment. Though this is not a long book it could easily have been shorter.
Intriguingly, the author glances in her final chapters at the more general question of the content and style of Soviet internal propaganda (a rich, and richly hilarious, seam) and the popular parodies and subversions of it that thrived underground. Now that would be a book to look forward to.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist
Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero By Catriona Kelly Granta, 352pp. £17.99