ABSTRACT
I’d like to begin in a rather odd place and time, in the village of Gerasimovka in the Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union, where over fifty years ago, a 13-year-old boy named Pavlik Morozov denounced his kulak father to the local authorities for hiding a pig in his basement. This was at the height of Stalin’s dekulakization program, in which at least three million died by starvation, and many more were deported to labor camps, because they resisted the expropriation of their produce and farm animals. But Pavlik became a folk hero and a statue was erected in his honor.
