Bezhin Meadow - Original Turgenev Story and Pavlik Morozov

Original Turgenev Story and Pavlik Morozov

The film was based in part on a story by Ivan Turgenev, a 19th-century Russian scholar and novelist, but was adapted to incorporate the folk story of Pavlik Morozov, a supposed Young Pioneer glorified by Soviet Union propaganda as a martyr. Turgenev's original short fiction titled "Bezhin Meadow" or "Bezhin Lea" was a story about peasant boys in the 1850s, in the Oryol region, discussing supernatural signs of death, while they spend the night in the Bezhin Meadow with a lost hunter. Eisenstein would later remove any direct references to Turgenev's fiction, aside from the title, from the film. It is a part of A Sportsman's Sketches, a collection of short stories.

Morozov's life and death in the village of Gerasimovka in the Ural Mountains, has no connection with Turgenev's literary work. Morozov was a 13-year old boy who denounced his father, a kulak, to the Soviet government authorities, and was in turn killed by his family. It was a Soviet morality tale: opposing the state was selfish and reactionary, and the state was more important than family. The most popular account of the Morozov story is as follows: born to poor peasants in Gerasimovka, a small village 350 kilometres (220 mi) north-east of Sverdlovsk, Morozov was a dedicated communist who led the Young Pioneers at his school, and supported Stalin's collectivization of farms. In 1932, at age 13, Morozov reported his father to the political police (GPU). Morozov's father, the Chairman of the Village Soviet or Selsoviet, was alleged to have been "forging documents and selling them to the bandits and enemies of the Soviet State" (as his sentence read). The elder Morozov, Trofim, was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp, and later executed. However, Pavlik's family did not approve of the young boy's actions. On September 3 of that year, his uncle, grandfather, grandmother and a cousin murdered him, along with his younger brother. All of them except the uncle were rounded up by the GPU, convicted, and sentenced to "the highest measure of social defense", execution by a firing squad.

The Morozov story was developed into compulsory children's readings, songs, plays, a symphonic poem, a full-length opera and six biographies. There is very little original evidence related to the story; much of it is hearsay provided by second-hand witnesses. In Bezhin Meadow, the child is named Stepok, departing from the original historical lore and information. Among the ironies of Bezhin Meadow's history were that Pavlik Morozov may not have even been a member of the Young Pioneers. Morozov had been called a "disturbed young boy" who was unaware of the consequences of what he was doing and turned his father in to the authorities for having abandoned his mother for a younger woman, rather than for political reasons.