Pavlik Morozov, 1918-1932. Pavlik was the son of so called "kulak" parents. In the late 1920's and early 1930's, after Stalin issued his order that the kulak population was to be eliminated as a class, Pavlik's father hid kulak fugitives fleeing from the government in his house. According to the official story that persisted until the period of perestroika, Pavlik informed on his father to Stalin's secret police because his father had helped the kulaks. A survivor of Stalin's camps, Alla Yevgenievna Tumanova, however, made it clear that this was not the true story at all. Pavlik had simply got into an argument with his father and denounced him to get back at him. Relatives from his own village then murdered the boy. Pavlik was pronounced as a hero by Stalin and made an example of, to teach the other Soviet children that it was a mark of good Soviet patriotism to inform on your own parents for being anti-Soviet. During the rule of Czar Nikolai Romanov II, as well as the czars before him, the majority of the Russian people, the peasantry, defined the word "kulak" in a completely different way from the way in which the Bolsheviks, with Lenin, and later Stalin, at the head, defined it. The Russian word "kulak", which translated into English literally means "fist", was defined by the peasantry of czarist times to mean such people as usurers, land-subrenters, and wheeler-dealers. These people would preform a whole list of actions against the peasants that were an advantage to themselves and put the peasants at a disadvantage. According to the peasants these were the exploiters, or kulaks. For example, usurers, merchants, and wheeler-dealers would sometimes behave as if they were consumers and buy up the peasants' grain cheaply for very low prices in the autumn and then six months later they would sell it back to them for a lot more than what they paid for it in the first place. Or they would sometimes allow a person to take out a loan, and then when the time came for that person to pay back the loan, the kulak would then charge the person a lot more interest on that loan than was really necessary. These people, in the minds of the czarist peasants, were kulaks.
