[1] The most popular account of the story is as follows: born to poor peasants in Gerasimovka, a small village 350 kilometres (220 mi) north-east of Yekaterinburg (then known as Sverdlovsk), Morozov was a dedicated communist who led the Young Pioneers at his school and supported Stalin's collectivization of farms.

[1] However, Pavlik's family did not take kindly to his reporting his father and on 3 September of that year, his uncle, grandfather, grandmother, and a cousin murdered him, along with his younger brother.

[2] All of them except the uncle were rounded up by the GPU and sentenced to "the highest measure of social defense" – execution by a firing squad.

In her 2005 book Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero, Catriona Kelly agrees with Druzhnikov that the official version of the account is almost wholly fictional.

She determined the evidence is sketchy, based mostly on second-hand reports by alleged witnesses, and that Pavlik did not inform on his parents but was murdered after a mundane squabble.

Kelly also shows how the official version's emphasis shifted to suit the changing times and propaganda lines.

In some accounts, Pavlik's father's crime was not forging the documents, but hoarding grain; in others, he was denounced not to the secret police, but to a schoolteacher.

The one surviving photograph of him shows a malnourished child who bears almost no resemblance to the statues and images in children's books.

[10] According to the most recent research, Gerasimovka was described in the Soviet press as a "kulak nest" because its villagers refused to join the kolkhoz, a state-controlled collective farm during the collectivization.

Kelly believes there is no evidence that the family was involved in the murder of the boy, and that it probably was the work of some teenagers with whom Pavlik had a squabble over a gun.