During the 30s and 40s, "social surgery on a monumental scale" was practiced in the USSR by the Stalinist regime: 20 million died in labor camps, of famine, or in wholesale executions. a legendary hero for betraying his father to the secret police as an "enemy of the state," a act which became a symbol of Stalin's monolithic state-machine. Streets, parks and schools were named after this "little patriot." Pavlik's heroic reputation has come in for its share of revisionist analysis since Perestroika. We return to the remote village where he was born to meet with those who recall the myth and can expose the wretched reality.