Foreign News: Good Children’s Relatives

Rather more than an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth was exacted last week by the Soviet Court which tried the murderers of Pavel, 13, and Fedor, 9, Russia’s famed “good children” who peached on their father Trophim Morosov and had him banished for the crime of “obstructing collectivization” (TIME, Dec. 5).

Though the court sat in Gerasimovka, an insignificant village in remote Sverdlovsk Province in the Ural Mountains, every detail of this “propaganda trial” was published and broadcast throughout Russia. Too many villagers had stabbed and hacked the two “good children” for all the assassins to be shot. One woman and three men were sentenced to “the supreme measure of social defense”: Death by shooting. Three of the condemned were close kin of Pavel & Fedor.