A 13-year-old schoolgirl who kept a poignant and ultimately tragic diary about her life growing up in Stalin's Soviet Union has been hailed as Russia's answer to Anne Frank.
The diaries of teenager Nina Lugovskaya, called I Want to Live: The Diaries of a Young Girl in Stalin's Russia, will be published in English on Friday after lying in a KGB file for 50 years.
They offer an unusually perceptive view of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, combined with intimate soul-searching about the kind of everyday difficulties faced by teenage girls everywhere: boys, parties and parents.
Like Anne Frank, Nina was 13 when she began keeping her diary; and like the Amsterdam schoolgirl she was writing in the shadow of one of the 20th century's most repressive regimes.
In 1937, at the height of Stalin's purges, her family's Moscow flat was raided and her diaries, which covered the years 1932-37, were confiscated by the secret police.
Nina's father, a left-wing socialist revolutionary, had already incurred the Kremlin's wrath and spent time in prison and in exile. But her negative feelings about Stalin's government, feelings that she expressed in the diaries, were to be the undoing of the rest of the family.
Together with her mother and two sisters, Nina was found guilty of treason and branded a counter-revolutionary. They spent five years of hard labour in the Siberian gulag, followed by seven years of internal exile.
It was an ordeal that the young diarist's mother did not survive. But Nina did: after Stalin's death she was politically rehabilitated. She married and became an artist, and lived long enough to see the fall of Communism. She died in 1993 at the age of 74.
The diaries were unearthed in 2001 by Irina Osipova, a researcher for Memorial, an organisation that tries to keep alive the memory of Stalin's victims. They had lain forgotten, scrawled in childish handwriting on the pages of three school exercise books, in a KGB archive in Moscow.
Author: Andrew Osborne
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