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Nina Lugovskaya, the Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl 1932 - 1937

Recently unearthed in the archives of the NKVD, Nina Lugovskaya's diary provides a rare window into the daily routines of an educated Moscow family during the 1930s when fear of arrest was a fact of life.

Nina's diary begins in 1932, after her father's return from three years exile in Siberia , and though the family is still living in their apartment they are hard-pressed and under surveillance. Having largely purged his own ranks of dissenters, Stalin is now poised to purge the country.

Like Anne Frank, 13-year-old Nina is conscious of the extraordinary dangers all around her, yet preoccupied by ordinary adolescent concerns; traumatised by her father's first arrest, she hates Stalin and abhors his dictatorship. Her diary had been the repository not only of the usual adolescent outpourings but of her views of the grim and hypocritical life around her, the lies, the arrests and injustice.

It ends in January 1937, two days before the NKVD conducted a thorough search of her family's apartment. The diary was seized and carefully studied, the "incriminating" passages (preserved in the book) were used to convict her as a "counterrevolutionary" who was "preparing to kill Stalin." She spent five years in a Kolyma prison camp and seven more in exile. Nina died in 1993.

"Nina's diary is a fascinating account of the 1930s, one of the darkest times in the

Russian history - and a tribute to the author's youthful spirit. Acutely aware of the life's

daily horrors, Nina is also preoccupied with her own growing pains. Love is a principal

theme in her diaries, along with a recurrent exasperation caused by the Soviet way of

life." - Cambridge Book Review.

Should you need any further information, please contact Elena Kostioukovitch (elkost @libero.it)

On June 5 th 2003, Italian daily Corriere della Sera published this article by Vittorio Strada on the diary of Nina - the Russian Anna Frank - and the last thoughts she penned before ending up in a Soviet gulag.

A stunning diary, hot off the press in 500 copies, came in today from post-communist Russia. The diary is the mirror of free self-expression and of a deep refusal of the dominant regime. This would hardly be surprising, were the author an old-generation politician or intellectual. In fact, as suggested by the subtitle of the book that reproduces the diary with the title I want to live. , the author is a schoolgirl of modest social level who in 1932, at the age of fourteen, began to record her thoughts and feelings. Five years later she was arrested: for the political police her diary was the proof of her 'guilt' so she was convicted and sent to a gulag with her mother and her elder sisters. Her father was already imprisoned.

Similar in some respects to Anna Frank's, the diary of this schoolgirl, Nina Lugovskaya, is not politically oriented: Nina's jottings concern mostly her inner world, her difficult relationship with herself, with her family and with her peers, her first sensations as a teenager, the impulse to develop her own personality, a joyful will to live that sometimes clashes with almost suicidal desperation, a craving for freedom that in a world ignored and disdained by freedom is a sentence to loneliness. Nina's thoughts and feelings are the enchanting expression of a fiery spirit with an old head on young shoulders. What strikes most are her inherent detours into her own, private thoughts and assessments of the public, of the surrounding world, the regime and its leaders, including Stalin. They are piercing critical judgements that reveal a radical intolerance toward the state of affairs around her. Nina's analysis is outstandingly sharp - to an extent uncommon even in this day and age - for a schoolgirl born and grown in those years in communist Russia.

Aside from the particular importance of Nina Lugovskaya's writings, which are destined to become an international case, her diary is a new window of opportunity for a more genuine view of the daily routines of the Soviet reality's more humble protagonists. Only now have records begun to be unearthed from the former Soviet archives, revealing the existence of things never even suspected of and which are destined to rewrite from scratch many chapters of the USSR's social and political history, among other things. A diary is the subjective testimony par excellence: Nina's writings are therefore among the most valuable records, particularly when they illustrate situations where the unencumbered intimacy of inner thought was overcome by the unanimous publicity of a collective regime, and to keep a secret diary was a risky anomaly. Such is the state of the so-called totalitarian communities such as the Soviet one, the matrix for other akin regimes.

Modern historiography, from Anglo-American to Russian, attaches increasing importance to diaries as a source of information. The results are enlightening. The diary of Nina Lugovskaya, the 'Russian Anna Frank' is among the most vital and outstanding of its kind, not only for its apparent political meaning but also for its value as a human record.