Dimensions
163 x 240 x 27mm
Does that boy in my class like me? Why does my skin have to be so spotty? When will my father come home from exile? Wouldn't it be great if I could somehow kill Comrade Stalin? These were the everyday concerns of thirteen-year-old schoolgirl Nina Lugovskaya, who lived in Moscow in 1932, under Stalin's repressive dictatorship. The daughter of a dissident, she was imbued with unusually clear political insight. In her diary her outbursts against the brutal totalitarian regime that meant that schoolfriends' parents disappeared in night-time raids and her own father was regularly arrested and banished from Moscow, appear alongside the more typical adolescent worries about girlfriends, boys, her appearance and homework.
For five years Nina scribbled down her most intimate thoughts and dreams, including her ambition one day to become a writer. Then in 1937 her father's dissident activities propelled Stalin's secret police into ransacking Nina's home, where they discovered Nina's diary. Nina's open criticism of the regime and frequent vilification of Stalin's character on the pages of her diary provided sufficient evidence for the charge of treason, and the entire family was sentenced to five years' hard labour in the Gulag, followed by seven years' exile in Siberia.
