Nina Lugovskaya was born in Moscow on 13 December 1918. She survived her long imprisonment, married, and became a painter. But she never wrote again. She died in 1993, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Could do for the horrors of Stalinism what the diary of Anne Frank did for the Holocaust . . . the tragedy of Nina Lugovskaya is that a lively, compellingly ordinary girl was made to suffer so grievously for being so human. * Time magazine * Nina's diary is touching: it will strike both teenage and adult readers with a terrible pang of recognition . . . Where she does touch on politics, her views are, it must be said, remarkably mature and intelligent . . . she is a shrewd commentator. * Charlotte Hobson, Daily Telegraph * An astonishingly well-written and perceptive chronicle. * The Times * Carries poignant echoes of Anne Frank's diary. Both offer an innocent young girl's perspective on horrifying world events . . . but the essential difference is that Nina's diary was the reason for her arrest. * Mail on Sunday * Extraordinarily frank and eloquent diary [which] proved to be her undoing . . . Modern readers will be struck not only by Nina's perceptiveness and intelligence, the elegance with which she could write when her adolescent gloom lifted, her confused feelings for her father, her interest in current events and the well-informed hostility she nurtured for the Bolseheviks - but also by the sheer recklessness of her act of self-expression. * Times Literary Supplement *