A RUSSIAN ANNE FRANK

When this diary was published in Russia two years ago, it was immediately, and inevitably, compared with the diary of Anne Frank. It is a very articulate record by an adolescent girl, living in an ever more threatening totalitarian environment, of her fears and frustrations, and it mingles the emotional pains of a girl going through puberty with the anguish of a trapped animal feeling the hunters getting nearer. For a girl of thirteen years old, in a society where there was no information but official propaganda and market rumour, Nina was remarkably well informed and perspicacious: she reports the famine and cannibalism that took the lives of millions of peasants in 1933, when not just the Moscow press but Moscow’s inhabitants were genuinely unaware of the disaster happening five hundred miles to the south. Andrew Bromfield speculates that she may have had access to underground Menshevik or Social Revolutionary literature, but this seems unlikely in the 1930s when all dissidence had been suppressed. Nina’s perspicacity is one of the most mysterious elements in her diary.

Of the millions who shared the fates of Anne Frank and Nina Lugovskaya, only a tiny fraction left behind a record of what they went through. On the other hand, the differences between Anne Frank and Nina Lugovskaya are perhaps more important than the similarities. The most interesting feature of this diary is that it has been pre-digested for us: when Nina Lugovskaya was arrested and interrogated in January 1937, at the height of Stalin’s great terror, her NKVD interrogator went through the diary, marking up all the passages that made it so easy for him to indict an eighteen-year-old girl as a dangerous terrorist.

Andrew Bromfield has printed these marked passages in charcoal font and we can thus read two minds simultaneously, that of the victim and that of her persecutor. Nina writes at several points of her hatred for the Bolsheviks in general and Stalin in particular, who have made their lives and in particular the life of her idealistic socialist father such hell. She rejoices to hear of the assassination of Stalin’s closest associate, Sergei Kirov, in December 1934, and she calls for Stalin himself to be killed.

In some ways, Nina was a typical Soviet schoolgirl, living the double life that schoolgirls from educated and thoughtful Russian families had to live right until the late 1980s. School was a place where you feared revealing to your teachers and fellow pupils what you thought or what your parents talked about. Most Soviet parents brought up their children to be consummate hypocrites: it was the only tolerable way to find moral salvation for the family between the mid 1920s and mid 1980s. This brings us to the most unbelievable feature of the story: Nina’s mother discovered the diary, read passages of it, and even crossed out a few lines – but she did not destroy it, even though her husband was already classed as an ideological enemy and banned from living in Moscow. The diary was to save the NKVD from having to fabricate evidence and doomed the entire family to the Gulag. What was going through the mind of Nina’s mother, to leave this document virtually intact? Though Nina says far less about her mother than about her father, whom she loves and sometimes hates with passion, by inference the mother, of an educated bourgeois background, was the real rebel in the family. Her decision not to destroy the diary was an act far bolder than her daughter’s persistence in creating such compromising material.

Anne Frank’s diary, had the Gestapo read it when they took her away, would have made no difference to her fate. That is why it reads so movingly: we know the inevitable end. Nina’s diary-keeping, however grateful posterity is for a rare record of how people lived and felt when they were muted by terror, was a crazy, irresponsible act. Had it not been written, she and her sisters might have had rather different lives, even if their parents were doomed to go through the great mincing machine of the NKVD.

By some miracle, all the Lugovskoi family lived through their sentences in the worst part of the Gulag, the dreaded Kolyma with its nine-month winters, where nearly a third of the prisoners died each year, and the chances of surviving a ten-year sentence were a mere two in a hundred. The womenfolk were released after just five years, and Nina’s father lived for a decade or so after his release in 1947. Nina never became the writer that her diaries hint she should have become, but she married and became a very successful artist.

She lived long enough to see the Soviet Union collapse around her, her adolescent dreams fulfilled. One wants to know what enabled her and her remarkable family to come through the hell for which the contents of this diary were just an initiation; unfortunately, even when it became safe to do so, she no longer appears to have recorded a word of her feelings. The diary remains a monument to a girl’s reckless defiance of indoctrination and intimidation. Anne Frank’s diary leaves us not wanting or needing to know any more. I finished Nina Lugovskaya’s diary frustrated, despite the excellent background information Andrew Bromfield provides, as if I had left the theatre after just Act I of the tragedy.

[I Want to Live: The Diary of a Young Girl in Stalin's Russia
By Nina Lugovskaya (Doubleday 267pp £16.99)]