To hell with the new society! It's only Gennady who can get wrapped up in it and spend hours reading what Lenin and Stalin said and about the achievements of our Soviet Union. Nina is not the only Stalinist adolescent whose diary has come down to us, but she is one of the most singular personalities. The historians Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin have suggested that Soviet citizens in the 1930s had no choice but to think within a Soviet framework because no other was available, just as they had no language other than 'Sovietspeak' in which to express their thoughts. If they kept diaries, these historians suggest, it was almost always part of a self-conscious discipline aimed at producing the New Soviet Person and eliminating all traces of the pre-Soviet one. Bildungs diaries of this sort exist: that of the kulak's son Stepan Podlubnyi was published in German in 1996 by Hellbeck as Tagebuch aus Moskau; and schools and the Komsomol probably encouraged young people to keep them. But Nina's diary is another thing altogether. Read more of the London Review of Books