Includes bibliographical references. Translated from the Russian.

Does that boy like me? Am I pretty? Will my father be arrested? These were the everyday concerns of thirteen-year-old Moscow schoolgirl Nina Lugovskaya, who began to write a diary in 1932. Her indignant outbursts against Stalins brutal Terror appear alongside more typical adolescent worries about friends, boys and homework. For five years Nina scribbled down her most intimate thoughts. Then in 1937 Stalins secret police ransacked Ninas home and discovered her diary. Ninas criticism of the regime provided sufficient evidence for the charge of treason, and she, her mother and two sisters were sentenced to five years hard labour in the Gulag, followed by seven years exile. Recently Ninas diary was discovered in the KGB archives. Like Anne Franks diary, it poignantly reveals life at a time of political upheaval, betrayal and repression through the eyes of an innocent. 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. -BACK COVER.