Nina Lugovskaya

Nina Sergeyevna Lugovskaya (; 25December 191827December 1993) was a Soviet painter and theatre designer, in addition to being a survivor of the Gulag. During Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, Lugovskaya was the author of a diary, which was discovered by the Soviet political police and used to convict her entire family of Anti-Soviet agitation. After surviving Kolyma, Lugovskaya studied at Serpukhov Art School and in 1977 joined the Union of Artists of the USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, her diary was discovered intact inside the NKVD's file on her family. It was published in 2003, and resulted in Nina being called "the Anne Frank of Russia."

Family and early life Nina's parents were educated professionals. Her father, Sergei Rybin-Lugovskoi, was an economist

Although she had many friends, Nina suffered from depression, and repeatedly confided her suicidal fantasies to her diary. Nina further suffered from lazy eye, which made her very self-conscious. In her diary, she often confided her hatred for Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These beliefs came from witnessing the NKVD's repeated harassment and internal exile of her father, who had been a NEPman during the 1920s. She became a member of the Soviet Union of Artists in 1977 and held several solo exhibitions during the 1970s and 1980s, where her paintings were featured prominently in several buildings and the public library. In 2007, Houghton Mifflin published a new translation by Andrew Bromfield. It was titled, I Want to Live: The Diary of a Young Girl in Stalin's Russia. All passages underlined by the NKVD were printed in bold type.

Throughout her diaries Nina showed contempt for the Bolsheviks, writing "These bloody Bolsheviks! How I hate them! All hypocrites, liars, and scoundrels", "I could feel my fury with the Bolsheviks rising in my throat, my despair at my own powerlessness", "These lousy Bolsheviks! They don't think about us young people at all, they don't think about the fact we are human beings too"! In one passage she recounted "sixty-nine White Guards were arrested and shot in Leningrad without any investigation or trial".