Nina Kosterina was born in a revolutionary camp as the Bolsheviks took over Russia in the 1920s. She beat the odds of survival during the harsh early years and emerged in the 1930s as a young Communist woman in love with her country, her family, her city, her friends, politics, art and life. Even when Joseph Stalin's regime tore apart her family and imprisoned her father, she remained loyal to her country and joined an elite group of young women turned guerrilla soldiers when the Germans invaded Russia in 1941. Nina perished in a Nazi ambush behind enemy lines. After the war, her family found her diary hidden in a wardrobe. Years later, the diary was released as a book and became an international bestseller. Written from ages 15 to 20, the diary revealed a teenager transforming into an adult juxtaposed against one of the most dangerous and tumultuous periods in world history. Nina's biography opens a window into 1920s and 1930s Russia through the eyes of someone who considered herself just an "ordinary girl."

Nina Kosterina began her diary in 1936, when she was fifteen years old. She wrote the last entry in 1941, on the eve of her departure for the front to fight against the invading Germans, where she was killed. Apart from being an absorbing and remarkably contemporary story of the growing up of a vital rebellious adolescent, this moving document is also a revealing and candid record of the life of young people in Soviet Russia during the great Stalinist purges and trials, and the early days of World War II. Though many of Nina Kosterina's preoccupations were personal, the larger political events of the time shadowed her life and filled her diary increasingly - as the reign of terror spread, enveloping first the parents of her friends and then her own father and family.

Recently unearthed in the archives of Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, Nina Lugovskaya's diary offers rare insight into the life of a teenage girl in Stalin's Russia-when fear of arrest was a fact of daily life. Like Anne Frank, thirteen-year-old Nina is conscious of the extraordinary dangers around her and her family, yet she is preoccupied by ordinary teenage concerns: boys, parties, her appearance, who she wants to be when she grows up. As Nina records her most personal emotions and observations, herreflections shape a diary that is as much a portrait of her intense inner world as it is the Soviet outer one. Preserved here, these markings-the evidence used to convict Nina as a "counterrevolutionary"- offer today's reader a fascinating perspective on the era in which she lived.

"In 1937 Stalin' s secret police ransacked Nina's home and discovered her diary. Nina's 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."--Cover.

the fall of the Soviet Union and Russia's new democracy.

In Raised under Stalin, Seth Bernstein shows how Stalin’s regime provided young people with opportunities as members of the Young Communist League or Komsomol even as it surrounded them with violence, shaping socialist youth culture and socialism more broadly through the threat and experience of war. Informed by declassified materials from post-Soviet archives, as well as films, memoirs, and diaries by and about youth, Raised under Stalin explains the divided status of youth for the Bolsheviks: they were the "new people" who would someday build communism, the potential soldiers who would defend the USSR, and the hooligans who might undermine it from within. Bernstein explains how, although Soviet revolutionary youth culture began as the preserve of proletarian activists, the Komsomol transformed under Stalin to become a mass organization of moral education; youth became the targets of state repression even as Stalin’s regime offered them the opportunity to participate in political culture. Raised under Stalin follows Stalinist youth into their ultimate test, World War II. Even as the war against Germany decimated the ranks of Young Communists, Bernstein finds evidence that it cemented Stalinist youth culture as a core part of socialism.