I Want to Live, By: Nina Lugovskaya

I Want to Live is a diary of a young girl in Communist Russia in the 1930’s. Her name is Nina Lugovskaya. Nina started her diary when she was 13 nearly 14 in 1932. Her diary ends in 1937 when she and her family are exiled after a raid.

 Joseph Stalin was a ruthless dictator, he jailed, exiled or even killed anyone who opposed doing?him. Nina’s father, Sergei Lugovskaya, was one of those who were exiled. He was a political prisoner. He hated the Bolshevic government and was considered a counter revolutionary so he was exiled. Nina talks about how much she hates the Bolshevics in her diary. She most likely got the ideas from her father.

 21 January 1933…

Oh you Bolsheviks, you Bolsheviks! What have you done, what are you doing? Yesterday, Yulia Ivanovna gave our group a talk on Lenin and of course she talked about our socialist regime. It hurts me so much to hear these shameless lies from the lips of a woman I idolize. Let Evstikhevich tell lies, but not her, with that way of getting genuinely carried away, lying like that. ANd who to? To children who don’t believe her, who smile silently and say to themselves: Liar, liar.

Nina wrote passages from 1932 to 1937. She wrote about her life, crushes, her looks, and historical events.Nina was troubled, she talked about suicide, taking opium drops. She often was depressed, she saw no joy in life. Nina was very smart but did bad in school. She hated to study. She loved to read. Nina had many friends but was often depressed, she fantasized about suicide.

 She wrote about a few historical events.

• Stalin’s wife, Allievyas death
• The crashing of the Maxim Gorky
• The starting of The Italo-Ethiopian War

Nina and her family was exiled after a thorough search of their house in 1937. They were released in 1942. She married a man named Viktor Templin in 1947. They moved to the provincial town of Vladimir. Nina died in 1992 in Vladimir,Russia 2 years after the Communist collapse.