Tragic diary of Russia's 'Anne Frank' relives Stalinist horror

A 13-year-old schoolgirl who kept a poignant and ultimately tragic diary that recounts what it was like to grow up in Stalin's Soviet Union has been hailed as Russia's answer to Anne Frank.

The diaries of teenager Nina Lugovskaya, called I Want to Live: The Diaries of a Young Girl in Stalin's Russia, are to be published in English on Thursday after lying in a KGB file for over half a century. They offer an unusually perceptive view of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, combined with intimate soul-searching about the kind of everyday difficulties faced by teenage girls everywhere: boys, parties and parents.

Like Anne Frank, Nina was 13 when she began keeping her diary; like the Amsterdam schoolgirl, she was writing in the shadow of one of the 20th century's most repressive regimes.

In 1937, at the height of Stalin's purges, her family's Moscow flat was raided and her diaries, which covered the years 1932-37, were confiscated by the secret police.