Thirteen is a difficult age, especially when your father is in jail, your mother is sick with worry and your two older sisters are perfect in every way. So Nina Lugovskaya, a high school student in pre-World War II Moscow, began confiding her innermost turmoil to a diary. For nearly five years, she poured out her thoughts on parties, puppy love and sibling resentment — until one day in 1937, when there was a knock at the door. The diary was seized by Joseph Stalin's secret police (nkvd) and used to convict the girl of treason. Lugovskaya, her mother and her sisters spent five years in a labor camp and then five years of exile in Siberia. Such was the price of teenage angst in Stalinist Russia.

The story is not over. Historian and author Irina Osipova, working with the Russian human-rights group Memorial, was rummaging through newly opened kgb archives after the 1991 fall of the Soviet state when she

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) came across the file of Lugovskaya's father, Sergei, a minor opponent of the ruling Bolsheviks. In his file Osipova found Nina's diary — three fat notebooks that had somehow escaped destruction. They were published in 2003 by a small Moscow imprint as The Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl. Now Doubleday is launching a new, breezier translation with greater fanfare and a punchier title: I Want to Live. It could do for the horrors of Stalinism what the diary of Anne Frank did for the Holocaust.

Lugovskaya is no Anne Frank. Instead of humor and heroism during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, the Moscow maiden serves up a stream of adolescent self-absorption into which reality rarely intrudes. "Love!" she writes in the diary's very first entry, on Oct. 8, 1932. "How can you not think about it when everybody goes on and on about how great it is!" Yet love is her constant obsession, and the diary teems with accounts of classroom flirtations, boyish pranks, jealous friends, affections declared and unrequited.

What saves I Want to Live from banality is Lugovskaya's feistiness, her growing self-awareness and an occasional flash of insight. "Today I read some of the entries," she writes in 1936, "and, I must confess, I felt ashamed: pessimism and boys, boys and pessimism." She constantly resolves to get serious, study harder, become a successful writer, have surgery to correct her slightly crossed eyes (she does, to little effect). "I want to be brilliant, famous," she declares, and later rails against sexism in the People's Paradise: "I must prove that a woman isn't any more stupid than a man."

Such independence was not what caught the eye of the secret police — their underlinings from the original diary are chillingly highlighted in this edition — but rather Lugovskaya's possibly harmless, probably depressive musings about suicide, a serious offense against the socialist order. Even more incriminating was her anger at Stalin over her father's persecution: "For several days, when I was in bed I dreamt for hours about how I would kill him. His promises [are] the promises of a dictator, a villain and bastard, the vile Georgian who is crippling Russia." During her interrogation she confessed, apparently under torture, to plotting Stalin's assassination.

Lugovskaya was likely not alone in such thoughts, but committing them to paper was a mistake only an innocent teenager would make. The tragedy of Nina Lugovskaya is that a lively, compellingly ordinary girl was made to suffer so grievously for being so human. On Jan. 3, 1937, the day before the secret police came, she writes dreamily: "Who hasn't felt that pleasant, dizzy excitement from shaking a man's firm hand or suddenly felt someone gently take you by the shoulders, or stood alone with someone in the room and said something, gazing into a handsome, exciting face?"

Amazingly, Lugovskaya found that face. She survived imprisonment, as did her entire family. During her Siberian exile, she met a fellow camp mate, Viktor Templin. They married and settled in Vladimir, a graceful old city 150 km northeast of Moscow. She was pardoned by Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev in 1963. Like her husband, Lugovskaya became an artist and stage designer. In the 1980s they mounted joint exhibits in Vladimir, and today their colorful, Impressionist-influenced paintings hang in galleries around the world. Lukovskaya died in 1993 at age 74, having lived to see the end of Soviet communism. After her diary, she never wrote another published word.

• DONALD MORRISON
• A newly published diary shows just how dangerous teen years could be under Stalin's rule