Cambridge research reveals teenage diaries from Stalin’s Russia

A University of Cambridge academic has uncovered a collection of handwritten diaries by teenage boys living in the pre-war Stalinist era, offering a rare insight into the everyday lives of young people in the Soviet era.

New research by Ekaterina Zadirko, a Slavonic Studies researcher at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, reveals the contents of 25 diaries written by teenage boys between 1930 and 1941. Most of these documents have never been studied before.

Zadirko said: “Scholars tend to disregard most of what’s in these diaries as just teenage concerns. But in 1930s Russia, writing was a key strategy for teenage boys to process their coming of age and find their place in society. Even if their diary remained a private document, writing for these boys felt very high-stakes, even existential.”

One of the diaries is by a boy called Ivan Khripunov, the son of a once wealthy peasant who exiled as an enemy of the people under Stalin. A rare example of a peasant diary written by a young person, it provides insight into a young man’s life in 1937, when Ivan was 14, until his ill-fated conscription into the Red Army in 1941. In December 1940, Ivan Khripunov wrote: “Ten in the evening. I am sitting alone in the back room. Everyone has already gone to sleep … the ink is bad, it blurs on paper, and the quill scratches the paper like a good plough … Everything hinders my work … But I have to fill in the diary, whatever it takes.” Ivan wrote about his family surviving the famine of 1932–33, his father’s exile, and his mother and elder sisters suffering from the public humiliation of 'dekulakization', the Soviet campaign to eliminate those it labelled "kulaks" - enemies of the state. Some of the diaries end abruptly as their writers entered the Red Army and Second World War. Zadirko said: “These boys went to the front ‘from the school bench’, some of them perished, but those who survived, aged and died roughly with the Soviet Union itself.”

As he prepared for the military draft in 1941, Ivan wrote, “A new life begins. That is why I have written my autobiography … The war makes everyone into adults. I thought I was a boy, but now I am being drafted like an adult.” Less than a year later, he was reported missing. The exact date of his death is unknown. Zadirko said: “Soviet ideology shaped people, but they weren’t completely brainwashed. There weren’t just true believers and dissidents. People didn’t simply accept or reject propaganda, or play by its rules to survive. The diaries show that Soviet people, including teenagers, were many things all at once, trying to assemble their identity and make sense of the world with what they were given." First for all the latest news from across the UK every hour on Hits Radio on DAB, at hitsradio.co.uk and on the Rayo app.