Teenage diaries from Stalin's Russia reveal boys' struggles with love, famine and Soviet pressure to achieve

From phys.org

By University of Cambridge

                             Photograph of the diarist Vasilii Trushkin (1921–1996), aged 15 in 1937. Credit: Anna Trushkina

Overlooked diaries written by teenage boys in pre-war Soviet Russia reveal relatable perspectives on love, lust, boredom, pressure to succeed and trying to fit in; but also experience of famine, exile and conscription under Stalin.

"I drew her near and smooched her on the cheek. Having recovered from the initial embarrassment, I greedily bit into her lips." (Vasilii Trushkin, November 1939, aged 18)

"Tests and exams should not define life, right?! … But what is true life? Take my parents: they live and work by the sweat of their brow. Maybe, this is 'life?' If so, God forbid. Maybe, 'true' life is in the army, at war, at the front?" (Sergei Argirovskii, January 1941, aged 19)

"Our father was sent to Siberia … we were famished. We started going out to the field and luring out gophers to eat them." (Ivan Khripunov, September 1941, aged 18)

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

                                        Pages from Vasilii Trushkin's diary with text in Russian and German, 1937. Credit: Anna Trushkina

Slavic Review publishes Zadirko's findings about one of these diaries, that of Ivan Khripunov, the son of a once wealthy peasant who was labelled a kulak and exiled as an enemy of the people. A rare example of a peasant diary written by a young person, it provides astonishing insights into a young man's life from 1937, when Ivan was 14, until his ill-fated conscription into the Red Army in 1941.

Together, the 25 diaries which Zadirko is studying for a Ph.D. at Cambridge, preserve the voices of teenage boys from a wide range of families and locations. Sergei Argirovskii, for example, was born into Leningrad's intelligentsia. His parents were teachers of Russian language and literature. By contrast, Aleksei Smirnov was of peasant origin and worked as a mechanic in a Moscow boiler-house.

"Scholars tend to disregard most of what's in these diaries as just teenage concerns," Zadirko says. "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."

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 plow … Everything hinders my work … But I have to fill in the diary, whatever it takes." 

Ivan followed Maxim Gorky's literary model, recording his hardships as Gorky had described his pre-revolutionary struggles. 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 "dekulakisation," the Soviet campaign to eliminate those it labelled kulaks.

"I don't think Ivan realized that he was doing something potentially dangerous," Zadirko says. "By imitating Gorky, Ivan was following established literary conventions, but in doing so, he broke the rules of a Stalinist public autobiography, by discussing taboo subjects. It was not an expression of conscious political dissent but a clash of cultural models."

"He points directly to the state for causing famine and describes his family collecting wheat heads, known as 'spikes', which was criminalized by the infamous Law of Three Spikelets."

Ivan wrote, "The famine broke out not because of a bad harvest but because all crops were taken away. Kulaks were exiled to Solovki. Many innocent people suffered. For not giving up the grain, which was taken away from us, our father was sent to Siberia … Without bread … and our father, we were famished … we collected spikes (it was forbidden to collect spikes, and many times, the overseers took the spikes and our bags); we brought home the chaff and made cakes from it."

                     Diarist Ivan Khripunov's (1923–1942?) self-portrait, undated. Credit: Aleksandr Khripunov and Svetlana Bykova

Boys writing

"Literary writing was primarily a male pursuit in 1930s Russia," Zadirko says. "While girls kept diaries too, boys were more focused on the literary potential of their self-writing: they wrote poetry and prose, experimented with their style, and often tried to fashion their diaries as writers' diaries."

In November 1941, Ivan Khripunov wrote, "I think about my future big literary work in which I will show my life and give a full description of contemporary society."

A few of the diarists eventually became successful writers and saw their diaries published. Other diaries were printed in small regional journals, but the majority are only now accessible thanks to Prozhito, a crowdfunded digital archive of diaries, memoirs and letters launched in 2015 by scholars at the European University in Saint Petersburg.

The diaries record the daily grind of going to school, doing homework and being bored at home. But they also provide fascinating insights into the boys' attitudes to girls, the troubled times they lived in, and their visions of the future.

Girls: Romance or comradeship

"Abroad, love is the main goal of life … For us, love is a secondary concern. The most important thing is communal work. We rarely say the word 'love.' …I fell in love with a girl, but she didn't love me back … In my thoughts, I only wanted to look at her and not besmirch my tender being with the dreams about sexual intercourse." (Ivan Khripunov, September 1941)

Zadirko points out that when teenage boys described the girls they liked, they asked themselves, 'Is she a good comrade?', 'Is she politically conscious?', 'Does she have good grades?' But they also described them in a lofty Romanticist way, highlighting features like rosy cheeks and soft lips.

Vasilii Trushkin diary notebook with a cover made from newspaper. The inscription across reads: The diary from 1938 / Diary from the months of June–July / V. Trushkin (signature). Credit: Anna Trushkina

Soviet guidelines for romantic and sexual behaviour became very rigid and puritanical in the 1930s.

"Ideas of sexual behaviour were all over the place, the diaries record a lot of teenage angst," Zadirko says. "Young people were instructed not to have premarital sexual relationships, encouraged to establish friendship first and to choose a partner who would be a comrade, someone who would make you a better person.

"In this environment, teenagers had a lot of conflicted emotions and struggled to express them. They often wrote poetry about girls that is reminiscent of 19th-century Romanticism. The result was a weird mix of lofty and judgmental."

One of the diarists, Vasilii Trushkin (1921–1996), was a melancholic, brooding peasant who wrote poetry and aspired to be a writer. Aged 12, his family fled famine in the Saratov region of southwestern Russia by moving 4,800km to Irkutsk in Siberia.

In August 1939, aged 18, Trushkin wrote of being with a girl named Natasha: "It is so pleasant to feel the closeness of a beloved woman! From the sacred vessel, sung by many poets, I greedily drank pleasure. Afterwards, already in bed, I could not calm down for a long time."

Under pressure

"I am 18 today … If I remember my past and imagine my uncertain future, I get this scary feeling, an urge to get out of the life element, but where—I don't know myself. But this feeling is very strong, to the point of frenzy." (Aleksei Smirnov, February 1940)

Zadirko says that from today's perspective, teenage boys in 1930s Russia seem very conforming, but while diarists used Soviet ideological concepts to think about and fashion themselves, she argues that they did so in creative, unexpected ways.

A page from Ivan Khripunov's diary with his drawing (a view of his family's house in the village [khutor] Prishib, Rostov oblast, where they lived until 1935),    1941. The inscription at the bottom reads: "The house [khata] where I lived in Prishib ([drawn] from memory)". Credit: Aleksandr Khripunov and Svetlana Bykova

"These boys bent and circumvented Soviet doctrine, so they retained their teenage sense of self while still trying to fit the Soviet mould," Zadirko says.

How the boys considered their future highlights a dilemma in Stalinist culture, she argues.

"So much was expected from these boys, and they felt really confused about what they should do," Zadirko says. "They were told they could become whoever they like and inhabit a socialist utopia, but they were put under huge pressure to become the kind of heroic role models that Soviet culture celebrated."

"They believe that to be useful and to fit in, paradoxically, they had to be exceptional. They worry that you're either born with exceptional talent or you're not, and if you don't have it, you're doomed.

"When something goes wrong, aged just 16 or 17, some worry they've already lost too much time, that they haven't achieved anything, and they write about their life already being over. This is familiar teenage angst but in an incredibly high-stakes environment."

In September 1936, a 16-year-old David Samoilov—who went on to become one of the most famous poets of his generation—wrote, "I am completely untalented, and writing will always be a torment for me. To be a high school literature teacher, a lowly critic, an editor of a provincial newspaper? It's a disgusting prospect. But let it be! Suppose I sacrifice my self-esteem, aspirations, etc. for the thing I love, but will I be of any use to the society I live in?"

Zadirko believes that the diaries provided a crucial safe space for 1930s Soviet teenagers to work out how to perform their public identity, which gave them an advantage over many teenagers today.

"Working out your identity in public on social media today feels much less safe," Zadirko says. "In the private setting of a diary, the only judge is yourself."

Pages from Ivan Khripunov's diary with his drawing, a view of a street in Rostov-on-Don, 1941. Credit: Aleksandr Khripunov and Svetlana Bykova

Preparing for war

Some of the diaries end abruptly as their writers entered the Red Army and Second World War. Zadirko says, "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.

"We mustn't over exoticize Soviet lives," Zadirko says. "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."

More information: Ekaterina Zadirko, This Is Not Art but the Most Real Life": Ideology, Literature, and Self-creation in a Soviet Teenager's Diary (1937–1941), Slavic Review (2025). DOI: 10.1017/slr.2025.10152

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-teenage-diaries-stalin-russia-reveal.html