Nina Kosterina (1921–1941)

Nina Kosterina was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, just as the Russian Civil War was ending and the Soviet Union was getting under way. Her parents were Alexei Evgrafovich Kosterin, a Bolshevik who had spent three years in prison for his activities, and Anna Mikhailovna; the couple married sometime between 1918 and 1920. Nina was their first child.
The family
settled in Moscow by 1922, and were proud supporters of the new government. Nina began her training as a young Communist early, influenced by her family's politics and the teachings of Communist philosophy in the school system. She began keeping a diary at age 15, and soon afterwards was accepted into the Young Communist League known as the Komsomol.

In 1936, Nina's father was sent to the Russian Far East on assignment and she never saw him again. While he was away, Alexei fell out of favor with Stalin's regime and was sent to a prison gulag.

Nina graduated from secondary school in 1939, hoping to become a geologist. While she was at a summer geology camp, Nazi Germany invaded Russia during World War II. Her family evacuated from Moscow but Nina chose to return and volunteer as a student soldier. She participated in partisan missions for about a month in 1941.

In January 1942, her family was notified that she was dead. For years, they lacked details about what had happened. Then a published memoir about soldiers from the war found its way to the family -- it included an official report about her last mission. A member of Nina's unit described how a band of the partisans had slipped behind enemy lines south of Moscow near the cities of Podolsk and Narofominsk. As they went deep into the woods, they fell into a German ambush, and Nina was killed.

After the war, Nina's mother and sisters returned to Moscow and found her diary in their apartment. They kept it safe and gave it to her father after he was released from Stalin's prisons in 1955. The diary stayed private until 1962, when the family allowed a Soviet magazine to publish it. Two years later, Nina's diary appeared in Russia in book form. In 1968, it was translated into English and published in the USA, where it became a bestseller.