Diarist Ivan Khripunov's (1923–1942?) self-portrait, undated. (Credit: Aleksandr Khripunov and Svetlana Bykova)
In A Nutshell
- Teenage diaries in Stalin’s Russia were more than private notes: they were training grounds where boys shaped themselves into model Soviet citizens.
- Ivan Khripunov, a peasant boy whose father was exiled during collectivization, turned family tragedy into a literary apprenticeship, framing suffering as essential to becoming a writer.
- Historian Ekaterina Zadirko shows how these diaries reveal Soviet teenagers wrestling with ideology, identity, and private emotions—even when privacy itself felt political.
CAMBRIDGE, England — Ivan Khripunov was just 14 when he began keeping a diary in 1937, during one of the darkest chapters of Soviet history. But his goal wasn’t to document political dissent or record protest. It was something more subtle—and more telling. Ivan used his private writing as a place to grow into the kind of person Soviet society celebrated: an educated, observant, ideologically-aligned writer.
For five years, until his draft into the Red Army in 1941, Ivan wrote regularly about his family, village life, personal goals, and literary models. His 450-page diary, now studied by historian Ekaterina Zadirko and published in Slavic Review, offers a rare inside view of how Soviet teenagers internalized and navigated Stalinist ideology. As Zadirko argues, it shows how young people used writing not just to reflect on their lives, but to actively reshape themselves into model Soviet citizens through self-narration.
“In 1930s Russia, writing was a key strategy for teenage boys to process their coming of age and find their place in society,” Zadirk, a Slavonic Studies researcher at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, said in a statement. “Even if their diary remained a private document, writing for these boys felt very high-stakes, even existential.”
How a Peasant Boy Turned Family Tragedy Into Literary Training
Ivan’s family had reason to fear the Soviet state. His father was labeled a kulak—a so-called “rich peasant,” often persecuted under Stalin’s collectivization policies—and was exiled to Siberia during the 1932–33 famine. Ivan and his relatives endured hunger, stigma, and loss. But rather than express bitterness, Ivan turned these experiences into the material of a literary apprenticeship. “This [life] was very hard. But it must be described. The writer must live, suffer, observe,” he wrote.
He channeled those traumatic experiences into narrative form, writing by candlelight with poor-quality ink that blurred on the page. In a December 1940 entry, Ivan 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 framed his diary as a chronicle of that suffering and resilience—part personal document, part literary workshop. He studied the work of Maxim Gorky, the canonical Soviet writer, and consciously modeled his self-narrative after Gorky’s celebrated autobiographical trilogy.
![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](https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Ivan-Khripunov-diary-drawing-1200x699.jpg.webp)
“I have read the first volume of the Gorky trilogy… [Gorky] writes the story of his life and at the same time reflects on his own development,” he wrote.
Rather than simply recording events, Ivan used the diary to train himself. He read widely, took stylistic notes, and honed his sense of what a proper Soviet writer ought to do. “I want to read many books and from the books to draw what I should write,” he noted.
His diary was not a simple record of events but a self-conscious literary project. In November 1941, as he prepared to enter the army, Ivan wrote, “I think about my future big literary work in which I will show my life and give a full description of contemporary society.”
Writing About Stalin’s Crimes Without Getting Killed
Ivan’s writing touches on the traumatic realities of Soviet life: collectivization, famine, and exile. But he avoids direct criticism of the regime. Instead, he casts hardship as a crucible, something a true writer must endure to understand life. “I do not want to embellish or invent anything. I want to write the truth as it was,” he explained.
He described state-induced famine, exile, and social ostracism while still using the sanctioned language of socialist realism. Despite his family’s persecution, Ivan continued to express admiration for Soviet ideals: “I love our Soviet land, our sun, our field, our people.”
Upper image: a view of the village [khutor] Chernyshkovo, Rostov oblast. The inscription below: “A water tower in Chernyshkovo. [Copied] from the drawing by A. Koshelev [Ivan’s best friend]”
Middle image: a view of the house in the village [khutor] NizhniaiaVerbovka, Rostov oblast, where Ivan’s family lived in 1935–1939. The inscription below: “The house [izba] where we lived in the kh[utor] N. Verbovka”
Lower image: a view of crop fields in Nizhniaia Verbovka. The inscription below: ‘Plantations in N. Verbovka’
For Ivan, the task wasn’t rebellion. It was alignment. He wasn’t trying to expose the Soviet state; he was trying to become someone who could belong to it.
One of the most striking entries reads: “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.”
Why Soviet Teens Used Diaries as Secret Training Grounds
In the high-pressure ideological environment of 1930s Russia, diaries became a rare space where boys could experiment with selfhood. While girls also kept diaries, boys were more likely to treat them as training grounds for literary identity. “They wrote poetry and prose, experimented with their style, and often tried to fashion their diaries as writers’ diaries,” Zadirko said.
Ivan wrestled not only with the expectations of the state but also with his own uncertainty. In a passage quoted from September 1941, he reflects on his conflicted feelings toward romance: “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.”
What Ivan’s Story Reveals About Life Under Dictatorship
Ivan’s diary reflects a generation caught between propaganda and personal ambition. “These boys bent and circumvented Soviet doctrine, so they retained their teenage sense of self while still trying to fit the Soviet mold,” Zadirko said.
In his final entries before conscription, 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.”
He was reported missing in 1942. The exact date of his death is unknown, but the diary he left behind, preserved by his family and published in Russia in 2021, offers an irreplaceable window into how Soviet youth processed identity, grief, and hope.
“We mustn’t over exoticize Soviet lives. Soviet ideology shaped people, but they weren’t completely brainwashed. There weren’t just true believers and dissidents… 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,” said Zadirko.
“The writer must live, suffer, observe.” Ivan did all three.
A Second Diary: Vasilii Trushkin’s Inner Struggles in Stalin’s Moscow
While Ivan Khripunov’s diary captures a rural teenager’s attempt to rise above stigma and famine through literary ambition, another boy from a very different background was conducting his own private experiment in identity: Vasilii Trushkin, a Moscow schoolboy who also kept a diary in the late 1930s.
Trushkin’s writing reveals a teenager in conflict, not with the Soviet system overtly, but with himself. He grappled with romantic confusion and tried to bring his feelings into line with ideological expectations. In one haunting entry, he wrote: “I decided to ‘fall in love’ with Ira. I decided to do this in order to fight my homosexuality. The decision was conscious and cold-blooded.”
Historian Ekaterina Zadirko, who analyzed Trushkin’s diary alongside Khripunov’s, explains that Soviet boys were taught to evaluate romantic partners through ideological and moral criteria: Was she a good comrade? Politically aware? But beneath that official framework, teenage longing often surfaced in ways the system couldn’t accommodate.
“Romantic love was still very important to them,” Zadirko said, “but they couldn’t quite admit it.”
Trushkin admired Marx, Lenin, and Soviet heroes, but his emotional tone was hesitant and conflicted. Even in a private document, he worried about transgressing ideological boundaries. “There is no evidence that they were writing for an audience. They were writing for themselves,” said Zadirko. “And still, they were terrified of what they were doing.”
While Ivan Khripunov wrote from the margins of Soviet society and dreamed of publishing his life story, Trushkin, in the heart of Moscow, used his diary as a space to repress, confess, and recalibrate. Together, their stories show the complex psychological terrain Soviet boys navigated — where even privacy felt political.
Paper Summary
Methodology
Researcher Ekaterina Zadirko conducted a detailed literary and historical analysis of Ivan Khripunov’s diary, which spans 450 pages and covers the period from January 1937 to November 1941. She used communication theory to examine how the diary functioned both as a record of Ivan’s experiences and as a tool for developing his writing skills. Zadirko compared Ivan’s diary to other Soviet-era teenagers’ diaries and analyzed how Ivan incorporated elements from canonical Soviet literature, particularly the works of Maxim Gorky, into his own writing.
Results
Ivan used his diary as a “laboratory” for developing what Zadirko calls a “narrator-self”—essentially training himself to write in socially acceptable Soviet literary forms. Rather than using his diary primarily for political self-examination (as many adult Soviet diarists did), Ivan focused on mastering narrative techniques and building cultural capital for his desired career as a writer. His diary reveals how Soviet teenagers could write honestly about traumatic political events like collectivization and famine while still working within acceptable cultural frameworks.
Limitations
The study focuses on a single diary from one individual, which limits how broadly the findings can be applied to other Soviet teenagers. Ivan was unusually literate and ambitious compared to many rural youth of his era, and his specific family circumstances may have shaped his approach to writing in ways that weren’t typical.
Funding and Disclosures
The paper does not mention specific funding sources or conflicts of interest. Zadirko is affiliated with the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge.
Publication Information
This research was published in Slavic Review, Volume 84 (2025), pages 96–114, with the DOI: 10.1017/slr.2025.10152. The article is published as Open Access under Creative Commons Attribution licensing, allowing for unrestricted reuse with proper attribution.
