Nina Sergeevna Lugovskaya

Following the confiscation of her diary on the 4th of January 1937, nineteen-year-old Nina Lugovskaya and her family were sentenced to five years in a labour camp in Kolyma. After serving her sentence, she was released in 1942 and served the next seven years in exile in other remote areas of Siberia. While working as a theatre artist in Magadan, she met and married the artist and fellow gulag survivor, Viktor Templin. Having survived her exile, Nina studied at Serpukhov Art School and in 1977 joined the Union of Artists of the USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nina's diary was discovered intact inside the NKVD's file on her family. Published in 2003, the diary earned her the sobriquet of ‘Anne Frank of the Soviet Union’.