The diaries for this publication were provided by the Center for the Study of Ego-Documents "Prozhito". The book includes seven diaries of young people born in 1943-1948. The texts selected for publication are interesting because the youth of the authors captured in them coincided with the Thaw period in Soviet history. This complex and ambiguous period included such events as the Festival of Youth and Students of 1957, the adoption of the New Program of the CPSU in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, the construction of powerful hydroelectric power plants in the first half of the 1960s, Yuri Gagarin's space flight in 1961, the rise and fall of N. S. Khrushchev, achievements and breakthroughs in science and art, and much more, which creates a unique atmosphere that can be felt while reading. If we perceive a diary as a source of information about time, then this information should be sought not only in the listing of historical facts or details of everyday life, but first of all in the very personality of the authors - “writing down themselves”, they capture their time for posterity.