In a few years, the diary kept by a professor of medicine, Lev Petrovich Nikolaev (Taganrog 1898-Kharkov 1954), during the German occupation of Kharkov in 1941-1943, acquired a certain celebrity, thanks to its publication in 2010, first in a literary journal in Kharkov, then distributed via the Internet, while benefiting now from new editions. This published version itself appears as an editorial work by Nikolaev himself on an earlier typewritten version, kept for several decades in the family archives. However, there are still other versions of the diary, one, shorter, also typed, kept at the RGASPI in the collection of the writer Alexei Tolstoy, member of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission (ChGK). And the original manuscript, also preserved in the family archives and kept unpublished (it will be soon edited by Dr Viktoria Naumenko). The confrontation of this textual ensemble thus allows the reconstruction of both the trajectory of a private diary which became a centerpiece of the Soviets' denunciation of Nazi crimes in Kharkov, but also of the painful path of an individual facing a situation tragic history while being tortured by personal torment.The paper outlines the three long-term trajectories of the writer Alexis Tolstoy, the film-maker Alexander Dovzhenko, and Professor Nikolaev, which intersect in Kharkov liberated by the Soviets in 1943 around the testimony of Nikolaev and other members of the local intelligentsia on the crimes of the nazi occupiers in the city. It thus explores the allegiance of several members of the Soviet intelligentsia to wartime Stalinism and their various contributions to the production of Soviet documentation on Nazi crimes, responding to different political agendas, with linguistic aspects, by considering both the very brief period of the reconquest of the occupied territories and the long-term biographies and political trajectories of each individual. Finally, behind the façade of proclaimed gratitude for the Red Army's victory, the article looks at the link between allegiance to Stalinism, anguish and madness.