Olga Berggolts Will Not Be Forgotten
By Liza Utkhina
Special to The St. Petersburg Times
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For The St. Petersburg Times
Olga Berggolts, right, and her sister Maria embrace in this undated family photo.
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Maria Fyodorovna Berggolts, 89, is the only surviving family member of poet and blockade-era radio voice, Olga Berggolts. Puttering among the books cluttering her intelligentsia-style apartment with a view of the Neva River, she endlessly recites, with heartfelt intonation and longing, the hundreds of her sister's poems that she knows by heart. Between these recitals, she pauses to offer her opinion of Stalin - "A mafioso from the Caucasus!" - or his secret-services chief Lavrenty Beria - "debauched and dirty" - or just to recall a recent conversation with a friend - invariably some well-known artist or writer. Listening to her at these moments it is easy to imagine the voice of her sister, Olga, born in 1910, broadcasting on the one working radio station during the blockade of Leningrad, a solitary familiar voice that many survivors have reported literally kept them alive during those dark and lean days. From her microphone straight into the barricaded apartments of the besieged city, Olga read her own poems and those of other poets, delivered news about bombings or fires in the city, and, above all, encouraged the besieged Leningraders to hold on to their last hope of life. "She was always admonishing us," Maria said of her older sister in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times. "She forbade us from getting lice, telling us to wash our hair even when there was no warm water and it was 40 degrees below zero outside." "I think Olga meant for us not only to fight against lice, but for the whole idea [of surviving]," Maria continued. "As long as you were strong enough to wash your hair, even if you were starving, you would survive." But before the war, Olga had problems with the Communist Party, her sister said. Originally an idealistic activist, she was ousted from the party in the 1930s and even jailed by the NKVD, forerunner to the KGB, for a year for "unreliability to the party." Olga was bereft without the party, said Maria, alone and shunned. Olga was pregnant with her third child when the NKVD swooped down in 1937 and arrested her. She was questioned and tortured, her sister said, and eventually gave birth to a stillborn child. It would have been her third after Irina, from her first short marriage to the poet Boris Kornilov, and Maya, from her second marriage to literary scholar Mikhail Molchanov. Both daughters died before the war, Irina at 8 and Maya at just 11 months. Other blows that Olga endured included Kornilov's exile to Siberia for the supposedly dissident leanings in his writing. Olga managed restore his reputation and even publish a volume of his works in 1956. During that same year, she was the first public figure to stand up in support of the writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova who were singled out for harrassment by Andrei Zhdanov, head of the City Soviet of Leningrad. As part of his post-war campaign to restore party control over culture, Zhdanov shut down the local literary journals Leningrad and Zvezda, two places where Zoshchenko and Akhmatova regularly published. Olga was released from prison in 1939 and reinstated as a Communist Party member. By that time, however, the country was less than two years from war. Despite the meat grinder of the NKVD, Maria said her sister still believed strongly in the ideals and values of communism. "My sister did not change her ideals even after a year in prison," said Maria, saying that Olga concluded that "there was something wrong with the people, not with the idea of communism. In 1942, the NKVD exiled their father, a medical doctor, to Siberia for refusing to spy on his colleges and patients. "During the war we had two enemies: German fascists outside and Russian fascists within the country," Maria added. Maria, too, remains a devout communist to this day. "[The NKVD], which originally had the executive power of the government, slipped out from under the government's control and acted alone." Other members of their family - three aunts and a grandmother - starved to death during the 900-day blockade of Leningrad. The war also took Olga's husband Nikolai, who, Maria said, had been the center of the poet's life. Toward the end of the siege, her husband dead, Maria convinced Olga to flee Leningrad for Moscow. "She was very brave, my sister," Maria said. "She used to say 'there are only two sorts of people: those who trust and don't trust, those who drink and don't drink.' And Olga trusted and drank." She died in 1975. "Once, after Olga's death, a friend and I went to the cemetery to Olga's grave. It was very cold, and we had a drink in Olga's memory to warm ourselves up," Maria said. Then she said she noticed a worker nearing them. As he approached, Maria and her friends offered him some their wine. He finished his glass and then noticed Olga's name on the grave. "Berggolts!" he exclaimed, according to Maria. "Leningrad's Madonna! It was she who helped me to survive the blockade, just hearing her voice on radio." In all, Olga composed hundreds of poems, many of which she read over the air during the siege. However, no complete volume of her poetry has yet been published. Last year, Maria organized a two-volume set of Olga's previously unpublished prose and poetry, but the print run was minuscule. Even her most famous works from the blockade period - "Leningrad Notebook," "Leningrad Poems" and a collection of her radio commentaries "Leningrad Speaking" - were only recently republished. However, there is one solemn place where hundreds of thousands read Olga Berggolts' words every year: the Memorial Wall at Piskaryevskoye Cemetery. Berggolts is the author of the immoral words there carved in stone: "Nikto ne zabyt - Nichto ne zabyto." "Nobody is forgotten. Nothing is forgotten."
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