Olga Berggolts

Olga Fyodorovna Bergholz (Russian: О́льга Фёдоровна Бергго́льц, IPA: [ˈolʲɡə ˈfʲɵdərəvnə bʲɪrˈɡolʲts] ( listen); May 16 [O.S. May 3] 1910 – November 13, 1975) was a Soviet poet, writer, playwright and journalist. She is most famous for her work on the Leningrad radio during the city's blockade, when she became the symbol of city's strength and determination.

Olga Berggolts was born in a working suburb of St. Petersburg. Her father Fyodor Christophorovich Berggolts (1885—1948) was a surgeon of half-Russian and half-Latvian descent, although in 1942 he was forcefully sent to the Krasnoyarsk Krai as "an ethnic German and a son of a principal shareholder" (his father was in fact a factory worker). He studied in the Imperial Military Medical Academy under Nikolay Burdenko and served as a military doctor during the World War I; after the October Revolution he was mobilized by the Red Army and continued working at the hospital train. Olga's mother Maria Timofeevna Berggolts (née Grustilina) (1884—1957) was a native Russian. She also had a younger sister Maria (1912—2003) who would later become an actress of the Leningrad State Theatre of Musical Comedy. With the start of the Russian Civil War in 1918 Fyodor Berggolts sent his family to Uglich where they lived in the former Bogoyavlensky Monastery up until 1921. Upon return Olga entered a Petrograd labor school which she finished in 1926.

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