Nobody Is Forgotten and Nothing Is Forgotten

Russian poet Olga Berggolts

Last week millions of American citizens on the storm-ravaged island of Puerto Rico were still without power, medicine, food, water and fuel, while the man who calls himself president occupied his days publicly criticizing members of the National Football League for peacefully expressing their 1st Amendment right to free speech.

After the Republican-controlled Senate failed once again to pass an ungainly healthcare bill that would have stripped access to affordable healthcare for millions of Americans and allowed insurance companies to charge exorbitant rates for pre-existing conditions, they set their sights on slashing taxes for corporations and the tiny fraction of the U.S. populace that makes up the 1%.

Depending upon one's perspective, the chaotic, directionless meandering and trite, paternalistic moralizing that defines today's Republican Party can be as exhausting as it is exasperating.


Arguably, a number of Russian citizens in the port city of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) likely felt the same way about the Communist Party - particularly on June 22, 1941 as news spread of Hitler's massive German invasion (codenamed Operation Barbarossa) along the western borders of the Soviet Union.

Russian poet Olga Berggolts was not among those who (albeit quietly) expressed criticism of the Party for its slow response to the many indications that an army of 3.8 million German soldiers was moving east into the Soviet Union across an enormous 1,800-mile front - though she had every reason to do so.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1910, she was just seven-years-old during the October Revolution of 1917 - when the Bolsheviks (led by Vladimir Lenin) toppled the short-lived provisional Russian government that took power after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on March 5, 1917 in the wake of widespread criticism of his leadership during the First World War as revolution and widespread hunger swept across Russia.

The end of the 304-years of the Romanov monarchy in Russia heralded years of internal political conflict, socio-economic upheaval and violent civil war that eventually led to the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922.

Olga Berggolts (sometimes spelled Bergholz) grew up amidst all that upheaval and chaos, becoming a devoted but idealistic Communist, poet, editor of a local factory paper and a writer of children's stories by the 1930's.

Olga Berggolts' arrest photo

But Joseph Stalin's consolidation of his control of the Communist Party and the country would usher in one of the darkest periods of her life.

Starting in 1936, Stalin and other officials began a two-year campaign to oust members of the Communist Party suspected of being "counter-revolutionaries" or "saboteurs".

A period of political repression which would come to be known as the "Great Purge" or the "Great Terror."

An estimated 600,000 Soviet citizens (the actual number will never be known) were executed at the hands of the Soviet government between 1936 - 1938.

Thousands more were sentenced to labor camps or prisons on intentionally-vague charges that allowed the Party leadership to imprison, torture, or kill virtually anyone.

For reasons that are unclear, but likely related to the content of her writing, her work as a newspaper editor, or her relationships with other intellectuals, Olga Beggolts was ousted by the Party, arrested by the NKVD (precursor to the KGB) and jailed for 12 months for "Unreliability to the Party".

While I can only surmise that she sought happiness, stability and intellectual companionship in marriage, the 1930's were far from kind to her.

Or those she loved.

Boris Kornilov & Olga Berggolts

Sometime in 1925 or 1926, she met the highly-regarded and handsome young poet Boris Kornilov while both were members of "The Shift", a group of poets in Leningrad led by the writer and poet V. M. Sayanov.

Berggolts and Kornilov were briefly married for about two years and they had a daughter named Irina.

But after his first collection of poems was published in 1928, his writing began to spark criticism by the Communist Party establishment.

Without the benefit of having extensive historical knowledge of the period, from what I've read, Kornilov began drinking heavily - understandable given the times.

It's quite possible that because of that, Berggolts was motivated to accept a job as a journalist in Kazakhstan in 1930, where she eventually divorced Kornilov and married Mikhail Molchanov - a literary critic with whom she had a second daughter, Maya, who (sadly) eventually died at 11 months old.

Back in Russia, Kornilov was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1936 - the same year that he and Berggolts' first daughter Irina died of heat disease when she was just 8-years-old.

On March 19, 1937, Kornilov was arrested in Leningrad after being accused of being involved in an anti-Soviet plot - he was sent to Siberia and eventually executed on February 28, 1938.

Perhaps because of her relationship with Kornilov, Berggolts was arrested by the NKVD a second time in 1937 while she was pregnant with her third child (presumably by Molchanov) and sentenced to prison for two years, during which she was interrogated and tortured - sadly, resulting in the child being born stillborn.

Now what fascinates me, is that despite all that personal tragedy, and her brutal treatment at the hands of the Soviet state, Berggolts remained a devout Communist - she remained true to the cause.

According to an article about her on Russiapedia.com, Berggolts is quoted as saying of the Communist-ruled Soviet establishment that imprisoned and tortured her, "there was something wrong with the people, not with the idea of Communism." 

You have to respect her for being a true believer.

Berggolts at work at her desk

After being released from prison in 1939 (the same year the movie Gone With the Wind was released), she returned to Leningrad and re-joined the Communist Party and continued to write poetry.

As a character Berggolts figures prominently in the author Harrison Salisbury's "The 900 Days", his definitive (and comprehensive) 1969 non-fiction account of the three-year German siege of the city of Leningrad during World War II - that's where I first learned about her life and contributions to the Russian war effort.

Not only did she record her written personal observations of life in Leningrad during the siege, she grew famous for reading her poetry on the radio on the only functioning radio station that still broadcast during the long and devastating German siege when the city was being starved, frozen, attacked and bombed from the skies and shelled by artillery.

Her uplifting poetry readings and messages of hope read over the radio are widely credited with helping to boost morale amongst the people of Leningrad during the horror of the three-year German siege.

During which an estimated 1.5 million Russian civilians and soldiers died as a result of combat, starvation, disease or freezing cold - numbers that are almost incomprehensible considering how much the Siege of Leningrad takes up in the historical textbooks of American students. 

Berggolts gave hope to the thousands of Russian civilians who helped defend their beloved city by building fortifications, anti-tank defenses, moving supplies and fighting alongside the Red Army to repel the German attackers.

Russian civilians walk past a frozen corpse on
the streets of Leningrad during WWII  

As Harrison Salisbury observed in chapter 33 of "The 900 Days" , Olga Berggolts once described the city's populace as moving through the streets of Leningrad to the front lines of the battle by: 

"familiar streets that each remembered like a dream - here was the fence around our childhood home, here stood the great rustling maple...I went to the front through the days of my childhood, along the streets where I ran to school."  

Lately I've found myself reflecting on Berggolts' words.

Especially as I try to make sense of what's happening with the regression of the U.S. government under Republican control, and the attempts to turn the GOP's obsession with widespread voter suppression of their perceived "political enemies" into government policy.

Think of Trump and his fabricated claims of voter fraud in the 2016 presidential elections (which he won...).

Or his controversial and widely-reviled White House "commission on voter integrity" led by the notorious Republican voter-suppression specialist Kris Kobach - whose crusade to "purge" voter rolls of thousands of citizens he deems ineligible to vote based on bogus, inaccurate data reeks of the same kinds of tactics that enabled the Communist Party under Joseph Stalin to charge, arrest and even kill people without due process or fair trial.

I've watched in horror as Donald Trump recklessly tramples over the hallowed institutions of our government as he attempts to mold them into a mechanism that exclusively trumpets the rigid ideology of the right-wing faction of hyper-conservative politicians and billionaire political backers that has coopted the Republican Party.

Like those citizens of Leningrad making their way past a cityscape altered by the German invasion that Olga Berggolts described, sometimes it feels as if I'm moving along a conveyor belt of change with other Americans.

Piskariovskoye Cemetery in St. Petersburg

Moving past institutions like the presidency, the Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Education - and seeing them altered into nearly-unrecognizable reflections of what Congress and the American people intended them to be.

When I visited the then-Soviet Union in the summer of 1987 with a group of classmates and our teacher, my visit to the city of St. Petersburg opened my eyes to one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

A city with a fascinating history stretching back to 1703 when it was founded by Peter the Great.

To stroll through the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world, or the Winter Palace once occupied by the Romanov family opened my eyes to a rich culture with a deep literary tradition - it stood in stark contrast to Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire."

Unquestionably, one of the most moving experiences of my life was during a visit to the enormous  Piskariovskoye Cemetery in the heart of the city - before then I had no concept of the extent of destruction of the Siege of Leningrad.

But when we stepped out of our tour bus and walked to a stone terrace that overlooks the cemetery, which is more like a vast open park, my eyes were immediately drawn to rows and rows of raised elongated symmetrical mounds (pictured above).

When I asked our tour guide what they were, I was stunned when she told me they were mass graves - each one containing thousands of bodies. Because of the cold, the bombing, the starvation and lack of fuel during the siege, it was almost impossible for many civilians to effectively bury their dead.

Piskariovskoye Cemetery, which opened in 1960, was built as a solemn place of remembrance, mourning and reflection - and a final place of resting for the remains of approximately 420,000 civilians and 50,000 soldiers who died during the siege.

Etched on the Memorial Wall of the cemetery are the words of Olga Bereggolts:

"Here lie Leningraders. Here are city dwellers - men, women, and children. And next to them, Red Army soldiers. They defended you, Leningrad, the cradle of the Revolution, with all their lives.

We cannot list their noble names here, there are so many of them under the eternal protection of granite. But know this, those who regard these stones: No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten." 

Regardless of the current political tensions between America and Russia, I've never forgotten the kindness and generosity of the everyday average people I met during my visit to St. Petersburg, or the suffering and tragedy of the Siege of Leningrad during WWII - and I never will.