Olga Fyodorovna Berggolts was born on 16 May 1910 in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire, into a family of a factory doctor of German descent.
Olga Fyodorovna Berggolts was born on 16 May 1910 in St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire. Her father, Fyodor Khristoforovich Berggolts, was a factory doctor of German descent, and her mother came from a family with roots in the merchant class. She grew up in the Nevskaya Zastava district, an industrial working-class area of the city, an environment that would later inform her poetic sensibility and her deep identification with ordinary Leningraders.
Her childhood coincided with the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War, experiences that shaped her generation of Soviet writers who came of age extolling the new socialist order while also enduring its early hardships, including famine and dislocation. She began writing poetry as a child and was encouraged in her literary ambitions from an early age.
Berggolts later studied philology at Leningrad State University, where she was immersed in the vibrant, if increasingly politically constrained, literary culture of the 1920s Soviet Union. This early period established the foundation for a career that would make her one of the most emotionally resonant voices of Soviet literature, particularly renowned for the role she would play decades later during the Siege of Leningrad.