When Ol'ga Berggol'ts's poetry collection 'Uzel' appeared in 1965 her Soviet readers knew her as author of poems about the suffering and resistance of those who lived through wartime Siege of Leningrad. 'Uzel' also included poems about her pre-war ordeal, which included the deaths of her two daughters, her exclusion from the Communist Party, her arrest, interrogation and eventual release after several months in prison. Berggol'ts was able to publish her poems about the traumatic experiences of wartime, although she was criticised for an excessive emphasis on suffering; her prison poems waited for decades (some until the late 1980s) to appear in print. This paper explores the twofold role of the poems in 'Uzel'. On the one hand the collection brings together both prison and the war in a narrative of the poet's life which, like her prose autobiographical work 'Dnevnye zvezdy', attempts to re-assemble a fractured and disrupted past. On the other hand it challenges the prevailing contemporary view of Soviet history from which the extent of wartime suffering was masked by an emphasis on heroic endurance, and the years of Stalin-era terror were addressed in public with extreme reluctance. As a poet and public figure, Berggol'ts could be challenging and disruptive: her poems insisted on memory and her determination not to let the disturbing past be erased. 'Uzel' played a key role in acknowledging this past, and disrupting the efforts of those who would have preferred it to be decently obscured behind comforting narratives of trauma that was justified by a greater cause.
