When Anna Kozlov caught sight of the elderly man clambering out of a car in her home village of Borovlyanka in Siberia, she stopped dead in her tracks, convinced her eyes were playing tricks. There, in front of her, was Boris, the man she had fallen in love with and married 60 years earlier. The last time she had seen him was three days after their wedding, when she kissed him goodbye and sent him off to rejoin his Red Army unit.
By the time he returned, Anna was gone, consigned by Stalin’s purges to internal exile in Siberia with the rest of her family as an enemy of the people. They left no forwarding address.
Frantic, Boris tried everything he could to find his young bride, but it was no good. She was gone.
Now, more than half a century later, they were reunited, an extraordinary coincidence leading them both to return to their home village on the very same day.
“I thought my eyes were playing games with me,” Anna said. “I saw this familiar looking man approaching me, his eyes gazing at me. My heart jumped. I knew it was him. I was crying with joy.”
Now 80 years old, Boris had returned to visit his parents’ grave. As he stepped out of the car, he looked up to see Anna standing by her old house, where they had lived for the few days after the wedding.
“I ran up to her and said: 'My darling, I’ve been waiting for you for so long. My wife, my life...’”
They stayed up all night, talking about everything that had happened to them and the cruel circumstances that tore them apart.
In 1946, they married. It was a hasty wedding; there was no time for anything else and they could not afford anything grand in those hard years after the war.
Three days later, he had to return to his unit. “We kissed goodbye - but I never expected we wouldn’t see each other for more than half a century,” Anna said.
A little while later, the state caught up with her. Like her father, she was branded an enemy of the people and forced with the rest of her family into internal exile in Siberia.
“I threatened to commit suicide rather than go because I couldn’t live without him,” she said, “but in the end I was forced to go. It was the most miserable time of my life.”
On his return, Boris was distraught. “She was always waiting for me when I came home, but this time there was no sign of her,” he said. “Nobody knew where they were, or what had happened to Anna. That’s how we lost any track of each other”.
In their new village, Anna’s mother resolved that the girl should remarry. She told her that Boris had remarried. “She said he had forgotten about me - that’s why no letters came.
“I didn’t believe it and I longed for him so much. But one day I got back home from work at a timber plant and my mum had burned all his earlier letters, poems and pictures - including our wedding photographs.
“She told me this other man was coming to meet me - and that I should go out with him, and if I was lucky, he’d marry me. I burst into tears and rushed into the yard. The world turned black for me. I wanted to die and I got a clothes line and went into the hayloft intending to hang myself.
“My mother came in and slapped me in the face and told me not to be so stupid. She persuaded me to go out with this man, Nefed, and gradually he and my mother persuaded me that this was where my future lay.”
Boris, too, finally gave in and re-married. He became a writer, penning a book dedicated to the woman he’d married as a young soldier but only ever spent three nights with.
In time, their respective spouses died. With the demise of the Soviet Union, Anna was once more able to travel home. Then came the chance reunion. “I felt the same when we met last year,” Boris said. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Yes I had loved other women when we were separated. But she was the true love of my life.”
He suggested they marry again. Anna resisted, but says he talked her round. “What’s the point, I said, we can just live together they rest of our lives? But he insisted. I never thought I’d be a bride at my age but it was my happiest wedding.
“Since we found each other again, I swear we haven’t had a single quarrel. We’ve been parted for so long and who knows how much is left for us, so we just don’t want to lose time on arguing.”
