Russian Couple Reunited After 60 Years Apart

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. They met when he was secretary of the Young Communists and had to make a speech in the village.

Afterwards, she was standing there in a circle of friends, but he had eyes only for her. Her father had been purged by Stalin before the war for refusing to work in a collective farm, but Boris did not care.

She was too beautiful for words. “I loved her and would always defend her,” he recalled.
So the romance blossomed. When he came home from the front, she was always there, waiting. 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.”

Read more : Telegraph