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Separated by Stalin, lovers are finally reunited after 60 years The Sunday Telegraph January 13, 2008 Sunday WILL STEWART in Moscow and GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN WHEN ANNA Kozlova 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 that 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. Now, more than 50 years later, they have been reunited by an extraordinary coincidence that led them both to return to their home village on the 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.'' Boris, now 80, had returned to visit his parents' grave. As he stepped from the car, he saw 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 had torn 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. The romance blossomed. When he came home from the front, she was always there, waiting. In 1946, they married. It was a hasty wedding and 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.'' Existence became drudgery, confined in a small settlement in eastern Siberia, on a diet of potatoes and bread. "It was cold and miserable with no prospect of escape,'' she said. The work was hard, with only the prospect of jail for those who could not or would not go on. On his return to their village, Boris was distraught. "She was always waiting for me when I came home, but this time there was no sign of her. Nobody knew where they were, or what had happened to Anna.'' 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. But one day I got back home from work at a timber plant and found my mum had burnt 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 intending to hang myself.'' To get through it, she tried to convince herself that there was no alternative. "I concluded that perhaps we were never meant to be together,'' she said. "While I never loved him [Nefed] as much as Boris, I can't say we were unhappy during our long marriage. We had five children, but I never forgot my first love.'' Boris, too, re-married. In time their respective spouses died. With the demise of the Soviet Union, Anna was able to travel home. Then came the chance reunion. When Boris suggested they marry again Anna resisted, but he talked her round. Now, she says: "I swear we haven't had a single quarrel.''
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