Woman GULAG prisoner at centre of deeply moving post-war love triangle dies aged 94

Siberian Klavdia Novikova met Yasaburo Hachiya in a resettlement camp for GULAG inmates after both were released from sentences imposed under Stalin. A Soviet bureaucratic blunder meant that former prisoner of war Yasaburo - who is now 96 - was not sent back to Japan after his penal colony sentence expired, and instead he became lost in the Communist system, taking a Russian name to obscure his origins. 

Eventually the couple wed and lived together 37 years before in an ultimate act of love she divorced him so that he could return home to a wife he thought was long dead, who had loyally waited for him for 51 years.

When Klavida Novikova died recently in her village of Progress in the Amur region, her passing went almost unnoticed in Russia, but for Japan, it was rightly a significant event. 

This Russian woman was seen by the Japanese as the ultimate symbol of female love and sacrifice because of her insistence that he must return to his first wife who had waited for him for so long, and to his surviving daughter, as well as to finally receive the 'dignity' he deserved of living in his homeland. 

'His wife needed to hug him again before they died,' said Klavidia before her death. 'I felt I had torn away half of my heart when I let him go. But it was nobody's fault. Just fate. The main thing is that he was better there, with good living conditions. He had suffered greatly, and probably would not have survived  here.'

Their remarkable love story began before the Second World War when Yasaburo, the scion of a wealthy family, moved with his Japanese wife Hisako had settled in Korea, looking for a better life. Here the couple had a son and daughter. 

When the Red Army arrived in 1945, many Japanese people were rounded up and accused of espionage.  He was sent to a Stalin camp in the extreme east of Siberia, in Magadan, at the heart of Stalin's notorious GULAG system, on a ten year sentence.

Meanwhile, Klavdia - also previously married, with a son - was locked away for a decade in this region, too, after being wrongly convicted of 'theft of socialist property'. This resilient lady said: 'I went through such hell, but was not broken, not even uttering an obscene word. The camp broke so many women, it is scary to remember. The most important thing for me was to keep my soul.'

When she returned, she found that her husband had deserted her and started a new family. When Japanese prisoners were released from the camps, the apparatchiks forgot to put Yasaburo's name on the list of prisoners to be sent home. By then, he was certain his wife and children were dead, and afraid of how he would be received back home after long years in the USSR. So he became a Soviet citizen, adopting the innocuous name Yakov (Yasha) Ivanovich. 

'We met in Bryansk region, where we were in a re-settlement camp,' explained Klavdia. 'I saw Yasha with his non-Russian face. He was skinny, downtrodden, and in his eyes was such a wrench that my heart ached with pity.'

They did not start a relationship immediately, not least because Klavdia could suffer from being with a man who had been jailed - however unfairly - for anti-Soviet espionage.  

'In the early 1960s, my friend urged me to move to the Russian Far East, to the village of Progress, and I did so,' she recalled. 'Yasha wrote that he wanted to be with me, and I refused - I was afraid. 'I only told  a close friend that I was in correspondence with a former military prisoner.' 

Undaunted, Yasaburo made his way across six Russian time zones to be with her. Klavdia relented and they wed, the start of a happy and loving marriage. He became in turn a barber and a photographer while also practising acupuncture. They grew tomatoes and cucumbers, and kept a goat and bees. They lived  modestly, but in great happiness, though not having children.

'There were no men like my Yasha,' she boasted. 'Local women envied me: he did not drink or smoke.' The couple were so close that they vowed to die on the same day because they could face being apart. Yasaburo even bought two coffins and stored them in the attic. 

After the Soviet Union collapsed, a local man told his Japanese business partners about this long lost countryman living in the east of Siberia. This led to Yasaburo's brother being found - and then, more dramatically, the discovery that his wife Hisako and daughter Kumiko were alive. They had survived the ravages of post-war Korea and returned to Japan. His son, though, died in Korea. 

It turned out that Hisako had faithfully waited 51 years for her husband to return. Returning from Korea with Kumiko, she and worked as a nurse, saving enough to build a house which she dedicated to her missing Yasaburo. 

His world turned upside down as his daughter, now 51, and brother came to Progress village for a reunion, and to persuade him to return home to Japan, to his waiting wife. 

He refused, telling Klavdia: 'I cannot leave you, you're everything to me.' But Klavdia sacrificed her own happiness, and insisted he should return to the arms of his wife who had waited for him so long. She reasoned, too, that he was in poor health and would get better treatment in Japan. 

Despite his objections, she got him an international passport, changed their savings into dollars - and divorced him. Had she not done so, in Japan he would not have qualified for a pension, property rights and inheritance, she said. 

In March 1997, she kissed goodbye to her beloved husband, imagining she would never see him again, but feeling this was the right thing to do after history had put her unwittingly into a love triangle. 

Yasaburo constantly sent her little gifts from Japan. Every Saturday, he called her and begged her to visit him. The couple's story became well-known in Japan. A famous writer penned  a book about her, and the story was made into a film. Klavdia won great respect for her selfless act to the Japanese man she loved. Residents of the Tattori prefecture, a suburb of Tokyo, raised money for a trip by 'babushka Klava' to Japan, and - then over 80 - she decided to make the trip.

Finally, Yasaburo's two wives met. They embraced each other and wept, needing no translator to understand each others deep emotions. Klavdia later returned for another trip, and after Hisako died, he begged her to move to Japan. He even contemplated moving back to Progress to be with her. 

Klavdia refused this saying she wanted him to 'live with dignity' in the evening of his life in Japan, where he was guaranteed good health care. She insisted her own needs were modest and she should live back in her Russian motherland. 

She passed away in September, and he outlived her. Soon afterwards a touching letter arrived in Progress, from Yasaburo, addressing his beloved wife as if she was still alive. 

'Klavdia! I learned that you died, and grief overcomes me. I tried to call you on 30 August, the day of my 96th birthday, but I did not succeed. All the 40 or so years that I lived with you in Russia, you were always with me, always supported me. Thank you for everything ... 

'I was able to return to Japan only because of your efforts, and I am immensely grateful to you for this. I remember how we even made two coffins for you and me. If it was in my power, I would come rushing to you and hold you tightly to my heart ... But now I'm powerless ... Rest in peace, dear Klavdia. Your Yasaburo.'