WOW: A Stalin-era Gulag survivor never saw her husband again. USA TODAY found him.

Khachatryan’s only “crime” was that she fell in love with, and then secretly married, a Yugoslavian military officer who was studying in Moscow. She was 17. As part of her arrest and then punishment in a subarctic climate in Siberia, Khachatryan endured horrible indignities. She also never saw her husband, Radojica Nenezic, again.

When Khachatryan was finally released from the Gulag after Stalin’s death in 1953 she did not know what had become of her “Yugloslav” as she likes to call Nenezic; nor he, her. For more than 70 years that was mostly the end of their story, such as it was.

Then, in the late spring of this year, journalism the connector, as I learned, intervened.

A grandchild of Nenezic’s, the result of another marriage that produced a daughter, was alerted to a sad tale published in a major U.S. newspaper of a woman who sounded a lot like the “Lyudmila” who they grew up hearing about from their grandfather.

(Nenezic had died more than a decade earlier from a heart attack.)

“We just want to tell Lyudmila that our grandfather never stopped loving her and that even we know the story about his love for her,” this grandchild wrote to me in a Facebook message, from Croatia, a country that was previously part of Yugoslavia until a series of political crises caused that nation to break apart in the early 1990s.

“I thought there is nothing that could be worse than prison and the Gulag camp in the world. But now I know, it can be. It is possible to kill a person twice,” she wrote in reply to the letter from Nenezic’s daughter, referring to confirmation of his death years earlier.

“It is to kill me a third time,” Khachatryan added in that letter.

Heartbreaking — but that’s how Real Socialism™ always turns out.