The cause of Lydia’s death remains unknown. Some believe she was murdered, others say it was suicide. Her body was found in the nearby woods just days after her husband was ordered to leave Poland forever.

Now a sleepy provincial town, in the mid 1960s Legnica was a strategic Cold war outpost. With 80,000 Soviet troops stationed here, it was even nicknamed Little Moscow.

“There is a saying here in Poland that you can trade barbs with Russians but that shouldn’t stop you from loving Russian girls. That was true 40 years ago, it’s still true today,” director of “Little Moscow” Waldemar Krzystek says.

Despite being communist allies, Poland and the Soviet Union discouraged any personal contacts between their citizens, let alone love affairs.

Olga Avtonomova knows that all too well. A young nurse, she arrived in Legnica in the early 1980s.

“When I arrived in Poland, we were banned from meeting Polish people or, as it was called back then, having unsanctioned contacts,” Olga says.

Like Lydia decades before, Olga also fell in love with a Polish man. But her story is more uplifting. These days she comes to Lydia’s grave with her daughter.

“I was fired and forced to leave Poland. But one of the Soviet diplomats took pity on us – he told me what to do so we eventually got married,” she says.

Once abandoned by even her closest friends, nowadays Lydia’s grave is one of the best-kept at the cemetery – a surprising sight in today’s Poland where the Soviet legacy is often seen as negative.

The Soviet troops have long left Poland but Lydia’s story keeps drawing people from across the former USSR to Legnica. One such visitor, Lydia Mogilyan, came all the way from Ukraine.

“It was love that transcends all borders. The kind of love we all – Russians, Poles, Ukrainians – need today,” Lydia Mogilyan says.