Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Work for Marina was a problem. A work permit was not easy to come by, and at first, Ilya, a man of vigorous probity, refused to pull strings for her. Eventually, against his principles and better judgment, he finagled a work permit, which carried residence permission as well, from the MVD. An actual job was almost as difficult, but after several more weeks, Marina found employment as one of four assistants in the pharmacy at the Third Clinical Hospital, where she was paid the equivalent of about forty-five dollars a month. It was poor pay, particularly in view of her responsibilities, but she loved her work and it was the standard rate everywhere in the Soviet Union. Besides, she did not have to pay rent. Uncle Ilya preferred that she spend her money on herself.706

  At about the same time, Marina joined the local Komsomol, the Communist youth organization.707 She soon fell in with a group of young people who passed, in the Soviet Union of 1960, for Bohemian, and with her good looks, taste in clothes, and upper-class address, she attracted a number of male admirers. Her friends were mostly students who, like Marina, had irreverent proclivities and whose social life consisted of reading and discussing serious literature as well as current news they heard on Voice of America broadcasts, going to the opera, the theater, and restaurants, and dancing to the music of Elvis, Eartha Kitt, and Louis Armstrong. But their tastes were more eclectic than that, including an appreciation for Latin classics like “La Paloma.” Slang words borrowed from English were very popular in her set, with a hint of the forbidden. They called Minsk’s main street “Broadway” and an apartment was a “pad.” An evening’s get-together was a “do” or a “carouse.”708

  Marina seemed to be enjoying this life at the time she met Lee at the Palace of Culture dance in March of 1961.709 Lee asked to see her again and begged her to name a time and place. She was noncommital, saying only that she might see him at the Palace of Culture dance the following week.710

  She did go to the dance, with a girlfriend, the next week, and Lee was there. They danced together most of the evening, and she allowed him to walk her home. Aunt Valya was prevailed upon to meet him and was suitably impressed. She liked his modesty and politeness and the fact that he was neatly dressed, although neither Valya nor Marina really thought of Lee Oswald as a potential husband. Marina, however, did agree to a date the following weekend.711

  But on March 30, 1961, before they could see each other again, Oswald was admitted to a hospital because of a discharge and loss of hearing in his right ear, which had periodically become inflamed during his youth, though his childhood mastoidectomy had been to his left ear.712 Marina visited Lee the next day, bringing a jar of apricots, which seemed to delight Lee, particularly since it was his favorite dessert, and she continued to visit him until, after the removal of his adenoids, he was discharged from the hospital on April 11.713 While he was in the hospital, he wanted to become engaged to her and didn’t want her to see anyone else. She indicated acquiescence but did not take his proposal seriously. At that point, she did not love him and was mostly visiting him because he seemed to be all alone and she felt sorry for him. Besides, she cared much more for another suitor, a twenty-six-year-old medical student named Anatoly Shpanko, with unruly blond hair and a fetching smile, whose kisses made Marina’s head spin but whose proposal of marriage she had declined.714 Nonetheless, on the suggestion of her Aunt Valya, Marina invited Lee over for supper, and her aunt and uncle were favorably impressed with him. At one point, Uncle Ilya put his arm around Lee’s shoulder and said, “Take care of this girl. She has plenty of breezes in her brain.”715

  The next night Marina visited Lee at his apartment in the company of several friends, and her girlfriend Lyala thought Marina was insanely lucky to have acquired an American boyfriend who was so handsome. Was he a better catch than Anatoly? Marina asked. “Of course,” was the reply. After several days of long walks on the cold streets and along the frozen river of Minsk, punctuated by tender kisses, Lee, just one week after having left the hospital, asked Marina to marry him, and told her he wanted to stay in Russia forever. She did not say no, but thought it wise to wait for a while. He would not hear of it. He wanted to marry immediately. She agreed to let him speak to her Uncle Ilya the next day.

  He arrived at the Prusakovs’ flat in a black suit, white shirt, and tie, topped off by a dark blue hat. Thoroughly intimidated, he nonetheless conferred with Ilya while Marina and her aunt waited breathlessly in the kitchen. Ilya put Lee through a battery of grueling questions and tried to make sure that Lee fully realized what a flighty creature Marina, in his view, was. He even examined Lee’s documents and asked Lee if he intended to stay in the Soviet Union. Lee solemnly stated that he intended to stay. It wasn’t true, of course. As we have seen, he had started proceedings to return in December and had been pursuing them for four months already—but he hadn’t told Marina about them either. He had told her several other lies too, that his mother was dead (“I don’t want to talk about it—it’s too painful”), that he was almost twenty-four (he was twenty-one), and that he had renounced his American citizenship and could thus never return to the United States. Prusakov gave them his blessing, somewhat reluctantly perhaps. He thought it was too soon, but he didn’t want Marina to blame him for her unhappiness later on.

  “If you fight or if anything goes wrong,” he told them, “settle it yourselves. Don’t come to me with your troubles.”

  “Does that mean you are saying yes, Uncle Ilya?” Marina asked like a young girl.

  “I am,” he said. “Let’s drink to it,” he added, and they retired to the kitchen table where they drank cognac.716

  The next day, April 20, Marina agreed to marry Lee and they met during their lunch hour for a trip to the registry office to sign documents starting the ten-day waiting period. Marina noticed that Lee was born in 1939.

  “You are only twenty-one,” she said, a slight irritation in her voice. “Why did you tell me you were twenty-four?”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t take me seriously,” he responded evenly.

  They were married on April 30, 1961, in a civil ceremony at Marina’s home, with two of Marina’s girlfriends as bridesmaids, followed by a festive dinner reception for about twenty people.717 “It was one of the happiest days in my life,” Marina would later write.718

  Many have asked the question of whether Marina loved Lee, and there is no simple answer since Marina herself has given conflicting stories. But although Marina had dreamed of one day coming to America, that apparently was not one of the reasons for marrying him, because at the time she thought he had renounced his citizenship and could not return.719 Marina told the FBI shortly after the assassination that she married Oswald because she loved him,720 and in a summary of her life with Lee for the Warren Commission, said that even before he asked her to marry him she “had already fallen in love with him.” But years later she told author Priscilla McMillan, “Maybe I was not in love with Alik as I ought to have been. But I thought I loved him.”* If she did, it clearly did not appear to be a deep love. If it were, it wouldn’t have been possible for the following words, taken down by McMillan, to come out of her mouth: “I married him because I liked him. He was neat and clean and better looking than Anatoly. I was more in love with him than anyone else at the time.”† And: “I married Alik because he was American.” McMillan writes, “It was almost as if, being the only American in Minsk, he had the right to pick anyone he pleased. It would have been an act of lèse-majesté to refuse.” Marina also conceded to McMillan that Oswald’s apartment played a role in her decision and that she might not have married him without it. McMillan writes, “All her life she had always felt unwanted and ‘in the way’…Because of her illegitimate birth she had felt like an outsider all of her life…All of her life she had dreamed of having a room of her own …And for her, as for many girls she knew, the great lottery of Soviet life was to find a man you loved—who had an apartment.”721

  If Marina’s love for Lee was not the kind novelists write love stories
about, you couldn’t tell it by Lee, who wrote in a diary entry for May of 1961, “She is maddly in love with me from the very start.”722

  What about Lee’s reasons for marrying Marina? Were they as impure as hers? In his May 1 diary entry, he writes, “Inspite of fact I married Marina to hurt Ella I found myself in love with Marina.” In a following May entry he writes, “The trasistion of changing full love from Ella to Marina was very painfull esp. as I saw Ella almost every day at the factory but as the days and weeks went by I adjusted more and more [to] my wife mentaly.” He added, “I still haden’t told my wife of my desire to return to US.”723

  To make their union even more confusing, there was one thing that bothered Marina. Lee, curiously, had never yet actually told her that he loved her. When she expressly asked him once, he only replied, “You ought to know how I feel from the way I act.”724

  By midnight, the wedding reception was over and Oswald had escorted Marina to her new home, carrying her up the four flights of stairs (he didn’t tell her it was an American tradition) to his apartment. On their wedding night sex did not come easily to the two, who were, after all, only nineteen and twenty-one years old. Marina, to disguise the fact that she was not a virgin, resorted to some preparation from the pharmacy where she worked to create the impression that she was. It worked well enough as far as Lee was concerned, who told her, “Thank you for saving yourself for me. Frankly, I didn’t think you had.”725*

  Marina thought of the whole month of May as her honeymoon, as they met every evening at 5:30 outside the pharmacy when she got off work, went for a stroll, window shopped, and dined at the dingy Café-Avtomat, where the food was at least not worse than Marina’s cooking. Afterward, Lee would water the flowers on their tiny balcony and scan the view across the river with his binoculars.726

  They both loved classical music—Tchaikovsky was Lee’s favorite composer—and they’d play a game of listening to classical music on the radio and see who could name the composer. He was better at it than she, being able to recognize whether a composition was by Bach, Chopin, or Wagner.727

  Lee’s diary entry for the month of June reads, “We draw closer and closer, and I think very little now of Ella. in the last days of this month I revele [reveal] my longing to return to America. My wife is slightly startled. But than encourages me to do what I wish to do.”728

  Oswald must have known of his wife’s desire to go to America (even though she had resigned herself to not being able to do so) because even before he told her in late June, per his diary, that he longed to return to America, he wrote an undated letter (postmarked Minsk, May 16, 1961) to the U.S. embassy sometime in May of 1961 (received by embassy on May 25) asking it to include his new wife in his plans:

  Dear Sirs

  In regards to your letter of March 24. I understand the reasons for the necessity of a personal interview at the Embassy, however, I wish to make it clear that I am asking not only for the right to return to the United States, but also for full guarantee’s that I shall not, under any circumstance’s, be persecuted [prosecuted] for any act pertaining to this case. I made that clear from my first letter, although nothing has been said, even vaguely, concerding this in my correspondence with the Embassy. Unless you honestly think that this condition can be met, I see no reason for a continuance of our correspondence, Instead, I shall endeavour to use my relative’s in the United States, to see about getting something done in Washington.

  As for coming to Moscow, this would have to be on my own initiative and I do not care to take the risk of getting into a awkwark situation unless I think it worthwhile. Also, Since my last letter I have gotten married.

  My wife is Russian, born in Leningrad, she has no parents living, and is quite willing to leave the Soviet Union with me and live in the United States.

  I would not leave here without my wife so arrangements would have to be made for her to leave at the same time as I do.

  The marrige stamp was placed on my present passport., after some trouble with the [local] authorities, so my status as far as the U.S.S.R. is concerded, is the same as before, that is, “Without cititzenship.”

  So with this extra complication I suggest you do some checking up before advising me futher.

  I believe I have spoken frankly in this letter, I hope you do the same in your next letter.

  Sincerly Yours

  Lee Harvey Oswald729

  Even if the United States granted his request to return with his wife, there was still another considerable obstacle. Would the Soviets permit Marina to leave? At some time within a month or two thereafter—exactly when is not clear—Marina began to seek the permission of the Soviet authorities to leave for the United States. She wrote to a government department in Minsk, which forwarded her request for exit documents to the Foreign Office in Moscow. Marina also wrote a letter to the American embassy in Moscow for documents to request permission for herself to emigrate to the United States.730

  Around this time, Lee started to correspond, after a two-year lapse, with his brother Robert, without apology and as if the 1959 letters had never been written. In a May 5, 1961, letter, he advised Robert he was now married.731 In a May 31, 1961, letter he hinted, without giving a tad of reason for his 180-degree turnaround, that he might want to return to the United States. He wrote, “I can’t say wether I will ever get back to the States or not, if I can get the government to drop charges against me, and get the Russians to let me out with my wife, than maybe I’ll be seeing you again. But, you know it is not simple for either of those two things. So I just can’t say for now.”732

  Meanwhile, in Moscow, Richard Snyder wrote to the State Department on May 26 (the day after receiving Oswald’s letter) noting Oswald’s threat to create problems for the department in the United States, and asking for guidance. “In view of the possibility that the Department may receive further inquiries from Oswald’s mother or from other persons in his behalf concerning his case, the Embassy would be glad to have the Department’s comments before replying to Oswald.” Snyder did include his proposal to State that “should [Oswald] be found not to have lost American citizenship, he would be entitled to return to the United States under the laws and regulations applicable to all American citizens.”733

  State wrote back to approve, with circumspection, Snyder’s proposal. “The Embassy’s careful attention to the involved case of Mr. Oswald is appreciated,” they said. “It is assumed* that there is no doubt that the person who has been in communication with the embassy is the person who was issued a passport in the name of Lee Harvey Oswald…In the absence of evidence showing that Mr. Oswald has definitely lost United States citizenship he apparently maintains that technical status.”734

  On July 8, 1961, Oswald, impatient at the lack of a response from the U.S. embassy to his last letter, appeared without warning at the embassy in Moscow. It was a calculated risk for him, since, as a resident alien, he was not supposed to travel without authorization.735 Marina was anxious and tearful about the trip, but Lee, who as a southern boy (Louisiana and Texas) didn’t like Russia’s harsh climate, told her, “One more winter in Russia and I’m going to die.”736 And there was now a new factor in the equation: Marina was pregnant. In a narrative of her life with Oswald for the Warren Commission, she wrote, “Lee was very anxious to have a child and was very grieved when the honeymoon was over and there was no sign of a baby. Sometime in the middle of June we were out on a lake near Minsk with one of his friends who spoke English very well, lying in the sun and swimming. That was a wonderful day, and that evening Lee told me that he was sure that after the required time, starting from that day, we would have a baby. I did not believe it, but a week later we were eating in a café and I fainted. I think this was the first sign of the baby.”737

  This news was much on their minds as he boarded an Aeroflot airliner for the two-and-a-half-hour flight to Moscow. He was, according to Marina, quite fearful when he said good-bye to her, and neither of them were able to eat their
breakfast at the airport. He told Marina that officials at the embassy were “entitled” to arrest him because he had tried to renounce his citizenship—they weren’t, of course, but Oswald seemed to believe they might. He was equally fearful of the Soviet authorities and begged Marina to say nothing to her Uncle Ilya about his risky trip. He sought to minimize that risk by taking a two-week vacation and traveling during it so as not to be missed at work.738

  But he miscalculated slightly. When he finally arrived at the embassy in the city center at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, July 8, he found the offices closed. Fortunately he was able to reach Snyder by phone. Snyder, like other embassy employees, lived in the building, and he came downstairs to meet him, advising him to return on Monday.739

  The pregnancy had made Marina topsy-turvy with emotions she did not understand and could not control. She bristled at his attempts to dominate her. During Lee’s whirlwind courtship of her, she had been very much in control, but with their marriage the rules began to change and he asserted himself more and more and Marina hadn’t been altogether sure that she liked that. And his jealousy and suspicions were oppressive. “Where have you been?” he would ask her when she was only a few minutes late in coming home from her work. “I called the pharmacy and they said you had already left.” And their sex life wasn’t quite what she expected. She thought there would be more romance to it, but it was mostly, for Lee, just sex, and she started to feel used by him physically, and started, every now and then, to resist his advances. She also began to become a little distrustful of him when she found out (when he received a letter from Marguerite) that his mother was still alive. Here she had thought that “God sent me an orphan like myself.” When she asked him why he had lied to her about his mother being dead, his explanation, which he had no time to formulate, was entirely inadequate—something about if people knew he had a mother it might cause his mother some unpleasantness. He then proceeded to tell Marina he didn’t love his mother and added another lie to the tableau, that the reason was the way his mother treated his brother Robert’s wife. If he did not tell Marina about Marguerite, Lee did tell her—and it made her jealous—about the first woman he ever physically knew, a Japanese girl whom Lee spoke glowingly of in terms of beauty and how she had catered to his every need.740