If Lonya’s appeal was exotic, Marina faced another threat to her peace of mind that summer, and it came from inside her own family. In August her cousin Valentin arrived to spend his holiday at the Prusakovs’. He was the son of Klavdia’s younger sister Polina and her husband Georgy Alexandrovi, who was head of the building trust in Kharkov. The legend of Valentin’s noble looks had preceded him, and Marina found that the handsome reality very nearly lived up to the legend. They were soon deep in a clandestine and, to Marina, sinful romance, of which one of the chief delights was being seen with Valentin on the street.
Strangely enough, Valya, who could be a zealous chaperone when the occasion, or her husband, required it, had not the slightest suspicion of the flirtation that was blossoming under her very roof. She even let Valentin sleep in the living room, which was also Marina’s bedroom. Marina for once was in a quandary that she dared not share with her aunt. She enjoyed Valentin’s kisses by day, but at night she curled up in her bed like a frightened rabbit and refused to allow him near her. When Valentin left after his two-week visit, he swore he would never forget her and asked her to wait for him. She even had a passionate love letter from him, which she hid at the pharmacy. But she made herself forget Valentin, for she considered her feelings for him incestuous, and she was frightened by them.
In October Marina went to Leningrad on vacation and stayed at a government Rest House. She had been there a week before she even dared to venture back to the Medvedevs’ apartment. When she did go, laden with gifts for everyone, Petya and Tanya were overjoyed. Even Alexander seemed glad to see her, although he behaved in his usual gruff manner and before long excused himself and went to bed. Marina promised to come again, but somehow she failed to get around to it.
She spent part of her vacation in Leningrad with the Tarussins, the parents of her old suitor, Oleg. Marina had written to them regularly from Minsk, and Oleg’s mother still treated her as a prospective daughter-in-law. But when she and Oleg were reunited, it was clear that his feelings had changed. The day before her return to Minsk, Marina told his mother that the romance was over—Oleg did not love her any more. She did not love Oleg either. But it hurt her to be unwanted again.
The faithful Sasha was there to console her on her return from Leningrad. She consented to be his date for New Year’s, but she promised herself that she would dance with anyone who came along, to torment the hapless Sasha and seek revenge on the entire male species. That evening she found herself in the arms of Anatoly Shpanko, a lanky fellow with unruly, dark blond hair and a wide, appealing smile. Toyla, as she soon called him, was a twenty-six-year-old medical student who had already served his term in the army. He was whimsical, yet deferential, to Marina, and from the moment of their first kiss—they were standing in a dimly lit courtyard, with snow swirling all around them and a lantern creaking in the doorway—she was deliriously in love with him. “He was a rare person,” Marina recalls. “He was honest in everything he did.”
There was only one drawback. Attracted as she was to Anatoly, Marina did not think he was handsome. Nor did she like the way he dressed. He simply did not fit the image she had created for herself of a girl who goes out only with handsome men. Not wanting to be made fun of, fearful that her friends might think less of her, she steered Anatoly along back streets when they were together as surreptitiously as if they were engaged in a clandestine affair. But she forgot her calculations when he kissed her. His kisses made Marina’s head spin. Finally, he proposed, but there were obstacles. Anatoly had two or three more years in medical school, no money, and, even more important, no apartment. Marina consulted Valya and Ilya. “No, my girl,” Ilya said. “Let him finish the institute first. He can talk about getting married then.”
Marina was not surprised. It was what she had expected, after all. But there was something in her uncle’s words that hurt her deeply. He would not consent to her marrying anyone, no matter how superior a human being, who did not have a place of his own. It was not Anatoly, whom he had never met, he was rejecting. It was Marina herself.
In later years Anatoly’s broad grin and unruly hair would return to haunt Marina. She knew she would be lucky to have him. She admired him, she was attracted to him sexually, he had a fine future as a doctor, and he loved her. He came, moreover, with a pair of adoring parents who would have been good to her. What more on earth could she want? But Marina was having a good time, and as yet she did not feel quite ready to settle down. Or perhaps she did not feel ready for someone who treated her with Anatoly’s decency. She and Anatoly kept on seeing each other, and Anatoly kept on proposing. Marina simply shelved his proposals. “Let’s wait and see how our feelings develop,” she said. And she would see, perhaps, whether anybody else came along.
On Friday, March 17, 1961, Marina went to a medical students’ dance at the Palace of Culture, a huge building in the center of Minsk. Both Sasha and Anatoly had asked her to go with them and Marina could not make up her mind. She preferred Anatoly, of course, but Marina, as she often did, decided to let fate take a hand. If she arrived early, she would go with Anatoly. If late, it would be Sasha. She told both of them to wait for her outside.
Marina was late. That evening she spent a long time in front of the mirror doing and redoing her hair. Wearing her very best, a dress of red Chinese brocade with a tiny bodice and a bell-shaped skirt, she did not arrive at the Palace of Culture until ten o’clock. Sasha had been waiting outside for nearly three hours. Anatoly was somewhere inside, alone.
The Palace of Culture contained within it a vast, impersonal hall with immense white columns and several glittering chandeliers. It was not a place for intimacy. The orchestra was deafening and brassy. Dancing with Sasha, her eyes sweeping the floor for Anatoly, Marina was approached by another medical student, an acquaintance of hers and Sasha’s by the name of Yury. He had a dark-haired stranger in tow, and as Yury began the introductions, the stranger stuck out his hand to Marina, grinned, and said simply: “Alik.” A moment later he asked Sasha for permission to dance with her.
Marina could not have cared less. They had been dancing in silence a minute or two when the stranger said, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t catch your name.”
She told him.
“What a pretty name!”
Marina thought he was giving her a line. Still, he was a good dancer, and he was very well dressed. He was wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, and a white tie of some funny foreign material. The tie and his accent told her immediately that he was not a Russian. He must be from Latvia or Estonia.
“It’s not just your name that’s pretty,” the stranger continued. “You’re pretty, too. I saw you when you came in. I was trying to figure out how to meet you, but you had a crowd around you. I’m glad we finally met.”
Alik danced with her again and again, as if he could not bear to lose her for a moment or let her dance with anyone else. The second the music stopped, he asked for the next dance, and Sasha barely had a chance. When she did dance with Sasha, Alik did not dance with anybody else. He waited for her to be free. That was all right with Marina. This Alik was a good dancer. He was clean and polite. And his accent amused her.
But she still was looking for Anatoly, hoping to make him jealous. To teach him a real lesson, she suggested to a group of young men, all standing around waiting to dance with her, that they go to the bar. “It’s boring here. Let’s get some champagne!”
It was the climax of Marina’s career as a single girl. She felt like a princess, resplendent in her red brocade and her elaborate hairdo. Never had she looked so pretty. Never had she had so many admirers. They all drank champagne and were on their way back to the dance floor when Marina finally saw Anatoly. “You go on back,” she said to her entourage. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Her performance had had the desired effect. Anatoly was angry and insisted on taking her home. Marina refused. She returned to Sasha and her other admirers, and when the dance was over, she brushed past Anatoly,
who was waiting for her at the door, with five young men in tow, the stranger Alik among them. All six of them set off down the street. A few paces behind, to Marina’s intense satisfaction, was Anatoly. He called out to her twice. Marina paid no attention. He caught up with her, put his hand on her shoulder, and pleaded: “Marina! I’ve got to talk to you.”
“I can’t talk now. Can’t you see? Go away!”
Alik was a witness to the scene; Alik, the stranger with the funny accent. Long afterward he told Marina that he had made up his mind that night. “I got what I wanted,” he boasted. “I got you away from them.”
The group of young people went to Yury’s apartment, where his mother, who was a professor of microbiology, was waiting up for them. That night, before the dance, she had given a lecture on America, which she had just visited as part of a delegation. Suddenly, Marina realized that Alik was American. Yury had asked him to the lecture, hence the dance, to hear his mother talk about America.
They all sat together in the living room asking Yury’s mother questions. Alik listened carefully but did not say anything. Finally, Yury’s mother went to bed, and the boys turned to Alik. They wanted to know what was right and what was wrong in Yury’s mother’s description of America.
Marina remembers his tone. He was pleasant and self-confident. He dismissed some of her remarks as “propaganda.” The rest, he said, was fair enough. Yury’s mother had been struck by the absence of lines in American stores. She attributed it to those two vices of the capitalist system, unemployment and overproduction, and concluded that Americans were too poor to buy. Alik politely disagreed. The stores seem empty, he said, because there is plenty for everyone at a price each can afford. “Your mother is right, though,” he said to Yury. “Unemployment is a problem.”
Marina liked the way he talked. She especially liked the way he stuck up for his country. She asked him if he loved America. He did, he said, but he did not love everything about it. He disliked unemployment and racial discrimination and added that education and medical care cost far too much. But he noted that housing was better than in Russia and that the ordinary apartment was bigger. Of the two countries, Russia and the United States, he thought America was more democratic because everyone can say what he thinks.
For a while Alik and two of the boys spoke English. Marina, who had seldom heard it spoken before, was enthralled. When it was time for Sasha to take her home, he offered to drop Alik off afterward. The three of them left the apartment together.
When she reached home, Marina rang the doorbell and called out excitedly, “I’m not alone, Aunt Valya. Sasha’s here.” Properly warned, Valya unlatched the door in her nightgown and quickly scuttled back to bed. Marina followed her into her room.
“Aunt Valya,” she whispered, her eyes very large. “Sasha’s in there. Sasha and another boy, an American. He’s really nice. Come in, and I’ll introduce you.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Valya said. “Bringing an American here and the place in such a mess?” She was afraid to meet him. “I look too awful,” she said, then groaned, “Oh, my God, an American was the only thing lacking in your collection.”
Before he left, Alik asked Marina if he might see her again. He begged her to name the time and place, adding that he seldom missed a dance at the Palace of Culture.
“Maybe I’ll go there next week,” she said.
With that the young man said good-night, and as Marina closed the door behind them, she tried to remember Alik’s name. It had a German-Jewish sound to her, something like “Oswald.”
— Interlude —
The path that led Lee Harvey Oswald to the Palace of Culture in Minsk in 1961 had opened up seven or eight years earlier when, as a very young teenager, he was handed a pamphlet on the streets of New York about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the two Americans who were convicted of and executed for betraying atomic secrets to the Russians. Next, when he was fifteen and was looking for what he later called “a key to my environment,” he borrowed books by Marx, Engels, and American Communist writers from the New Orleans Public Library and began to consider himself a Marxist.1
Only a few days after reaching the eligible age of seventeen, he joined the US Marine Corps. His half brother, John Pic, had chosen the Coast Guard for a career, and his full brother, Robert Oswald, had recently completed a tour in the Marines; both assumed that Lee enlisted to get out from under the “yoke of oppression” of their mother, Marguerite, who sought to control the lives of all her sons in every way. The older boys had entered the armed services to get away from her, and that was largely Lee’s motive as well. But he had another motive, too. Lee’s father, Marguerite’s second husband, had died before Lee was born, and Marguerite had raised the boy almost single-handedly. Lee desperately wanted to be a man, to learn a man’s skills and be part of the world of men. He idolized his older brother Robert, and he knew no better way than to follow where Robert had led.
Lee’s three-year term of enlistment began on October 26, 1956, in San Diego, California. He underwent the rigorous Marine Corps basic training, including use of the M-1 rifle, both at San Diego and at Camp Pendleton, California. At the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, and then at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, he was trained in aircraft surveillance and the use of radar. Six months after joining the service, he was granted low-level clearance to deal with material up to the “confidential” (as distinguished from the “secret” or “top-secret”) level. He was simultaneously promoted to private first class. Lee had a higher than average IQ, 118 on the Wechsler scale, and during his training he scored well, both in proficiency and in conduct. But he was unpopular with his fellow Marines. He kept to himself, preferred reading to the company of others, and spent his weekends alone.
Lee was next assigned to the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, California, and in the late summer of 1957, he shipped out to Japan, where he joined an air control squadron at Atsugi, outside Tokyo, as a radar operator. The squadron’s job was to direct American aircraft to their targets by radar and to scout for such Chinese or Soviet planes as might stray into the area. It was while he was at Atsugi that Lee may first have become aware of what was perhaps the most highly prized secret in all of US aerial reconnaissance, the U-2 aircraft.
During his early months in Japan, Lee Harvey Oswald began to blossom. He lost the meekness that had caused the men to christen him “Ozzie Rabbit,” and he became more manly and assertive in standing up for his rights. He had his first experience with women and, like many of the men, was said to be keeping a mistress. Feeling free in a way he had not felt at home, he told one friend that he did not care if he ever went back to the United States.
But a curious episode occurred on October 27, 1957, six weeks after Lee’s arrival in Japan and only a few days after his eighteenth birthday. One of his buddies, Paul Edward Murphy, heard a shot in the cubicle next to him. He rushed in to find Lee sitting on his foot-locker, looking in a bewildered way at his left arm. Murphy asked what had happened, and “very unemotionally,” Lee replied,” I believe I shot myself.”2 The wound, inflicted by a .22 caliber pistol Lee was not authorized to possess, was in his left elbow, and he spent the next two and a half weeks in a naval hospital. It may have been a clumsy accident, but Lee was not a novice when it came to handling guns.
Just after Lee left the hospital, his unit was sent off on maneuvers to the Philippines. It remained at Subic Bay, on Bataan, across Manila Bay from Manila, for three months, and it was at Subic Bay, Lee was to say later, that he learned to sympathize with local Communists and conceived a hatred for US “militarist imperialism” for exploiting the Filipino natives.3
While Lee was stationed in the Philippines, a second curious episode occurred. Private First Class Martin E. Schrand was found shot to death one night while on guard duty outside a hangar that could have been sheltering a U-2. Lee knew Schrand well. They had been part of a small group of men who started radar training in Jacksonville the yea
r before and had been together most of the time since. A Marine Corps investigation in 1958 established that Schrand’s death was accidental and self-inflicted, and yet a rumor arose among the men that Lee Oswald was responsible.4
The rumor is notable for two reasons. Lee had considered himself a Marxist for two years. And at Subic Bay he had become sympathetic to what he called “Communist elements” among the Filipinos. Afterward, speculation arose that Lee wanted to break into the hangar and learn something about the U-2 so that he could use the information later on.5 Although the speculation appears to be groundless, the rumor is still notable as a measure of Lee’s unpopularity among his fellow Marines.
When Lee returned with his squadron to Japan in the spring of 1958, he was court-martialed for the offense that had led to the wound in his elbow. The court decided that the wound was accidental, but for unauthorized possession of the pistol Lee was reduced in rank to private and sentenced to a forfeiture of pay and confinement at hard labor for twenty days. His confinement was suspended for six months.
Two months later, in June of 1958, Lee was court-martialed again. While drunk in a café, he had spilled a drink on a sergeant and abusively challenged him to a fight. Such episodes often occurred in after-hours drinking places, but the sergeant brought charges, another measure of Lee’s unpopularity. This time he drew a second forfeiture of pay and a twenty-eight-day sentence of confinement at hard labor. The earlier suspended twenty-day sentence was invoked as well, and during the summer of 1958 Lee spent seven weeks in the brig. Further, his request for extended overseas duty was denied.
Lee’s two courts-martial, his being broken in rank, his time in the brig, and now the refusal of his request for extended duty overseas—all were keen disappointments. But he had a new enthusiasm. In Japan he was again exposed to Communist propaganda, this time to Soviet magazines and to individuals who were fanatically pro-Soviet. “Soviet propaganda works well,” he was to say later, referring to his time in Japan.6 He made up his mind that he would go to the USSR.
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