Years later I asked McVickar if he had told me about Oswald in the hope that I would try to talk him out of defecting. That, in a bugged hotel room and with my own visa hanging by a thread, would have been risky indeed. “Oh, no,” McVickar laughed. “I hoped you would listen him out of it.”
I made one more effort to see Lee. Later in the week, with my story about him written and on its way to New York, I was trudging upstairs in my hotel and found myself on the second floor, Lee’s floor. I went up to the dezhurnaya, a tiny woman in white who sat on the landing and presided over a huge desk filled with keys. “How about Number 233?” I asked. “Is he in?” She inspected her drawer of keys, and her arms flew into the air. “Out!” she said.
Lee forgot his promise to say goodbye, and I never saw him again.
Why was Lee Harvey Oswald permitted to remain in the Soviet Union? Was he the pitiful, slightly unbalanced boy Soviet officials had at first taken him for, or was he a determined and single-minded individual who would go to any lengths to get what he wanted? The question was a crucial one, and the answer Soviet officials seem to have reached may have determined the outcome of his case. Oswald’s suicide attempt was proof that in order to get what he wanted he would stop at nothing—he would even try to take his own life. And his willingness to talk to reporters showed that he would not hesitate to embarrass either the Russians or the Americans publicly.
Oswald told me that Soviet officials had warned him that his case would be decided according to the “international atmosphere.” In that sense he could hardly have timed his arrival more propitiously, for on September 26 and 27, while Oswald was on the high seas on his way to Russia, Premier Khrushchev and President Eisenhower were meeting in the Maryland woods to christen what became known as the “Spirit of Camp David.” After Khrushchev’s return to Moscow, even minor questions affecting Americans in the USSR began to be decided, to a greater degree than before, according to whether they would help or hurt Soviet-American relations.
Yury Nosenko, a Soviet secret police officer who later defected to the West, told the CIA and FBI that the initial decision to expel Oswald was taken by the KGB, working through Intourist, the agency that handles travel by foreigners inside the USSR.17 Nosenko was unable to say who reversed that decision, although he speculated that it was overruled by the Soviet Red Cross or Foreign Ministry. The speculation appears poorly founded unless one of these organizations was fronting for another that was politically more powerful, either the KGB at a very high level, or some special party body or official whom Khrushchev entrusted with overseeing implementation of the Spirit of Camp David.
Thus Oswald’s suicide attempt appears to have been pivotal. First, it came at a moment, late in October, when the new policy began to be effected. Second, it appears to have altered the Russians’ estimate of Oswald’s character and of the damage he could do. Evidently, they decided that it would be less harmful to their image abroad to accept this young American who claimed to be motivated by Marxist ideals than to reject him with the risk that he might embarrass them with a very public suicide. During the long weeks he was kept in limbo, until after the first of the year, they no doubt hoped that he would become disenchanted and would quietly go away.18
But Lee, by his self-imposed sequestration in the Metropole, avoided any confrontation with reality that might conceivably have caused him to change his mind. Instead, he spent his emotions writing angry letters to his brother Robert. He told Robert that he “would like to see the capitalist government of the US overthrown,” and “happiness is taking part in the struggle.” He added that Robert and Marguerite were “not objects of affection” and he had to come to Russia “to find freedom.” And in December, even before he had been told what his future would be, he wrote to Robert that he chose to break all ties with his past and would not be writing to him or to their mother again. “I am starting a new life,” he said, “and I do not wish to have anything to do with the old.”19
On January 4, 1960, he was informed what his new life would be: He could stay in the USSR, not as a citizen, but as a “stateless person.” He was to be sent to Minsk, capital of Belorussia, where he would be a metalworker at the Belorussian Radio and Television Plant. Through the Soviet Red Cross he was given 5,000 old rubles, or $500, with which he was able to pay his hotel bill and his train fare to Minsk and still have some rubles left.
Lee started his job in Minsk on January 13, and in March he was awarded a pleasant one-room apartment with a view overlooking the river. His financial situation was superb. He earned $70 to $90 a month at work and received an additional $70 a month in the form of a Red Cross subsidy. He had as much monthly income as the director of his factory. Lee did not particularly like his job. It was mere manual labor, while he had hoped for a place in an institute and a chance to study full time. But as the object of much attention and the recipient, like every foreigner, of many favors, he was at first reasonably content.
Lee made friends at the factory, and in his free time he studied Russian and went to the opera with Rosa Kuznetsova, an Intourist interpreter. He bought a 16-gauge single barrel shotgun that summer, joined a hunting club, and went on hunting trips in the countryside. His fellow workers, who called him “Alik” because “Lee” sounded Chinese, peppered him with questions about America, and Lee liked that. And in the fall he began to have love affairs. He soon discovered that some of the girls cared passionately about him because he was an American, the only one in Minsk, and he had an apartment. Others, however, seemed to care about him for himself. But the woman he wanted turned him down. She was Ella Germann, a dark-haired Jewish girl whom he had met at the factory. They saw each other for a few months, and Lee celebrated the New Year of 1961 with Ella and her family at their apartment. He decided that he was in love with her and, more or less on impulse, proposed to her the following evening. To his astonishment Ella rejected him; first, because she did not love him and, second, because relations between Russia and America might someday grow worse and he would be arrested as “an American spy.”
Lee was stunned. Ella’s refusal helped to crystallize the many criticisms—the provincial drabness, the cold climate, the officiousness of the party secretary in his workshop—that had been quietly taking shape in Lee’s mind ever since his arrival in Minsk. He no longer considered Russia a paradise. On January 4, two days after Ella’s refusal and a year to the day after he had been assigned to Minsk and given his documents as a “stateless person,” the visa authorities in Minsk inquired whether he still wanted Soviet citizenship. It was not an offer, simply a pulse taking. Lee replied that he did not and asked merely to have his documents extended for another year. And he confided to his diary, “I have had enough.” In February he wrote the American embassy in Moscow asking to have his passport back. He rudely reminded the embassy that he was still an American citizen and said he would like to go home.
It was in such a mood of disappointment in love and with Russia that Lee Harvey Oswald met Marina Prusakova.
PART TWO
Russia, 1961–1962
— 6 —
Courtship
On Saturday night, March 25, 1961, Marina and a girlfriend from the pharmacy went to another dance at the Palace of Culture. Wearing a simple gray dress and her best Czechoslovak shoes, Marina was walking down the stairway to the dance floor when she met Alik coming up.
“Hello,” he said, grinning happily. “I’m very glad you came. I was afraid you might not be here.”
He was dressed differently from the last time she saw him. He was wearing black trousers, a blue button-down shirt without a tie, and a charcoal gray V-neck sweater. Marina noticed that his eyes were a deep blue. She was pleased that he had been looking for her.
They danced and talked all evening long. Strolling home together down Ulitsa Kalinina, the broad thoroughfare on which Ilya and Valya had their apartment, Alik pointed out the building in which he lived. It was on the same street, about a seven-minute walk away. Outside
Marina’s building, Alik asked: “May I see you again?” She agreed to a date on the following Thursday. He asked for her phone number, “just in case.”
Three days later, on Tuesday, when Marina came home from work, Valya informed her that a young man had called, not once but twice, and said he would call again the next day. He had a “nice, polite voice,” Valya remarked, “but I couldn’t understand him very well. It’s probably your American.” On Wednesday he called again. This time, Valya reported, he sounded upset. He was in the hospital and unable to meet Marina the next evening.1 Would she come to see him in the hospital? Valya had written down the address.
On Friday Marina appeared at the Fourth Clinical Hospital, unannounced, bearing a jar of apricots. Alik was overjoyed. He exclaimed that apricots were his favorite dessert. He was wearing hospital pajamas and flushed with embarrassment when Marina arrived. Both were uneasy as they sat talking in the corridor for about an hour. Alik was to have an operation on his adenoids the next day, and the prospect made him so nervous that he was scarcely able to speak of anything else. As Marina got up to leave, he begged her to visit him again. He looked so pale and seemed so lonely that she agreed. In her pharmacist’s coat, she explained, she could pass for a nurse any time. She could come and go as she pleased.
Marina came again the next day. The operation was over, his adenoids were out, but Alik complained of pain and the absence of anesthetic. Marina felt sorry for him and started coming to see him nearly every day. She noticed that as a foreigner he got a good many favors from the hospital staff. She herself was allowed long after visiting hours. Had she been seeing anyone but a foreigner, she would, she knew, have been shooed summarily away.
One day as they were walking down the hospital stairway. Alik suddenly asked if he might kiss her.
“If you ask,” Marina said, coquettishly, “I’ll have to say no.”
And so he kissed her.
Marina cringed. The whole thing—Alik, his asking for the kiss, the fetid hospital air—repelled her. She felt averse to herself and to him and left abruptly.
Marina resolved not to see him again. She had liked Alik at first, and when her coworkers at the pharmacy learned that she had an American boyfriend, they were intrigued and envious. But now Alik was pale and unattractive. He was not a boyfriend, anyway, just a foreigner she felt sorry for. But she was anxious not to hurt his feelings. So when he called from the hospital a day or so later and asked her to come again, Marina reluctantly consented. As long as he’s sick, I’ll go, she said to herself, but the moment he’s out of the hospital, I’ll refuse to see him again.
He had a hangdog look that first visit after the kiss. Marina sensed that he wanted to say something, and this time, as he walked her down the staircase, he took her two hands, kissed them, and said: “I want you to be my own girl [he used the Russian for “fiancée”]. I don’t want you to go out with anybody else.”
Was it a proposal of marriage, or had Alik merely chosen the wrong word? Marina was surprised, but she replied as she usually did. She promised him that she would think it over—promising herself, meanwhile, that she would go serenely on seeing her other boyfriends, especially Anatoly, whose kisses were still making her head spin. Marrying Alik was the last thing on her mind.
Easter was approaching, and Aunt Valya was overflowing with sympathy for Marina’s new American friend. “It’s bad enough to be in a hospital in your own country,” she said. “But he has nobody here. We can’t let him feel all alone.” So on Easter Sunday Marina turned up at the hospital bearing an Easter egg dyed specially by Valya, as well as candies and kulich, a sweet Russian Easter bread with raisins, donated by Aunt Lyuba.
When Marina returned home, she told Aunt Lyuba that Alik had loved the egg. She also confessed that he had asked her to be his fiancée. In Valya’s eyes that meant he was an honorable young man, and she urged Marina to bring him to supper as soon as he left the hospital. On Tuesday, April 11, the day of his discharge, he came. It was his first meeting with Marina’s aunt and uncle. Marina felt shy about the “fiancée” business and asked Valya not to bring it up.
At dinner Ilya quizzed their guest about how he happened to be in Russia and whether he was happy there. Alik answered that he had come as a tourist and had found it difficult to get permission to stay. But he had been eager to live and work in Russia and learn the truth about it, not just the “truth” that is shown to tourists. He told Ilya that he worked at the Minsk Radio Plant and had his own apartment. He said he had made friends and was happy in Russia.
At the end of the meal, Ilya proposed a toast. He raised a glass of cognac to “the health and happiness of Americans in the USSR.” Then he excused himself to go to work. As he rose from the table, Alik stood up, too, a polite gesture that endeared him to Valya and made an impression on Marina. Ilya put an arm around Alik’s shoulders. “Take care of this girl,” he said. “She has plenty of breezes in her brain.”
When Valya and Marina got up to do the dishes, Alik, in another welcome and unfamiliar gesture, followed them into the kitchen to help. Then he and Marina went for a walk, and she agreed to go out with him two evenings later. When Alik kissed her that night for the second time, it seemed to Marina that the aversion she had felt in the hospital was gone.
The next evening Sasha and Yury came by. Alik had invited them to his apartment, and they asked Marina to come along. She hesitated, then agreed. Alik might as well know that there were other men in her life. Let him feel a pang of jealousy or two. But she insisted on taking Lyalya Petrusevich, a close friend who lived in her apartment building. She and Lyalya had strolled past Alik’s building a year or so before, admiring the balconies that overlooked the river. Now she wanted Lyalya to see the building—and meet her new American acquisition.
Alik was surprised to find not only Yury and Sasha but Marina and Lyalya at the door. He gave them wine and chocolates and they danced. Marina noticed that Alik’s collection of classical records was poorer and reflected a good deal less musical knowledge than the collections of other boys she knew. Alik wanted to walk her home. But she went with her friends instead.
Lyalya was lyrical about Alik. “Good God!” she exclaimed. “That boy is really great! He’s so neat and polite and good-looking, and he keeps his apartment so clean! I’d throw everybody over for a chance at a man like that! You’re too choosy, Marina.”
Marina asked Lyalya whether Alik was better than Anatoly? “Of course,” she said. “If I had a boyfriend as good-looking as that, and an American besides, I’d marry him blindfolded!”
Her Aunt Valya’s approval, and now Lyalya’s, raised Alik in Marina’s esteem. Not everyone could have an American boyfriend; he was the only American in Minsk. He could probably have any girl in town, and it occurred to her that if she wanted to keep him, even as a curiosity in her collection, she had better watch out.
When he came for their date the next evening, Marina’s feelings had undergone a full revolution from what they had been in the hospital. They strolled along the frozen river, and Alik politely cleared the snow off a bench so that Marina could sit down. Soon he confessed that he was cold and led her back to his apartment. He played a record, the theme song from the film Around the World in Eighty Days, and they danced. They did the samba, the cha-cha-cha, and a little rock ’n’ roll. And Alik kissed her again.
From that evening on, Marina’s dates with Anatoly were infrequent. All she wanted was to go to Alik’s apartment and dance, to kiss and drink tea and talk. He was more gentle, tender, and affectionate than anyone she had known. His caresses seemed different somehow, because they were the caresses of a foreigner. Furthermore, it was the first time she had enjoyed the luxury of a man’s kisses without the fear of interruption. With the brief exception of Eddie in Leningrad, she had never before known a man with an apartment of his own.
There were other things that attracted her to Alik; little things, such as his accent and his voice on the telephone. And bigger things, too
. One evening as they were walking near the opera house, she asked about his family in America. He told Marina he did not have a mother. Was she dead? Marina asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it—it’s too painful.” Later, he said that his mother was dead and that he had been raised by an aunt. And to Marina the fact that they were both orphans, above all the fact they had both lost their mothers, was a significant bond. She told Alik that her parents were dead, too, but said nothing about being illegitimate. After that, they scarcely ever spoke of their pasts.
Alik told Marina that he was twenty-four, almost as old as Anatoly, and Marina found that attractive, too. He also told her that he had renounced his American citizenship and could never go back to the United States. But that revelation in no way diminished his appeal. It was flattery enough that he was an American and that, for the moment at least, his choice seemed to have fallen on her.
One evening toward the middle of April, Alik took Marina to his apartment and began to kiss her until he reached such a point of desire that he said, with “madness in his eyes,” as Marina describes it, that she must go home immediately or he would compel her to stay with him until morning. Terrified and delighted, Marina grabbed her coat and ran home. When she told Valya what had happened, she smiled and said, “I see.”
Marina and Lee Page 13
