Reclaiming History (145 page)

If Lee Harvey Oswald were really a spy for the CIA, as so many conspiracy theorists believe, he seemed to be a singularly inept one.

Lee settled into Soviet life easily. He found a nearby café where the food wasn’t very good and depressingly unvaried, although it was cheap and he really didn’t care about quality “after three years in the U.S.M.C.”
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In August he applied for membership in the union at his plant and became a dues-paying member in September.
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With the help of friends Golovachev and Titovets, his ability to speak Russian improved. Both likewise improved their English skills and wound up speaking more English with him than Russian. Titovets and Oswald improvised a grisly, taped “interview” with a fictional murderer:

Titovets: “Will you tell us about your last killing?”

Oswald: “Well, it was a young girl under a bridge. She came in carrying a loaf of bread and I just cut her throat from ear to ear.”

Titovets: “What for?”

Oswald: “Well, I wanted the loaf of bread, of course.”

Titovets: “Okay. And what do you think—what do you take to be the most—your most famous killing in your life?”

Oswald: “Well, the time I killed eight men on the Bowery sidewalk. They were just standing there, loafing around. I didn’t like their faces, so I just shot them all with a machine gun. It was very, very famous. All the newspapers carried the story.”

According to Titovets, “We were just having a great time and, actually, we were laughing our heads off.”
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Around the same time, Oswald’s diary reflects that he began to view his new homeland with a more critical eye. “As my Russian improves I become increasingly concious of just what sort of sociaty I live in. Mass gymnastics, compulsary after work meeting, usually political information meeting. Complusary attendance at lectures and the sending of the entire shop collective (except me) to pick potatoes on a Sunday, at a State colletive farm. A ‘patriotic duty’ to bring in the harvest. The opions [opinions] of the workers (unvoiced) are that its a great pain in the neck. They don’t seem to be esspicialy enthusiastic about any of the ‘collective’ duties a natural feeling. I am increasingly aware of the presence, in all thing, of Lebizen [Libezin], shop party secretary, fat, fortyish, and jovial on the outside. He is a no-nonsense party regular.”
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In October, he invited Ella to a party at his apartment. When Lee’s pal Pavel showed up with a young woman named Inna Tachina and made it rather obvious that he had brought her for Lee, Ella, who wasn’t really all that serious about Lee, was nonetheless miffed, and she quarreled with him about Inna. He left his own party to walk Ella to her nightshift at the plant about eight minutes away and apparently smoothed things over, for the relationship continued, but he also started an affair with Inna.
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Oswald wrote of Inna on a page in his diary he kept separate from the others, one dedicated to his amorous affairs in the Soviet Union: “Enna…from Rega, [Riga] Esonia [Estonia—Riga is actually in Latvia, not Estonia]. Studing at Conservatorie I met her in 1960 at The Zegers. her family (who sent her to Minsk) apparently well off. Enna loves fancy cloths well made shoes and underthings in October 1960 we began to get very close and clemingating [culminating?] in intercourse on October 21 she was a virgen and very interesting we met in such a fashion on 4 or 5 occiations ending Nov. 4 1960 later upon completion of her last year at the Music Con. she left Minsk for Rega.”
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By December 1, he was having a light affair with one Nellya Korbinka.
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She also made it to the same, separate, long page of his diary dedicated to intimate relations: “Nell…large, five ft. 11. inch, 150 lbs, built proportionly, large…breast hips wide and lovely but very pleasly proportioned, from a village near the polish border of strictly Russian peasents stock. gentle kind womenly and understanding, passionate in heart…she combined all the best womenly features with the kind, simple, Russian hearth I met her through one of her room-mates, Tonka, Nell and Tonka together with three other girls lived in a room at the for. lan. Insit. [Foreign Language Institute] dorm. in Minsk near the victory circle. I began to notice Nell serously only after I had parted ways with ENNA. Nell at first [does] not seem to warrant attention since she is rather plain looking and frieihtingly large. but I felt at once that she was kind and her passions were proportional too her size…after a light affair lasting into Jan and even Feb, we [continued] to remain on friendly but conventional terms.”
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Lee did not understand that a few of the young women who showed an interest in him were, so to speak, professionals—informants to the KGB. One, Anna Byeloruskaya, wrote the following report to them: “The general mental development of Oswald is low. His views are limited, and he has a very poor appreciation of music, art, and literature.” The KGB, however, thought she might be able to trap him as a spy. They asked her to tell Oswald that a relative of hers was a physicist at the Academy of Sciences, but she got no response from him, Oswald showing as much interest as being told about a new fly in the forest.
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The woman he remained serious about was Ella German. They continued to see each other and mostly enjoyed each other’s company. After a New Year’s Eve party at her parent’s home, he wrote in his diary, “I think I’m in love with her. She has refused my more dishonourable advanis, we drink and eat in the presenec of her family in a very hospitable atmosfere. Later I go home drunk and happy. Passing the river homeward, I decide to propose to Ella.”
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The next day, January 2, 1961, Lee made his move. He wrote, “After a pleasent handin-hand walk to the local cinima we come home, standing on the doorstep I propose’s She hesitates than refuses, my love is real but she has none for me. Her reason besides lack of love; I am american and someday might be arrested simply because of that example Polish Inlervention in the 20’s. led to arrest of all people in the Soviet Union of polish oregen ‘you understand the world situation there is too much against you and you don’t even know it’ I am stunned she snickers at my awkarness in turning to go (I am too stunned too think!) I realize she was never serious with me but only exploited my being an american, in order to get the envy of the other girls who consider me different from the Russian Boys. I am misarable!”
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It was difficult for Ella too, “because I knew he was in love with me, and he was all alone here. But I had no deep feelings for him.”
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“I am misarable about Ella” Oswald wrote the day after they parted. “I love her but what can I do? It is the state of fear which was alway in the Soviet Union.”
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The very next day brought a fateful meeting at the Passport Office in Minsk, which called Oswald in to find out whether he still wanted Soviet citizenship. “I say no simply extend my residental passport…and my document is extended untill Jan 4. 1962.”
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He covered the remainder of the month in his diary with a single entry: “I am stating [starting] to reconsider my disire about staying The work is drab the money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling allys no places of recreation acept the trade union dances I have had enough.”
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Although he was well off by Soviet standards, he had learned about the peculiar quality of Soviet money, which was more like a sort of military scrip than the money in capitalist countries. You could not invest Soviet money in anything at all except a low-interest savings account, and you didn’t need to save it for medical expenses or your children’s education, since these were covered by the state. It’s only real use was to exchange it for consumer goods and services, and those were severely limited in variety, quantity, quality, availability, and style. It’s not that the parsimonious Oswald didn’t have enough money, just that there was nowhere to spend it.

I
t probably wasn’t the bleak Soviet lifestyle, however, that caused Oswald to give up on Russia. It was something much more fundamental. He defected to Russia, of course, because he thought it embodied Karl Marx’s core tenet of a classless society, where the proletariat (working class) was not exploited as he perceived it to be under the capitalism he loathed. But to his considerable dismay, what he found in Russia was not Marxism but Russian Communism, a bastardization and pale imitation of what Marx had envisioned in
Das Kapital
. Russia’s “classless society” was only a heady theory, not a reality. The commissars drove around in their fancy Ziln cars and spent their idle time at their comfortable dachas, while 99.9 percent of the Soviet population remained poor, were depressed, and led a marginal existence. This jolting realization rekindled—but with much more intensity this time—Oswald’s interest in Cuba, leading him to the view that Castro and Cuba were the last bastion of true Marxism on the face of the globe. It also caused him thereafter to never fail to proclaim that he was a Marxist, not a Communist, which he at one time had assumed was simply a synonym for Marxism.
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When he later returned to the states, he told a New Orleans police detective that Russia had “fat stinking politicians over there just like we have over here,” and that “they do not follow the great concepts of Karl Marx—the leaders have everything and the people are still poor and depressed.”
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The Warren Commission found that Oswald’s “most frequent criticisms” of Russia concerned the contrast between the lives of the ordinary workers and the Communist Party elite.
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He told an acquaintance in Dallas that the people in the Soviet Union “were poor. They worked and made just enough to buy their clothes and their food…The only ones who had enough money to buy anything else…the luxuries of life, were those who were Communist Party officials…high ranking members in the party.”
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Another Dallas acquaintance said that Oswald “seemed to classify all members of the Communist Party as opportunists who were in it just to get something for themselves out of it…and [he] thought they were ruining the principles which the country should be based on. In other words, they were not true Communists. They were ruining the heaven on earth which it should be.”
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A Dallas friend said that Oswald was “quite bitter” about the disparity between the elite and working class, including the fact the former could take vacations down to the Black Sea. When he reminded Oswald, “You were saying everyone got a month’s vacation,” Oswald responded, “That’s true, but you had to pay your transportation,” and it would take, for instance, a year’s salary to go from Minsk to the Black Sea.
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He told another Dallas friend that for the average worker or citizen in Russia, “travel was nonexistent; that a person who grew up in Minsk would probably spend his whole life without venturing far from the city.”
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“I didn’t find what I was looking for,” he summed up his feelings about Russia to yet another Dallas friend.
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Many have ridiculed Oswald for the superficiality of his understanding of Marxism, and it clearly did not appear to be deep, but his writing reflects that he was also very aware of an important adjunct to Marx’s classless society, the “withering away of the state,” a situation that would exist for a short, unspecified period following the revolution during which time a police state would be necessary to avoid anarchy. But the Bolshevik Revolution was way back in 1917, and Oswald said, “This is not the case, and is better observed [as he did] than contemplated.” If anything, he concluded, the state had actually increased, not decreased the regimentation of every ordinary Soviet citizen.
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A friend of Oswald’s in Dallas said that in a discussion between the two of them, Oswald indicated that average Russian citizens “didn’t have any freedoms, as we think of freedom, in other words, to get in our car and go where we want to, do what we want to, or say what we want to.”
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*

Oswald’s February 1, 1961, entry in his diary reads, “Make my first request to American Embassy, Moscow for reconsidering my position, I stated ‘I would like to go back to U.S.’”
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Although this February 1, 1961, diary entry says that Oswald made his “first request” to return to the United States on that date, he had done so two months earlier. On February 13, 1961, the American embassy in Moscow received a letter from Oswald postmarked Minsk, February 5:

Dear Sirs,

Since I have not received a reply to my letter of December 1960, I am writing again asking that you consider my request for the return of my American passport.

I desire to return to the United States, That is if we could come to some agreement concernig the dropping of any legal proceeding’s against me, If so, than I would be free to ask the Russian authorities to allow me to leave. If I could show them my American passport, I am of the opinion they would give me an exit visa.

They have at no time insisted that I take Russian citizenship. I am living here with non-permanent type papers for a foreigner.

I cannot leave Minsk without permission, therefore I am writing rather than calling in person.

I hope that in recalling the responsibility I have to america that you remember your’s in doing everything you can to help me since I am an american citizen.

Sincerly

Lee Harvey Oswald
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The letter is noteworthy in two respects. For one thing, Oswald’s dyslexia is largely absent, which suggests that it was very carefully crafted and recopied, possibly with the help of one of his friends or acquaintances. It’s tone of mixed humility and bluster suggests that Oswald had not forgotten his foolish threat to betray military secrets to the Soviets, although he was at the same time prepared to demand his rights as an American citizen. Then there’s that mention of a previous request, from December, which he said went unanswered. Richard Snyder, still in his post at the embassy, was puzzled by that. They had heard nothing of Oswald since November 1959.
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The Warren Commission concluded, partly because of Oswald’s statement in his Historic Diary that he made his “first” request in early February, that the claim of an earlier request was probably not true.
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That little mystery was finally cleared up in November 1991, however, when ABC broadcast a special
Nightline
investigation into Oswald’s KGB files, which its investigator had inspected in the Soviet Union. One of the questions Forrest Sawyer put to the KGB officer showing him the files had to do with the missing letter. The first letter, written in December but intercepted by the KGB and for some reason never forwarded to the embassy, was still there in Oswald’s file.
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