Alik loved to sing. He sang Harry Belafonte in the bathtub, Rimski-Korsakov while mopping the floor, Rachmaninoff while washing dishes. He whistled or sang Russian folk tunes, and when he played opera on the phonograph, he sang and pantomimed as if he were on stage. His favorite singer was the incomparable Russian bass, Chaliapin, and when he sang along with a Chaliapin recording, he would turn red as a beet trying to hit the low notes. When he made it, he would shout: “Look at me. I sing as well as he does!” At the end of an especially taxing passage, he would call out in triumph to Marina: “Mama, I love you!”
One Sunday in early September, when the leaves were turning yellow out of doors, they were sitting together in the apartment, Marina sewing and Alik bending over his diary. He was singing as usual, and Marina noticed that nearly every line ended with the same words—“Oh my darlin’.” They were English words, but she understood them and hoped they might refer to her. After a while she grew tired of hearing the same song over and over. “Put on another record now,” she said. “You’ve been singing that one thing all day.”
“I’m sorry,” Alik apologized absentmindedly but after a brief pause started singing it again.
Marina was to hear the song often, and always, it seemed, when Alik was working on his diary. It was not until years later that she found out it was the title song of the movie High Noon, the story of the sheriff of a small Western town who, against the wishes of his wife and without any help from the townspeople, is brave enough to stand up to a band of outlaws who are out to take over the town. Alik saw the movie in Fort Worth in 1956 on the enthusiastic urging of his brother, Robert, and they loved to sing the song together.1 He may also have seen it again while he was in the Marine Corps, and it is apparent that the theme of the movie and its title song, the conflict between love and duty, made a deep impression on him.
Alik’s favorite opera was Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, based on a short story by Pushkin. He saw the movie of the opera countless times and played it on the phonograph again and again. One aria, in particular, he played as many as twenty times a night:
I love you. I love you beyond measure.
I cannot conceive of life without you.
I would perform a heroic deed of unheard-of prowess for your sake …2
Marina suspected that her husband associated the aria with some former lover, and she grew jealous. She must have shown it, for Alik began to play the record only when she was out and changed it quickly the moment he heard her footstep on the stair. Marina soon found a name to attach to her jealousy. They had received postcards from someone vacationing in the south, and Alik explained that they were from an Intourist interpreter who had helped him a great deal when he first arrived in the Soviet Union. A week or so later the front door opened, and in she walked. It was Rimma Shirokova.
Alik looked pleased but ill at ease as he made the introductions. Rimma, about twenty-seven, was blonde and tastefully dressed, and was plainly a person of education. Marina liked her right away.
Alik and Rimma began to talk in English until Rimma tactfully suggested that they speak Russian so Marina could understand. Marina noticed that the visitor addressed her husband as “Lee,” a name she had rarely heard him called before. Rimma laughed and joked a good deal as the two of them sipped coffee and talked over acquaintances they had in common in Moscow. She asked “Lee” if he was going to continue his education. He told her, untruthfully, that he had applied for Friendship University but had not yet received a reply. “You must study,” Rimma said firmly, and he agreed. She stayed about an hour—she was catching a night train for Moscow—but before she left, Rimma said to Alik: “You have a good wife. Take care of her.”
“What a nice-looking girl!” Marina exclaimed, as soon as she had gone. “How on earth can you love me when you might have had someone like her!”
“I was in love with her,” Alik admitted. “I wanted to marry her. But she is older than I am. She thought I was just a little boy, and she wouldn’t have me.” He assured Marina that she was every bit as good for him as Rimma, and a good deal younger besides. In spite of his reassurance, Marina continued to feel inferior; Rimma was prettier and better educated than she was. “Rimma was too good for him—I wasn’t,” she thought.
Marina remembers more about the visit than her feelings of jealousy. Soon after Rimma arrived, Alik came into the kitchen and said to her in a low voice: “Don’t tell Rimma that we’re trying to go to America!” Rimma had gone out of her way to help him when he was trying desperately to stay in Russia two years before. He must have felt that he would cut a ridiculous figure if she learned that he was now trying, almost equally hard, to get out.
Marina also remembers that Alik was nervous throughout the visit. At the time she supposed that it was because of their former relationship. But years later, when she learned that it was Rimma who had discovered him that day in 1959 when he slashed his wrist in his hotel room in Moscow, she realized that Alik must have been afraid that Rimma would mention his suicide attempt.
Indeed, Marina would have been very shocked had she known of the episode. Yet she suspected something. A few weeks after she was married, she noticed a small scar on Alik’s left wrist. She asked if he got it in a fight over a girl and was surprised when he at first refused to answer. She was more surprised still when he snapped: “Don’t ever ask me again.”
“Was it your first love?” Marina persisted.
Visibly upset, he replied, “I was young and foolish then.”
After that Marina noticed, out of a corner of her mind, that Alik kept the scar hidden. He wore a watch on his left wrist and once, when it broke, it was months before he would take it to be fixed. Later, when he broke it again, and again had to take it to be fixed, he covered his wrist with an identification bracelet even though he hated jewelry and knew that Marina, too, hated jewelry of any kind on a man.
Marina never asked him about the scar again. But when she learned that it was the result of a suicide attempt, her thoughts again fastened on Rimma. She believes that her husband attempted suicide not only to put pressure on the Soviet authorities to permit him to stay in Russia, but to impress Rimma. “I would perform a heroic deed of unheard-of prowess for your sake.”3
About September 20, very soon after Rimma’s visit, Marina was on her way to work on the bus one morning when she was overcome by gas fumes. She stepped off to buy a glass of carbonated water and crumpled to the street in a faint. A passerby rushed her to the Third Clinical Hospital, right above the pharmacy where she worked. When Alik returned to the apartment that evening, he found a message and rushed to the pharmacy. Marina crept down the back stairs of the hospital to see him.
“Did you lose the baby?” he asked, pale and upset. Marina assured him the baby was all right. He told her to do anything, have an abortion even, but be sure no harm came to her.
The doctors found Marina run down and deficient in vitamins and iron. Then they discovered that her blood type was Rh-negative and, fearing complications in the pregnancy, kept her in the hospital about five days. Later, at Alik’s suggestion, they tested his blood. Marina was with him during the test, and she had never in her life seen anyone so afraid of pain and the sight of blood. He nearly fainted twice and was very peevish and cross. “Can’t they dig up a better nurse than that?” he complained. When it was over, it turned out that his blood type was Rh-negative, too.4
Marina was overcome. Fate had, indeed, taken a hand in her life. Throughout her marriage she felt certain that no other husband could have given her a child; no one else would have had the same blood type. It meant that they had been truly destined for one another. Somehow, across an ocean, he had found her.
Marina felt the same way about the scars both of them had on their arms. Skin had been removed from her right arm during an eye operation in childhood. Alik had the scar on his left elbow from the accidental discharge of a pistol while he was in the Marine Corps in Japan, although he told Marina, falsely, that he had been wounded in action in Indonesia. The scars were the same size and looked identical. To Marina the similarity was another sign that she and Alik had been destined for each other by fate.
Marina’s illness was not serious, and she had a good time in the hospital. Nurses came from all over to have a look at the “marvel” who had married an American. She had visits from two or three old beaux, but since husbands were not permitted, she had to steal downstairs to the pharmacy at night to see Alik.
One evening just after she left the hospital, Alik came home in a special hurry. “President Kennedy is going to speak tonight,” he said. He closed the balcony doors to shut out noises from the street, or perhaps to keep the neighbors from hearing. A series of announcements came over the radio, the first in a Baltic tongue, then Russian, then Ukrainian. Next, they heard a voice in English.
“Is it him?” Marina asked.
“Not yet,” Alik answered impatiently.
At the beginning of the year 1961, the year the Oswalds met and married, the new young president of the United States had stood in icy sunshine half a world away and taken the oath of office. “Let every nation know,” he said, “whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Less than three months later, a band of Cuban exiles armed by the United States landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Khrushchev and Kennedy met somberly in Vienna. A summer of crisis followed. Khrushchev threatened to end Western access to Berlin. Kennedy called out reserves. A wall went up in Berlin. At the end of August, Russia announced that it was resuming atmospheric nuclear testing. Three H-bombs of unprecedented megatonnage were detonated in Central Asia. The cold war entered a dangerous new phase as Khrushchev tested the mettle of the new president.
Alik recognized Kennedy’s voice the second it came over the air. He had apparently heard Kennedy before while he was in Russia, as the result of scores of Kennedy speeches or excerpts broadcast by the Voice of America and Radio Liberty, another station to which he listened. This speech was being broadcast live and in its entirety by the Voice. It was Kennedy’s address of September 25, 1961, given at the United Nations General Assembly, announcing the end of the Berlin crisis.
Alik was rigid with attention as Kennedy spoke for about an hour. The voice was wavy and distorted, and now and then a word was lost by jamming. “Oh, chort” (“damn”), Alik swore each time it happened. Once, when Marina made a slight sound, he waved her in irritation into the kitchen. After that she sat motionless beside him.
The moment the speech ended, Alik bounded into the kitchen to make tea. What was it about? Marina asked. “About war and peace,” he told her and quoted a few of the president’s phrases.
“That’s funny,” said Marina. “Everybody wants peace here. They want peace there, too. So why do they talk about war?”
“Politics,” Alik grinned.
A day or so later, Alik defended the president’s speech in a discussion with Uncle Ilya. He thought the Soviet government was “sneaky,” since it had attacked the speech without publishing it or printing a fair account. Sipping tea in the kitchen with Aunt Valya, Marina heard her husband speak up stoutly for the United States. Uncle Ilya was equally staunch in his defense of the Soviet Union. But on one thing they both agreed—the Bay of Pigs. Alik roundly deplored American policy toward Cuba and Fidel Castro.
Marina did not know it, but her husband had long been enthusiastic about Castro. That autumn he took her to see a movie about the Cuban leader by the illustrious Soviet film director, Roman Carmen. Alik loved it, and he started calling Castro “a hero” and “a man of talent.” And at about this same time, he began to seek out the Cuban students in Minsk, three hundred or so strong, to learn what he could of Castro’s revolution.
The Cuban students were a lively lot who found Soviet Communism a drab disappointment. They loved singing, dancing, and playing the guitar, but no matter what amusement they thought up, the militia quickly forbade it. They were even discouraged from going out with Soviet girls, and they hated the cold weather. The Cubans were in dread that the Americans would invade their country and overthrow Castro, lest they be doomed to stay in Russia forever. Looking at the dreary, colorless city around them, they asked—was it for this we built a revolution?
Alik shared their disappointment in Russia, but he had believed in Communism for six years now, and it was hard to give up the dream that somewhere a perfect society was coming into being. Was it not sensible to suppose that the clumsy, stolid Russians, who had never done things right anyway, had merely fumbled the chance history had given them, and that in the hands of a livelier, more talented people like the Cubans, and with a heroic leader like Castro, Communism might yet yield its promise? And so, perhaps seeking a cushion against his disenchantment, Alik turned again to Castro, who might truly achieve an egalitarian society and whose Communism, Alik was certain, would be of a gaudier feather altogether than the drab thing Russia had created.
In October, three months after their visit to the American embassy, Marina and Alik still had no word from the Soviet authorities on their application for permission to leave Russia. It had to be assumed that such an application would be considered at a very high level, adding weeks, or even months, to the bureaucratic process. Alik sought to speed things up by putting pressure on the American embassy. He had written to the embassy at least once a month since his trip to Moscow, complaining of the difficulty he was having in obtaining Soviet exit visas and the harassment he and Marina were being subjected to. Now, in Marina’s recent illness, he saw another opportunity to enlist sympathy for his cause, and on October 4 he wrote Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson, asking him to make inquiries on his behalf at the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs in Minsk. He said that his wife was still under pressure to withdraw her visa application, and because of that she had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. Like many of Alik’s lies, there was a germ of truth in his claim. (Marina had been hospitalized, but not for nervous exhaustion.)5 He also inquired about the status of his passport renewal, and whether or not Marina’s application to enter the United States had been approved.
The embassy was not encouraging. Oswald’s passport renewal had been approved, but the embassy had been instructed to validate it only when his travel plans to return to the United States had been made, and when he reappeared in person at the embassy. Marina’s status with the American government was still pending, the embassy wrote; finally, Oswald was informed that the embassy had no way of influencing Soviet authorities to act upon applications for exit visas.
Marina was due for a three-week vacation in October. Alik, who had had his vacation, urged her to get away for a change of scene, and after a few days sitting at home, she decided to go to Kharkov, nearly five hundred miles to the southeast, to stay with her mother’s sister, Aunt Polina and her husband, Uncle Georgy (Jorya) Alexandrov. Another sister of her mother’s, Aunt Taisya, also lived in Kharkov, and Marina discovered, to her surprise, that none of her relatives there knew that she had married an American. They were even more shocked when she told them that she had applied for permission to go to America with her husband. Uncle Jorya hardly spoke a word to Marina after that. He stopped laughing and joking and abruptly ceased being the uncle she had known. For Georgy Alexandrov was head of the Kharkov Building Trust, one of the most important jobs in the city, and he, like her Uncle Ilya in Minsk, had every reason to suppose that Marina’s decision to go abroad could affect him disastrously.
Aunt Polina and Aunt Taisya begged Marina to change her mind. They told her horror stories about poverty and unemployment in the United States. “You’ll cry, and no one will hear you,” Aunt Polina said. Because of her, Uncle Jorya and Uncle Ilya might lose their jobs. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you in your condition,” Aunt Polina said, “but I can’t stand silently by while my niece in her inexperience makes such a mistake. Stay here. Let your husband go back by himself. We’ll all help you. You’re young—you can marry again.”
A few days of this, and Marina was sorry she had come. She went back to Minsk a day sooner than planned—and with new doubts about leaving Russia.
The anxious wait for word on their visas and her advancing pregnancy made her nervous and depressed. Night after night, in tears, she would seek reassurance from her husband, and in the mornings she would play Peer Gynt on the phonograph, sob a little, eat breakfast by herself, stare out the windows, and trudge off dully to work. Her mood was a match for the gray skies of autumn. But eventually the crying spells ceased. “Alik stopped paying attention,” Marina recalls, “so I stopped crying.”
Meanwhile, everyday life went on. Alik took Marina to a dance at the factory. His friends were eager to have a look at her, and he could not refuse any longer. But there was another motive. All evening long Alik twirled Marina purposefully on the dance floor, grinned at her as contentedly as a Cheshire cat and generally played the part of the blissfully married man. It was a performance for the benefit of Ella Germann, the girl who had turned him down. “Phi, how ugly and fat she’s gotten,” Alik said. “It’s lucky I married a thin girl.”
The subject of obesity was to come up constantly in their conversations. If Alik said of a woman, “Oh, she’s so thin,” it meant that he liked her. Walking down the street one day, he spotted a girl he knew slightly. She was flat-chested, bony, and tall. “She’d suit me fine” was his comment. “I could feel all her bones.” He once told Marina that he had slept with a girl named Nella. “She was a peasant girl from the country. But there was so much of her in all directions it made me sick. I felt as if I’d overeaten. I had a date with her, but I stood her up.” Marina, always self-conscious about her own thin body, came to realize that it was one of the reasons Alik had married her. Only later, after she had met Marguerite Oswald, did she conclude that Alik’s aversion to plump women had something to do with his feelings for his mother.
Marina and Alik continued to spend a good deal of time at Ilya and Valya’s. Ilya was hospitable, for he had long ago concluded that they would never be allowed to leave the Soviet Union. He spent long, patient hours playing chess with Alik. An experienced player, Ilya nearly always won, and Alik took his losses hard. Ilya would pat him encouragingly on the back and say that his game was getting better. But just as Alik was misleading Ilya by allowing him to suppose that he had abandoned his efforts to return to America, so he was misleading him about chess. He told Ilya that he was just learning to play. In truth, he had been playing since he was about thirteen years old.
Gruffly kind as Ilya was, it was Valya who made Alik a special favorite, and in ways that were telling to one who knew him, he returned her affection. He was obsessed by cleanliness, refusing, for example, to kiss any woman wearing lipstick or to eat food that had been touched by anyone else. For Valya, and Valya alone, Alik made an exception. He allowed her and no one else, not even Marina, to pick up tidbits in her fingers and pop them into his mouth. Once, before Marina’s unbelieving eyes, he went so far as to take a morsel from Valya’s plate and eat it.
Finicky as he was about food, Alik was more finicky still about smoke. He tried to get Marina, a chain-smoker, to stop, claiming that it was bad for the baby. He cut her down to three, then two, then one cigarette a day. But Marina was expert at evading him. She had cigarettes hidden all over the apartment, and she smoked on the sly, even in the bathtub. Alik had a poor sense of smell and rarely noticed.
And he was parsimonious, always saving for something. When they were first married, he was free with their money, buying records and furniture. Then, when he was thinking of returning to America but had not yet said anything to Marina, he put her off. “Later—we’ll see what we need.” Finally, after he had told her of his plans and convinced her to come with him, it was: “Why buy a whole lot now? We’ll only have to sell it when we go.” Marina turned over her salary to him. He doled out money for groceries and saved up the rest for their trip.
All through the fall, America was very much on Alik’s mind. He pored through copies of Time magazine that began to arrive in bundles from his mother in Texas, issues that were full of stories and pictures of the Kennedys, and of another public figure who was to become important in Alik’s life, Major General Edwin A. Walker. Still there was no word from the Soviet authorities, and Alik made visits to three Soviet government offices in Minsk to inquire about the progress of their visas: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Office of Visas and Registration (OVIR) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. They could tell him nothing. He began to complain in letters to his brother Robert about the slothfulness of Russian bureaucrats, suggesting that his rights under international law were being violated, protesting the American embassy’s lack of interest in his case and stating his determination not to stay in the USSR a single moment beyond the first of the year (his Soviet residence permit was due to expire on January 4). His complaints were designed not so much to impress Robert as the Soviet officials whom he presumed to be reading his mail. But there were signs of uncertainty and hints in his letters that Alik was aware that life would not be so easy when he got back home. On one occasion he wrote Robert: “Its not going to be to convient to come back to the States and try to start life over again.”6
Meanwhile, an event of great public magnitude had occurred, an event that Alik soon saw was to have a bearing on his life. While Marina was on vacation in Kharkov, the Twenty-Second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party opened in the Kremlin in Moscow, and a new wave of “de-Stalinization” got under way. Stalin’s body was removed from its marble mausoleum on Red Square, and Khrushchev began to move away from the alliance with China and toward better relations with the United States. As his friends Pavel and Ziger probably suggested to Alik, it was a hopeful omen as far as his and Marina’s visas were concerned.
A week or so after her return from Kharkov, Marina was trudging home from work one night through Stalin Square, a vast, cobblestoned area in the center of Minsk, when she noticed with mild surprise that a space the size of a city block had been roped off around the gigantic statue of the dead dictator that towered over the square. Later that night, houses trembled and shook to the heavy tread of tanks and trucks as they rolled through the city streets and took up position around the statue. By morning a high fence had gone up to conceal the tanks.
Of course there was talk at the pharmacy. “They’ll never get it down with chains and tanks,” one of Marina’s coworkers said. “It’s too big. They’ll have to use dynamite.”
The next night Marina was wakened out of a sound sleep by a series of loud explosions. She sat bolt upright in bed. “Do you hear?” she nudged Alik. “Is it war?”
“No,” came a sleepy mumble. “They’re just blowing up Stalin.”
In Minsk, it appeared, Stalin still had sympathizers who would be offended by the removal of his monument. And so it was being done under cover of night. The demolition crew was plainly in a hurry and under orders to complete the work before the November 7 parade. But Stalin was too strong for them. The foundations were deep and the monument powerfully wrought. Not even with chains, tanks, and dynamite could the statue be brought down. The head and upper part of the torso had to be dismantled first and the rest demolished piecemeal. It took longer than anyone anticipated, and the work of demolition was still going on when the marchers paraded through Stalin Square (later renamed Lenin Square) on November 7.7
Leaving work one day in December, Marina fell on the pharmacy steps and hurt her back. Alik was cross with her at first on the baby’s account, then anxious, then tender. He had worries of his own. He was losing hair. Marina consulted her friends, and they concocted various remedies at the pharmacy. Each night she came home and massaged his scalp with something new. Nothing helped, and soon Alik dreaded brushing his hair because it seemed to be coming out in clumps. “Don’t touch it, don’t touch it,” he would say to Marina. The more he fretted, the more his hairline receded. Finally, he stopped worrying about it—and his hair stopped falling out.
Once or twice he had nightmares. He mumbled in his sleep both in English and in Russian, and Marina did not know what he was saying. Ill with a fever one night, he screamed out in Russian, “I’m going to die, I’m going to die!” She woke him and tried to calm him. “It’s all right,” she said. “You’re going to be all right. The hospital is just down the street. There are doctors there. Medical care is free!”
All through the fall Alik kept a weather eye on the de-Stalinization campaign in both the Soviet press and the back issues of Time that his mother continued to send. And his letters to his brother Robert make clear that he rested his hopes of obtaining exit visas for himself and Marina, above all Marina, on the scope and success of that campaign. Moreover, the relaxation of cold war tensions between America and Russia may have reinforced his decision to go home by making him feel that family, friends, and future employers might not, after all, be so very critical of a young man who had chosen to spend a few years in Russia.
On the whole, however, it was the mechanics of getting to America that claimed most of Alik’s attention. He was increasingly impatient for a decision from the Soviet authorities. But where he was inclined to push, complain, and go “to the top” when he could, Marina’s attitude was, What will be, will be. It was either in the hands of fate, or in those of a temporal power higher than any she could summon.
Alik scolded her about it more than once. He told her not to be so timid. She was his wife, under his protection, and ought to have more confidence. He had the right to leave the country any time he wanted, and she had the right to come, too. He wrote and was forever making her write letters up and down the Soviet bureaucracy, but even when she complied he was never satisfied: “You always ask when you ought to demand,” he said. “A polite letter like that and they’ll never answer in a year.” And so Marina would rewrite the letter, part imperious to please him, part deferential, even supplicating, to please herself and the officials of her country. Who was she, after all, to give fate a shove either way?
What the Oswalds needed was a pipeline into the bureaucracy. And as it happened, they had one, right into the office of Colonel Nikolai Axyonov, head of OVIR, the MVD’s Office of Visas and Registration. Lyalya Petrusevich, Marina’s best friend, had a new boyfriend. His name was Anatoly, nicknamed Tolka. During his youth Tolka’s father had served with Colonel Axyonov in the army or the MVD, and because of their friendship, Tolka now resided in the Axyonov apartment.
Tolka was a mine of information. During the colonel’s endless hours at the office, his wife received guests in the apartment whom she was anxious that her husband not know about. To ensure Tolka’s silence, she gleaned bits and pieces of information about his friends the Oswalds. By this roundabout yet reliable route, the Oswalds learned sometime between Tuesday, December 12, and Friday, December 15, that permission for their exit visas had been granted.
Not content with the good news, Alik wanted to know exactly when the official word would be coming through. Just after the middle of December, he went to the MVD building and tried to see Colonel Axyonov. He was intercepted by an assistant who promised to pass along his request. Frustrated, he demanded that Marina go to see Axyonov.
“Why should I?” Marina said. “He won’t see me any sooner than he’d see you. Why bother anyone? Why not wait? They’ll let us know.”
Alik did not agree. “If you don’t give people a shove, they’ll never do anything at all. You’ll still be waiting in thirty years.”
Eventually, Marina gave in, and the following morning, a Monday, on her way to work, she stopped at the MVD building and went straight to the headquarters of OVIR. In the anteroom the colonel’s male secretary asked her business. Marina explained, and she was shown directly into Axyonov’s sparsely furnished office.
The colonel was not at his desk. Marina sat quietly by herself for half an hour or so, anxiously expecting a person in the shape of a dark, angry cloud to materialize. Instead, a rather small man came in, his attire civilian, his appearance indeterminate, his hair mouse-colored and fine. It was Colonel Axyonov, and he seemed to be slightly rattled. The moment he started speaking, Marina felt that he was kind—too kind for the work he was doing.
She stood as he came in. “Sit down, sit down,” he said hurriedly. “Please make yourself at home.” A uniformed aide entered and laid a stack of papers on the desk. Colonel Axyonov glanced through them and signed a half a dozen or so. Then he turned to Marina. “Let’s see,” he asked absentmindedly. “What is it you came to see me about?”
Marina explained that she wanted to find out about their exit visas. Would she and her husband be allowed to leave the country? She was very nervous. But she remembered Alik’s admonitions: she must be firm and insist on her rights.
Colonel Axyonov asked why she wanted to leave Russia. It was not a matter of loyalty, Marina answered firmly. She had nothing against the USSR, nor did she care what country she was going to. America was no better or worse than any other. She merely wanted to go where her husband went. After a series of other questions and answers that Marina does not recall, she told Colonel Axyonov that she had come to see him because her husband was anxious.
“Tell your husband not to worry,” he said soothingly. “I believe your request will be granted.”
Marina asked whether they would hear before the baby came. Axyonov suggested that they wait in any case for the child to be born in the USSR. He concluded: “I don’t know how long it will be before you hear. It isn’t up to me.” The word would be coming from Moscow. He would let her know as soon as he had any news.
The encounter between Marina and Colonel Axyonov later gave rise to many questions. Why did Axyonov see her? Why was she allowed to leave the USSR? And did not her relationship to Ilya Prusakov and the ease with which she was permitted to leave the country signify that she was a Soviet agent?
Axyonov undoubtedly received Marina because he knew who she was. From his lodger, Tolka, or from her own applications for a passport and a visa, he knew her to be the niece of Ilya Prusakov. Both men were full colonels, both worked in the same building, and Axyonov received Marina not in a reception room, as he would a total stranger, but in his private office. Ilya had the highest reputation for discretion, and this may well have played a part, not only in Axyonov’s receiving Marina, but in the recommendations that must have been made the previous summer as to whether she should be granted a visa to go abroad. But Ilya was also famous for his utter correctness and his hands-off attitude. He worked for the MVD, not the KGB, and it was not in his character to intervene in the affairs of another ministry, especially one so sensitive as the KGB or even in the work of another section of the ministry he himself was in, the MVD. Nor would it have availed him in the slightest if he had. Besides, Ilya was desperately opposed to Marina’s decision to leave Russia, viewing it as a threat to himself and the entire family.
As for Colonel Axyonov, he had made his recommendation in Marina’s case months before their interview, and the interview had nothing to do with the outcome. The case had already been decided, and as a matter of politeness to a colleague’s relative, he agreed to see Marina. Whatever recommendation Axyonov had made, it may have carried some weight or it may not have. The decision in such cases are not made locally but in Moscow, sometimes by the KGB and sometimes by a special section of the Party Central Committee that deals with travel abroad. Axyonov himself may not have known what agency was handling the case, and at what level, for each case is treated individually, in accordance with its own special features.
The same week that the Oswalds heard informally that Marina would be getting a visa, an identical decision was handed down in another case. But the two cases together were not harbingers of a new policy, for they were not identical—no two cases ever are—and there is not, even today, a predictable Soviet policy on emigration. So great is the role of chance that it is possible that the same case, considered on two successive days, might well be decided differently. For the bodies that make these decisions are isolated and arbitrary, they operate by rules of their own that are known to no one on the outside, and they are strangely impervious to influence from other government agencies and sometimes even from above.
There were, however, several major factors that may have been in Marina’s favor. She was not related to a high-ranking officer of the armed services or the KGB; she did not have a university education, had never held a sensitive job, and was not in a position to possess information derogatory to the USSR. Had she fallen into any of these categories, she would not have been allowed to leave Russia. Moreover, Marina had always stayed as far away from politics as she could. This was probably an advantage, since it meant that she had no political record. Evidently, the officials considering her case, probably KGB officials in Moscow and Minsk, concluded that, should she be permitted to go abroad, she was unlikely to do anything to bring the Soviet Union into disrepute, either by her conduct or her political remarks.8 And there was a good reason for allowing her to go: she was the wife of Lee Harvey Oswald.
From the beginning the KGB had not wanted him in Russia. He had offered radar secrets in return for an opportunity to remain, and it had been decided that he did not have secrets worth knowing. From the reports of Intourist and KGB personnel working at the hotels where he stayed on his arrival in 1959, the KGB had formed a low opinion of his intelligence and emotional stability. He was not a potential recruit for the KGB. Nor did he possess any skill that might be useful to the economy. Worse than that, he had shown himself to be a troublemaker. On being told that he would not be allowed to remain in the USSR, he had slashed his wrist, in what was reported to the KGB as a genuine suicide attempt that nearly succeeded. Oswald’s diary makes it sound like a mere suicidal gesture. A week later he had even threatened to repeat the deed. What the KGB learned about Oswald in October of 1959 was that he was a desperate character, one who was willing to do anything, including the use of violence against his own person, to get what he wanted. Its conclusion was probably strengthened by his scene at the American embassy and by his willingness to go public by talking to American reporters.
All these episodes embarrassed the Soviet government into allowing Oswald to remain, and he was helped by the political atmosphere. Khrushchev had just launched the “Spirit of Camp David” and wanted nothing to impede better relations with the United States. The effects of the policy had trickled down and helped even a small fish like Oswald. The “Spirit of Camp David” was later shattered briefly in 1960 by Francis Gary Powers and the U-2 episode, but relations between Russia and the United States were now again on the mend. Oswald was announcing that he wanted to leave Russia and that he would not leave without his Russian wife. Who was to say that if he were allowed to leave and she, as very often happened in such cases, was refused permission altogether or was delayed by five or six months, Oswald would not again embarrass the Soviet Union by some desperate and very public act, such as another suicide attempt, this time, say, in front of the Soviet embassy in Washington?
There are experts on Soviet affairs who believe that nothing happens in Russia quite by chance and that the authorities were so anxious, or at least willing, to have Oswald leave that they actually encouraged his friendships with Ziger and with Pavel Golovachev in the knowledge that they would counsel him to go. Oswald saw them daily at the factory, and they were also his best personal friends. Ziger is known to have advised him to keep his American citizenship. From everyone he knew, Oswald doubtless heard facts about Soviet life that led him to decide to leave the country sooner than he might otherwise have done. Both may have given him advice on how to return home, on visa tactics, and Ziger and Pavel, in particular, probably told him that if he wanted to leave Russia, and especially if he wanted to take Marina—that was the hard part—he should move while Khrushchev was riding high, since in Russia things could revert at any moment to the way they had been in Stalin’s time. Indeed, as it happened, Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization reached its high point with the Party Congress of October 1962, so that Oswald may once again, just as his and Marina’s exit visas were under consideration, have been the beneficiary of a temporary easing of Soviet policy.
But apart from a brief snippet in Oswald’s diary, there is no evidence, from Marina or from anybody else, that Ziger and Pavel did, in fact, coach Oswald on how to leave the country. Their friendships with him appear to have been genuine and spontaneous, and the two men, one perhaps a father figure, the other an older brother, were very likely the best and the truest friends he ever had.
The Russians could have kept Oswald if they had wanted to, by granting him citizenship, by denying his request for an exit visa, or by simply ignoring his request. He was in their country, a police state. But he was an “unsatisfactory” and uncooperative worker of below-average skill, he was occupying an apartment that would otherwise have gone to a factory official, and until a few months before, he had been receiving a financial subsidy.9 He was a drain on the country—and he brought no reward. If allowing Marina—who did not fall into any of the proscribed categories—to go was the price of getting rid of Oswald, why not?
On Christmas Day, Monday, December 25, one week to the day after her interview with Colonel Axyonov, Marina was summoned to OVIR. She stopped by on her way home from work and was informed that both she and her husband had been granted exit visas.