It was as well that Marina’s doubts were at an end, for events were picking up momentum. On April 12 Oswald wrote his brother that he expected to be able to leave Russia within a month or two. But then he added a sentence that betrayed both ambivalence and apprehension about his return: “Now that winter has gone, I really don’t want to leave until the beginning of fall, since the spring and summer here are so nice.”1
Oswald hated the cold weather in Minsk. It was one of the reasons, he said, for his decision to leave Russia. But that spring he still complained in his letters home that the American embassy was as slow with its formalities as the Russians had been with theirs. He made several telephone calls to the embassy, and a secretary in the consular office who spoke with him when the consular officers were out grew to dislike him indelibly. Oswald was very impatient about the delays and complained, in particular, about travel arrangements. He had been authorized a loan only large enough to cover the cost of the least expensive means of transportation back to the United States—train and ship—but he behaved as if it was his birthright to be wafted home by jet aircraft or, as a veteran, albeit an “undesirably discharged” one, to be flown home on a government transport.
Throughout the long bureaucratic process of his return, Oswald corresponded regularly with both his mother and his brother, and his letters to the two members of his family who were closest to him are revealing in their contrast. To Robert, Oswald was friendly, open, frank. He shared a few of his problems, his small adventures in Minsk, even his political ideas. There was no sharing in his letters to Marguerite.
The striking thing about Oswald’s letters to his mother is that, although they are empty of concern or affection, they are filled with requests. Of the seventeen letters he wrote to Marguerite between the resumption of their correspondence in June 1961 and his departure from the Soviet Union nearly a year later, fourteen contained a request or a reminder of some earlier request. At first the favors he asked were simple enough: Time magazine and books for himself, fashion magazines for Marina, pennies for friends who collected American souvenirs. But it was not long before the errands he asked of his mother, an older woman with a job, were substantial.
It fell to Marguerite to do some of the paperwork for her son’s return, including obtaining an affidavit of support for Marina from her own employer. Marguerite even suggested that she raise money for his return through a public appeal. Oswald vetoed the idea; at that moment the very last thing he wanted was publicity. But he instructed her to try to get money from the Red Cross or the International Rescue Committee. Any gifts—not loans—would be welcome. But above all, she was not to send her own money. And concerned about both his military status and the reception he was likely to receive in America, Oswald also asked his mother for his Marine Corps discharge and old newspaper clippings about his defection to Russia.
Oswald asked Robert for favors, too, but they were direct requests, as his criticisms of some of Robert’s actions were also direct. With Marguerite he was indirect. He praised, he cajoled, he condescended to let her help him, and he made it plain that it was not for her to offer him advice. Oswald respected his brother, but he seemed to fear his mother and the prospect of any closeness between them. He manipulated Marguerite, always with the twin purposes of exploiting her, yet at the same time keeping her at a distance.
Marguerite’s reward was meager. In one letter Oswald told her that there was no need for her to meet him in New York on his return to America. In a later letter, however, he hinted that he and Marina might come to her: “I cannot say exactly where we shall go at first probably directly to Vernon.”2 Marguerite was living in Vernon, a small Texas town thirty miles northwest of Fort Worth. But having dangled that prize in front of his mother, Oswald quickly snatched it away. In a letter written the very next day, he said that he would visit both her and Robert, but “in any event I’ll want to be living on my own and probably will finally live in Fort Worth or New Orleans.”3
Oswald was playing emotional hide-and-seek with his mother: Now you’ve got me, now you don’t. He used her, he depended on her, and then he pushed her away. Not surprisingly, his correspondence with the American embassy reflected this same attitude. He had walked out on his country, just as he had walked out on his mother. Now he expected the embassy, like an indulgent mother, to forgive, forget, and go to extraordinary lengths to bring him back, without any thought of a return.
On May 10 an official of the embassy wrote Alik to inform him that it was ready to issue Marina’s visa in Moscow. The final impediment had been removed, and the Oswalds could come to the embassy as soon as they got their affairs in Minsk in order. It was the word Alik had been waiting for, but by this time it was as if he no longer cared. He had, after all, proved his point. He had a right to leave Russia if he chose, and to take a Soviet citizen with him. It was now the bureaucratic momentum on both sides that carried him forward, rather than any very positive desire to go home.
Alik and Marina started to get ready for their journey. Knowing, or suspecting, that they would soon be leaving, one or another of their friends came by for a visit every night. With the thrill of vicarious adventure, they rejoiced over Marina’s miraculous good fortune. Every one of them longed to see America, to travel freely back and forth across frontiers. Not many, however, would have done what Marina was doing: leave family and country forever, without hope of ever seeing them again.
One day Marina had a memorable encounter. In a shop down the street from the apartment, she ran into Anatoly Shpanko. He had heard the news by the grapevine.
“Take me with you,” he said in jest. Then, more seriously: “Write. Let me know where I can find you. One day I’ll get to America, too. You’ll have money over there. You’ll come back for a visit. Some day we’ll see one another again.”
Marina was uneasy: “I’ve got to go. I have to get home to feed the baby.”
“Baby?” Anatoly was astonished. “Where on earth did you get a baby?”
“I really do have one,” Marina said.
“But I saw you three months ago, and I saw no sign of it then.”
“You didn’t see right,” said Marina, who had in truth, three months before, wrapped her coat carefully around her so that Anatoly would not see that she was pregnant.
Such was Marina’s farewell to the man who had wanted her to be his wife.
As for Alik, he had told almost no one that he was going, only Alexander Ziger and Pavel Golovachev. He also seems to have told another friend at the factory, who exclaimed, “Attaboy! I wish you could take me, too. There’s nothing to stick around for here.”
Alik gave the factory two days’ notice. On May 16 he handed in a statement to the director of the Minsk Radio Plant. His wording was formal and laconic: “I ask to be released from work as of May 18, 1962. I expect to be leaving.”4
It was a happy time for Alik. He had conquered two great bureaucracies, and as with so many of his other achievements, he accomplished it alone. While it was the victory over the Soviet bureaucracy that yielded the sweeter satisfaction, he was carried forward on the momentum of his double triumph. His old misgivings receded. He showed no sign of second thoughts and tried to encourage Marina. If she was unhappy over there, he said, she could always come back. Marina was doubtful. She would be ashamed to return after struggling so hard to get out.
“I used to think that, too,” Alik said. “I threw my passport down and told them I didn’t want to be a citizen any more. When, after all that, I didn’t like it, I was so ashamed. I said to myself, I’d rather die than ask to go back to America. But time changes the way you look at things. There’s nothing wrong with making a mistake and thinking better of it later. People do.”
The hardest part was telling Ilya and Valya, an ordeal Marina put off until a week or so before they were to leave Minsk for Moscow. It was painful to be with them after that, painful to speak of parting, yet impossible to speak of anything else.
Ilya had found occasion earlier that spring to say to Marina what he chose not to say to her husband: “Forget America. You never know how it will go. He’ll have a better life here. They’ll give him a bigger apartment. He can study to be an engineer. He’ll never have any worries. So long as Alik stays in this country, he’ll always be met halfway.”
Another time Ilya spoke out again. “He flits from side to side,” he said of Alik, “and is unhappy everywhere. Maybe he’ll go back and not like it there, and then he’ll want to come back here. But he’ll never be allowed to come back. People are tired of nursing him over here.”
Ilya’s last utterance about his nephew-in-law, delivered shortly before the Oswalds’ departure, had the tone of prophecy. “He is,” Ilya said to Marina, “a man who has lost his way.”
Valya did not voice any judgment, only a touching request. She begged Marina to leave baby “Marinka” behind. “You don’t know what will happen,” she implored. “There’s unemployment in America. Alka may have trouble because of having lived over here. You can have other children. I never will. She’ll be happy with us. I’ll take good care of her. I’ll love her more than if she were my own.”
Marina knew that Alik would never allow it, but trying to make amends for leaving, she promised to try.
“Are you crazy?” Alik said. “Have you gone out of your mind? Do you think I’d give up my baby? Never!”
Marina had another painful farewell. Carrying the baby with her, she stopped by the laboratory where Aunt Musya worked. Musya cradled the baby in her arms. Marina saw tears in her aunt’s eyes.
“She’s a good baby,” Musya said. “But the spitting image of Alka.” Then, hopefully, “You haven’t changed your mind?”
“No,” Marina answered. Then, fearful lest she burst into tears, too, she took the baby and quickly left.
They had a great deal to do. Anticipating their departure, they had tried to hand over their apartment to Tolka, the friend who lived with Colonel Axyonov, and his bride-to-be, Lyalya Petrusevich. But much to Alik’s annoyance, they had been rebuffed by the officials of the Minsk Radio Plant, who were in charge of assigning apartments in their building. Nevertheless, they did succeed in registering the apartment in Tolka’s name, and he would move in when the Oswalds left. He managed to stay only one week. The factory threw him out and awarded the apartment to someone else. Tolka did not marry Lyalya.
Alik and Marina sold their furniture, including the baby’s crib. Before leaving their apartment, they had another piece of unfinished business. Throughout their married life they had had the company of an unbidden presence: a tiny meter, or schyotchik ticking away on the wall, even at night when the other electrical devices were switched off. The Oswalds assumed that it was a bugging device and had long promised themselves that before they left the apartment for good, if they ever left for good, they would set aside an hour or so for absolute forthrightness. They would tell the “schyotchik” exactly what they thought of everyone they knew, who was an informer and who was not, to deny the KGB the satisfaction, as Marina puts it, of “thinking it had us fooled.” And so, before they left, they told the faintly ticking, scarcely visible companion of their married life their true opinions about everyone they knew.
On the day before their departure, Alik went to call on Erich Titovyets. He meant to tell Erich—for the first time—that he was leaving. Erich was not at home. He did not learn of his friend’s departure until after the Oswalds had actually left.5
One of Alik’s final duties was to visit OVIR, the Office of Visas and Registration, to have the exit visa stamped in his passport. He showed the visa to Marina and remarked, “I wish I could give it to Ziger.”
The Oswalds spent their last night in Minsk at Pavel’s. The next day, May 22 or 23, they boarded the train for Moscow. Russian-fashion, their closest friends, including Pavel and all the Zigers, came to the station to see them off. But even there they noticed that they were being watched by a man who was standing, half-hidden, behind a pillar.
“Listen in if you like,” Eleonora Ziger practically spat in his face. “We have no secrets here.”
Her sister, Anita, added: “I simply loathe people who eavesdrop.”
Marina kept glancing anxiously around the station looking for Ilya and Valya. Finally, she saw them standing way off by themselves in a corner. Their faces were forlorn, and they looked as if they were fearful of being seen by the KGB.
Marina hurried over to them. “Why didn’t you join us?”
“We didn’t want to be in the way,” Valya said. She turned to Alik: “Take care of Marina. She has nobody now but you.” She was on the edge of tears.
“Be sure to write,” Ilya broke in, his stoical front intact. Then to Alik: “You heard what Valya said?”
“I promise,” Alik replied.
“It’s time to go,” said Valya, no longer trying to hold back her tears. She kissed the three of them goodbye, lingering longest over the baby. Ilya, too, kissed Alik. Then, for the last time, he kissed Marina.
Mrs. Ziger, for her part, was uninhibited. “We’ve seen so many off,” she lamented. “When will it be our turn?” She spoke to Marina: “No matter how hard it is there, never, ever, come back here. But remember the birch trees, the people, our Russian countryside. Think well of your homeland always.”
Marina and Alik boarded the train. They stood at the window as, very slowly, the train started up. Marina’s friends Olga and Inessa threw flowers. They were narcissi, the flowers Marina had carried at her wedding.
“Come back if you are not happy there,” Pavel called after them. The Zigers shouted at them to write.
Marina heard someone cry, “We’ll see one another some day.” Then she saw Ilya and Valya. They were huddled together, desolate, looking as if their world had fallen apart.
The last sight Marina saw was their friends Olga, Inessa, and Pavel running along the platform, reaching out to touch the train. They ran a very long way.
For a few minutes, in the compartment, both Alik and Marina were silent. She started to cry. He stroked her as if she were a kitten. “I hope these really are better times,” he said. “I hope Uncle Ilya won’t lose his job or his pension.”
When they reached Moscow, they felt like a pair of carefree children. For three days they stayed at the Hotel Ostankino, on the outskirts of town; then they moved to the Hotel Berlin in the center of Moscow. They went to the American embassy several times, and Alik showed no fear of being arrested. They felt so relieved that just for the fun of it they smuggled a girlfriend of Marina’s, now living in Moscow, into the embassy, past a pair of bewildered militiamen. She sat delightedly inside, in the very citadel of capitalism, poring over the shiny magazines while the Oswalds went about their tasks.
Alik had his passport renewed, and the baby had her photograph taken and attached to her father’s passport. Marina was given her American visa, and the embassy made reservations for them on the Maasdam, a Dutch passenger ship sailing from Rotterdam for New York on June 4. The embassy loaned Oswald the entire cost of the tickets, $418, and arranged for him to pick them up in Rotterdam. Officials of the embassy also suggested a cheap hotel, or “pension,” where they could spend a clean and comfortable night in Rotterdam, and either Oswald or the embassy made the reservation. The embassy helped Oswald pay the railway fare from Moscow to Rotterdam. He contributed 90 rubles ($90), and it contributed $17.71.
Oswald had paid for the train trip from Minsk to Moscow, and he was paying for their hotel room, about 8 rubles a day, and meals in Moscow. He would also buy food during the railway journey to Holland and pay $7 or $8 for the pension in Rotterdam. So his out-of-pocket expenses for the journey home would come to between $200 and $300. Oswald left the Soviet Union owing the United States government $435.71.6
Marina was given a medical examination by the embassy doctor, Alexis Davison, a slender, pink-faced young naval officer who spoke impeccable Russian. The son of a Russian woman and a distinguished physician from Atlanta, Georgia—his parents met when his father was on an aid mission in Russia during the 1920s—Davison had a style that was humorous and irreverent, as breezy and American as his strawberry blond crewcut. Marina liked him immediately. He treated her with exactly the right combination of seriousness and levity, reassuring her that life in America was far better than in Russia. He urged Marina to look up his mother in America—Natasha Davison, now a widow, a grande dame in the Russian manner and one of the reigning spirits of Atlanta.
Alik liked Davison, too. He enjoyed the navy doctor’s jokes and was grateful to him for cheering up Marina at a moment when his own hands were full and his wife’s anxieties substantial. Later the Oswalds came across Davison’s name again. In the summer of 1963, the Soviet government accused him of being the go-between for Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a highly placed Soviet official who was tried and shot as a spy for the United States. For his alleged espionage, Davison was expelled from the USSR.
The Oswalds had other errands to run. They went to OVIR and to Gosbank, the State Bank, where Alik changed most of the rubles he had saved into dollars. Since they were to cross Europe by train, they had also to pay visits to the embassies of Poland, East Germany, West Germany, and the Netherlands to obtain transit visas. The errands required much sitting and waiting in anterooms, and Marina sometimes stayed behind at the hotel. Alik was happy as a lark. Late one afternoon he burst into their hotel room exhausted but elated. “My, I’m tired!” he exclaimed. “But I wouldn’t mind doing this for a year. It’s better than working in a factory!”
Their last evening in Moscow was a memorable one. They spent it at the apartment of Yury and Galka Belyankina; Galka had been a friend of Marina’s in Minsk, and the party ended with many farewell toasts. When the Oswalds pulled out of Moscow’s green-tiled Belorussian Station late the following afternoon, June 1, it was Galka Belyankina who saw them off. She was the last friend they were to see in Russia.
Their route lay through Minsk, where they were due to arrive early the next morning. Marina had wired Valya, begging her to come to the station, and she was in high excitement as the train pulled in, hoping for another glimpse of her aunt. She and Alik bounded onto the familiar platform, raced up and down, and searched everywhere. But Valya was nowhere in sight. Feeling crushed and trying not to show it, Marina said, “We’re breathing Minsk air for the last time.” She was in tears when they returned to their compartment. “Don’t worry. Don’t cry.” Alik held her tightly around the shoulders. “Everything will be all right.”
Next morning they were due at the border town of Brest. Alik had been puzzling over a problem: what to do with his Diary and the other things he had written in Russia. He had no intention of giving up his precious papers to a customs officer. An hour or so out of Brest, he hit upon a solution. He strapped the sheets of paper around his waist under his clothing. He did not seem specially nervous as he did it, but he told Marina to watch out for one of the conductors, a woman, whom he (and Marina, too) suspected of working for the KGB. The woman was too well educated to be a conductor, he said.
The pair presented a homely tableau as their train drew puffing into Brest. They were sitting in their myaqky (“soft” or first-class) compartment, the husband—composed but bulging a little around the waist—filling out customs declarations, the wife and baby surrounded by swaddling cloths that she had rinsed out and hung up to dry. Both were sipping tea in the Russian style from glasses.
Marina, who had expected to be questioned and perhaps searched, was astonished at how simple it turned out to be. A pair of nice-looking officers came into the compartment. One of them opened a suitcase and snapped it shut again without even looking inside.
“Have you any gold or other valuables or foreign currency?” he asked politely.
“Yes,” Marina answered, pointing to the baby.
At this the officer broke into a broad grin, saluted, and wished them a happy journey.
The Oswalds hugged each other as the train carried them over the bridge into Poland.
“I can’t believe we’re on foreign soil,” Alik said.
Marina looked back. “It’s only a bridge,” she thought sadly, “but it cuts you off from your country.” She stole a look at Alik. His face was so happy that she did not tell him what she was thinking.
That day they crossed the Vistula River into Warsaw. There they got out, changed a few dollars into zlotys, and bought beer. At each stop Alik clambered out and took photographs. The Polish countryside was flat, like Belorussia, and the people, too, looked poor, except for a stylish lilt to the way the women wore their cotton dresses. Poland was a good deal like what Marina was used to. But that night, waking briefly in Germany, she noticed that there were two Berlins, the “democratic” one, which was dark, and the other, which was brightly lit. Then the next morning, in Holland, she could not believe her eyes. It seemed to her that she was in a fairy tale tableau. They rattled through village after village, each one prettier than the last and so clean that they looked as if they must be inhabited by dolls. It was Sunday. Entire families were walking to church. And between villages, the meadows were dotted with grazing cows.
When they arrived in Rotterdam, they went straight to the pension the embassy had recommended. The landlady gave them lunch, and then the Oswalds went walking. Never had Marina seen such shops. She floated from window to window, thinking she must be in a dream.
“Alka!” she exclaimed. “When your mother sent us those magazines, I never dreamed you could actually buy those things in stores!”
He was watching her, grinning.
“And look,” she said. “Everything’s so cheap!”
“It’s a whole lot cheaper in America,” Alik said. He bought her a Coca-Cola, her first. It was a touch of home he had been pining for. “See,” he boasted again, “in Holland you drink American Coca-Cola.” It was the only thing he bought her, for it was Sunday and all the shops were closed.
In the pension that night, the sheets were so clean that Marina was afraid to lie down.
They had only that one day in Holland.7 The next morning, June 4, 1962, they boarded the Maasdam bound from Rotterdam to New York.
The voyage marked the beginning of a change in Alik’s behavior, and in his relationship with his wife. It was not a change for the better.
On the first day out, the two of them went on deck, struck up a conversation with a Rumanian girl, laughed, and had a fine time. But after that, Alik hardly took Marina out on deck at all. He got seasick there, and she did not. It did not occur to her to go alone.
She spent most of the voyage in their cabin with the baby. Taking several sheets of writing paper with him, Alik would vanish upstairs to the library and remain there for hours. Marina supposed he was writing letters. Often, at night, he went alone to the movies, leaving Marina and the baby behind.
He came to fetch her for meals, and it seemed to Marina that the other passengers were staring and laughing at her. She became self-conscious about her appearance and her clothes, unaware that it was the baby, swaddled from her waist to her toes, that was the object of so much attention. They had never seen swaddling before.
They had a charming waiter, a handsome young man whose name was Pieter. Half Russian and half Dutch, he knew a few words of Russian and wanted to know all about Marina. But Alik was suspicious of him. “Don’t tell him anything you don’t have to,” he warned Marina. “It’s no accident that they gave us a Russian-speaking waiter.”
Marina ignored this warning. To the extent their languages would allow, she chatted away openly with Pieter, and she discovered that his last name was “Didenko,” or something close to it. “Where,” Marina asked herself, “have I heard that name before?” Then, with a thud of recognition, she remembered. It was the name of her own, natural father—at least the name her stepfather had shouted at her once in a terrible moment of wrath.
Marina did not know what to make of the change in Alik. Whenever he took her anywhere, it was plain from his expression that he was doing it only out of duty. It was not that he was making other friends. Marina saw no sign of that. She concluded that he was ashamed of her because, as she put it to herself, she looked like “a little Russian fool.” Alone much of the time in the cabin, she sank into low spirits. Everything she knew and loved lay behind her; ahead, everything was unknown. Clearly, Alka neither loved her nor cared for her. Why on earth was she going to America?
Finally, she said to her husband, “Alka, are you ashamed of me?”
He did not reply.
“There’s a beauty shop on the boat. The girls come out looking princesses.”
“Oh, is there?” That was all he said.
Marina grew angry. She had given Alik 180 rubles in Minsk, payment for her maternity leave and money from the sale of their furniture. He had changed all of it into dollars, and she knew that he still had it. Yet he had refused to buy her anything when some boatmen rowed up to the Maasdam off the Irish coast with heavy wool sweaters to sell. There were shops on the ship, but he did not buy her anything there either. Nor did he pick up her hint that she should get her hair done. Marina was too proud to ask him for any money. The one thing she asked for was thread. Sitting by herself in the cabin, she sewed the heels of her wedding shoes.
“Don’t bother,” Alik said, when he saw what she was doing. “I’ll buy you shoes in New York.”
“I’ll sew these until you do,” came his wife’s laconic reply.
Marina’s unhappiness boiled over at a party they attended their last evening at sea. In spite of her attire—the red brocade she had worn the night she met Alik—she felt morose, and looked it.
“Wipe that expression off your face,” Alik said. “People are staring at you.”
“I can’t look any other way,” Marina said.
“Why?”
“Because you’ve changed toward me. Because you don’t love me and I feel hurt.”
“If you don’t care for me the way I am,” Alik said, “go away.”
“Where am I to go?” Marina said. “There’s only one way to go. And that’s the ocean.”
“Okay. Go.”
Marina ran from the table in tears. It was rainy and cold on the deck, and below, the water was gray and forbidding. She did not know what to do. She walked around the deck, and finally, she thought of the baby, who was lying asleep in the cabin. “Junie needs me, even if Alka doesn’t.”
Alik found her in the cabin when he came in an hour later.
“You’re here, are you?” he said.
“Only because of the baby.”
He quickly went out again. But he returned, and they made up. He escorted her to the bar, bought her a liqueur and himself a Coca-Cola. He even allowed her to smoke.
The voyage to America was not a happy one for Marina. She thought that she was somehow responsible for Alik’s strange behavior. She did not know the real reason for his abstraction and indifference to her: as the Maasdam steamed toward New York, he was once again deeply concerned about what might happen to him when he reached America.
Oswald thought that he would be met at the dock by newspaper reporters. He expected to be asked a series of questions designed to incriminate him with the FBI; and trying to prepare himself, he covered page after page of Holland-America Line stationery with a list of questions and answers. Then, dissatisfied, he wrote out a second draft, one which was more politic, less candid, and, apparently to his mind, more successful, since he ended it with the newspapermen exclaiming, with one voice: “Thank you, sir, you are a real patriot!”8
The questions Oswald allotted to the newspapermen reveal his central concern. He was still afraid that by one or more of his acts he had broken laws of the United States. And he was fearful that his answers might incriminate him. Indeed, the questions he sketched out are accusatory, the answers defensive. He was even prepared to deny that he was a Communist. In response to the question, “Are you a Communist?” he drafted two replies. (In the excerpts that follow, errors of spelling and punctuation have been corrected.)
First draft: Yes, basically. Although I hate the USSR and (the) socialist system, I still think Marxism can work under different circumstances.9
Second draft: No, of course not. I have never even known a Communist outside the ones in the USSR, but you can’t help that.10
Besides the two sets of questions and answers, which were really scripts for the anticipated press conference, Oswald wrote two long pages, again on Holland-America Line stationery, explaining why he had taken money from a source he believed to be the Soviet secret police. It was the question he dreaded most:
… I accepted the money because I was hungry and there were several inches of snow on the ground.… But what it really was was payment for my denunciation of the US in Moscow.… I didn’t realize all this, of course, for almost two years … I have never mentioned the fact of these monthly payments to anyone. I do so in order to state that I shall never sell myself intentionally or unintentionally to anyone again.11
There is no way of knowing how many sheets of Holland-America Line paper Oswald covered with handwriting, only to toss them into a wastebasket on the Maasdam. But it is clear from what has survived that he spent part of the voyage working up this imaginary colloquy with the press, and an even longer time drafting a statement of his political beliefs.12 Again, he apparently thought that he would be questioned on these matters.
I have often wondered why it is that the communist, capitalist, and even the fascist and anarchist elements in America always profess patriotism toward the land and the people, if not the government, although their movements must surely lead to the bitter destruction of all and everything.
I am quite sure these people must hate not only the government but the culture, heritage and very people itself.…
I wonder what would happen if somebody was to stand up and say he was utterly opposed not only to the governments, but to the people, to the entire land and complete foundations of his society?…
Where can I turn? To factional mutants of both systems [communism and capitalism], to oddball Hegelian revisionists out of touch with reality, [to] religious groups, to revisionists or to absurd anarchism? No!
To a person knowing both systems … there can be no mediation.…
He must be opposed to their basic foundations.…
And yet it is immature to take the sort of attitude which says “a curse on both your houses.”
There are two great representatives of power in the world … the left and right.…
Any practical attempt at one alternative must have as its nucleus the traditional ideological best of both systems, and yet be utterly opposed to both.…
For no system can be entirely new. That is where most revolutions … go astray. And yet the new system must be opposed unequivocally to the old. That is also where revolutions go astray.
Oswald then launched into criticisms of capitalism: “runaway robot” automation, “a general decay of classes into shapeless societies without real cultural foundations,” the “regimentation” of “ideals,” and, finally, war.
The biggest and key fault … of our era is of course the fight for markets between the imperialist powers … which lead to the wars, crises and oppressive friction which you have all come to regard as part of your lives. And it is this prominent factor of the capitalist system which will undoubtedly eventually lead to the common destruction of all the imperialistic powers.…
Oswald next considered what he called the “mistakes” of Engels and Marx,13 chiefly the notion that the abolition of classes would lead to a withering away of the state. He cited with bitterness his own visa experience to illustrate that even with Khrushchev’s decentralization, the state did not wither away. To counter the argument that the state had to become strong and highly centralized before it could wither away, he called for “social democracy at a local or community level.” Oswald believed that “true democracy can be practiced only at the local level.”
Four other long sheets of Holland-America Line stationery have survived, covered with Oswald’s scrawl, mutilated and nearly illegible because of scratched-out phrases and words. They are a vaguely programmatic document,14 apocalyptic in that Oswald apparently expected an armed confrontation between two camps at any moment and suggested that afterward he hoped to set up a peace organization that would break with the traditions of both Communist and capitalist systems, which “have now at this moment led the world into unsurpassed danger … into a dark generation of tension and fear.”
How many of you have tried to find out the truth behind the cold war clichés?
I have lived under both systems. I have sought the answers and, although it would be very easy to dupe myself into believing one system is better than the other, I know they are not.
For an American who was only twenty-three, Oswald’s experience was unique. He had, as he had written, lived in each of the opposing world camps, more or less as an ordinary citizen. Now, suspended between the two on the voyage home, he was looking at both, weighing both, trying to puzzle out a system that would combine the merits of each. And as he had done so often in his life before, he was doing it, once again, alone. He had not been to college, nor had he been part of any political or intellectual milieu in the United States. In Russia he had been cut off completely from such currents as might be stirring young people back home. Yet the political solution he reached, from his own experience, from reading, and from talking to his friends in Minsk, was similar to the solution proposed by a generation of American activists in the later 1960s: participatory democracy at a community level. Oswald was a pioneer, if you will, or a lonely American antihero a few years ahead of his time.
The trouble lay not with his ideas but with the emotions underneath. Oswald had been disappointed by Russia, which he had thought to be a Marxist society where each person’s needs were met. It was not the thing Oswald expected and found, a system of authority, that drove him from the USSR. It was what he came seeking and failed to find.
His disappointment, and above all the anxiety he felt on returning to the country of his birth, are evident in the confused style and erratic spelling of his shipboard writings. But his was not a new wound. It had been inflicted long before he went to Russia, and it stemmed from his relationship with his mother. For somehow Marguerite had failed her son. His need for his mother’s love had not been met when he was young. Not only was his need unmet, he had been unable to extricate himself from it. He remained enmeshed with his mother, needing her, yet resenting her and hating himself for his dependence. For his need was an enormous threat to him, and once in a while, in order to convince himself that he was free and a man, he had to pull himself together and act. And the action he took very often was one of rejection.
He had rejected Marguerite first when he joined the Marines. But his dependence remained so great that he was able to transform even that institution into a kind of mother. The Marine Corps—the “mother of men”—failed him, too: and in rejecting the Marines, he was, symbolically, rejecting his mother again. Then he defected to Russia, contriving in a single exquisite gesture to reject his real mother, the Marine Corps, and his mother country all at once. So doing, he transformed an unresolved personal conflict into a political act.
Now he had rejected Russia, once more reenacting the central drama of his life. Mother Russia had failed him not because it was authoritarian or because it lacked Marxian “equality.” It failed him because it did not meet all his needs. No country, no mother, could—his needs were bottomless. But this rejection was the most portentous one so far, for while rejecting his mother symbolically yet again, he was returning to her physically for the first time. He was returning to the real mother who was the cause of it all.
Marina had no idea of the danger her husband was running in going home. She was hurt and depressed by his shipboard behavior to her. But she had no way back. She was committed to Alik and June, and to the decision she had made in leaving Russia. And she was looking forward with the eagerness of a child to a great adventure that lay ahead. Besides, she was young and forgiving, fully capable of laying aside Alik’s cruelty and the warning signals he had given her. She saw in Alik’s suddenly altered behavior only his fear of being punished in America. She was right. But she failed to perceive the depths of his turmoil. As he approached the emotional orbit of his mother, he started to behave like a compass approaching its magnetic pole. The needle of his emotions began to swing, wildly and more wildly still, until eventually he was to forfeit his control.