Reclaiming History (142 page)

Near the end of the week, Priscilla Johnson paused on the second floor on her way back to her own room on the third floor of the Metropole. She stopped to ask the
dezhurnaya
, a diminutive concierge in white who sat on the landing, “How about Number 233? Is he in?” The woman checked her drawer of room keys and her arms flew up. “Out,” she said. Lee had forgotten his promise to say good-bye and she never saw him again.
⁵⁶⁷

Johnson told McVickar that Oswald was no longer at the Metropole, and on December 1, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Llewellyn Thompson, informed the State Department that “Lee Harvey Oswald believed departed from Metropole Hotel within last few days…apparently quickly and with no forwarding address.”
⁵⁶⁸

Oswald had ostensibly vanished into Russia, a country twice the size of the United States, practically a continent in its own right, and no one on the American side had any idea of what happened to him.

In fact, Lee Oswald, his funds all but depleted, had gone no farther than another, smaller room in the Metropole—a chambermaids’ cubbyhole room on the top floor arranged for by Rimma’s superiors. For the next six weeks he did little but wait for the Soviet authorities to decide what they were finally going to do with him.

Moscow in December is brutally cold, and Oswald did not have clothes warm enough to permit explorations in the city, so he mostly sat in the little room for which he was no longer able to pay rent and waited, even taking his meals there, though they were of poorer quality than the regular hotel fare. The reliable Rimma continued to visit him.
⁵⁶⁹
He later covered the whole period from November 17 through December 30 in a paragraph entry in his Historic Diary. He wrote that “I have bought myself two self-teaching Russian Lan. Books I force myself to study [them] 8 hours a day. I sit in my room and read and memorize words…I have $28. left,” he said, from the fifteen hundred dollars he had managed to save over the previous two years for his Russian adventure. “It is very cold on the streets,” he wrote, “so I rarley go outside at all…I see no one speak to no-one accept every-now-and-than Rimmea.”
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On November 26, he undertook a very long, handwritten reply to a letter from his brother Robert. It is a shockingly cold, fanatical document. In one of the softer, early paragraphs he writes,

I will ask you a question Robert. what do you surpport the american government for? What is the Ideal you put forward?…Ask me and I will tell you I fight [“fight” is encircled] for communism. This word brings to your mind slaves or injustice. This is because of american propaganda. Look this word up in the dictionary or better still, read the book which I first read when I was fifteen, “CAPITAL,” which contains economic theorys and most important the “communist manifesto.”

I will not say your grandchildren will live under communism, look for yourself at history, look at a world map! america is a dieing country, I do not wish to be a part of it, nor do I ever again wish to be used as a tool in its military aggressions.

He tells Robert that “happiness” for him “is taking part in the struggle” for Communism.

He later gets into the heart of his letter: “I want you to understand what I say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I have been in the military as you know, and I know what war is like: 1. In the event of war I would kill any american who put a uniform on in defense of the american government—any american. 2. That in my own mind I have no attachment’s of any kind in the U.S. 3. That I want to, and I shall, live a normal happy and peaceful life here in the Soviet Union for the rest of my life.” In case Robert missed the import of “no attachment’s,” Lee’s fourth paragraph spelled it out: “4. That my mother and you are (in spite of what the newspaper said) not objects of affection, but only examples of workers in the U.S.”

After this diatribe, he writes, “You should not try to remember me in any way I used to be, since I am only now showing you how I am. I am not all bitterness or hate, I come here only to find freedom, In truth, I feel I am at last with my own people.”
⁵⁷¹

Unless Oswald was lying to himself in his own diary entry covering the period of November 17 to December 30, in which he said he had twenty-eight dollars to his name, he tells Robert in the letter the lie that “I have no money problems
at all
. My situation was not nearly as sable [stable?] then, as it is now, I have no troubles at all now along that line.” He also made it clear in the letter that he was disappointed that his grand gesture had put him in the spotlight for only two days before he was plunged once again into obscurity. “I wish you would do me a favor since that other bad newspaper story went [out], I have been thinking I would like to give people, who are interested [in] the real reasons,” he wrote. “If you would, give the contents of this letter…to some reporter, it will clarify my situation, use your own judgement, however.”
⁵⁷²
*

Oswald seemed to realize that his fifteen minutes of fame had come and gone, and he knew his life was presently even gloomier than it had been before. He might have been cheered had he known anything of the progress of his case through the Soviet bureaucracy, but he did not. On November 27, Andrei Gromyko, minister of foreign affairs, and Aleksandr Shelepin, chairman of the KGB, addressed a joint memo to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that concluded with a recommendation: “Considering that other foreigners who were formerly given Soviet citizenship (Sitrinell, Afshar) left our country after having lived here for awhile and also keeping in mind that Oswald has not been sufficiently studied, it is advisable to give him the right to temporary residence in the USSR for one year, with a guarantee of employment and housing. In this event, the question of Oswald’s permanent residency in the USSR and granting of Soviet citizenship can be decided during the course of this term.”
⁵⁷³
*

Sometime in December, the Central Committee, not having yet ruled on the recommendation, once again called Oswald to the Soviet Passport Office, where he met three new officials who put to him the same questions the others had asked a month before, as though his case were only then being taken up for the first time. “They appear not to know me at all,” he wrote, disconcerted, in his diary.
⁵⁷⁴

Rimma, during her visits, didn’t even try to help him with his Russian, as she felt he was too distraught to learn very much, and she noticed no particular improvement in his skills from all the hours of study he put in alone. He kept asking her for news about his case, but when she passed his query on to her chief at Intourist, he said to her, “What can he do for a living?” She had no answer to that.
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Robert received a third letter on December 17 in which Oswald said that he would be moving from the hotel and would not be writing again. He asked Robert not to write to him. The letter concluded, “I’m sure you understand that I would not like to recive correspondence from people in the country which I fled. I am starting a new life and I do not wish to have anything to do with the old life. I hope you and your family will always be in good health.”
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Within a week or two, his mood had softened, if all but imperceptibly. Marguerite had mailed him a personal check for twenty dollars dated December 18. He returned it to her on January 5 with a note terse to the point of insult, scribbled on the torn-off flap of her envelope: “I can’t use this check, of course. Put the $20 bill in an envelope and send it to me I’m also short of cash and need the rest. Love Lee.”
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The “rest” may have been in reference to the hundred dollars he supposedly had given, not lent, her in September. In any case, she did send him a twenty-dollar bill, and almost immediately thereafter a money order for about twenty-five dollars, both of which failed to get through and were eventually returned to her.
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Christmas came and went. On New Year’s Eve 1959, Roza Agafonova was on duty in the hotel, and Oswald sat up with her to see the new year in. He had only just learned that she was married and the mother of a child born crippled, which was why, he wrote in his diary, “she is so strangly tender and compeling.” She gave him a small “Boratin” clown as a New Year’s present.
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Still unknown to him, on November 27, 1959, his fate had already been decided by the highest entity in the Soviet Union, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which passed a resolution on his behalf:

In regard to the petition by the American citizen Lee Harvey Oswald for Soviet citizenship, let it hereby be resolved: 1. To agree with the proposal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the KGB to grant U.S. citizen Lee Harvey Oswald temporary residence status for one year and to resolve the questions of his permanent residency in the USSR and Soviet citizenship during this period. 2. To oblige the Belorussian National Economic Council to place Oswald in a job in electronics and the Minsk City Council of Worker’s Deputies to assign him his own small apartment. 3. To instruct the executive committee of the Societies of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent to assign five thousand rubles for equipping the apartment for Oswald and to issue him an allowance of seven hundred rubles a month over the course of one year.
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KGB defector Yuriy Nosenko told author Gerald Posner, “After years of cold relations between the superpowers, they were just starting to warm up. We didn’t want to do anything to hurt this new atmosphere or to give a pretext to those who wanted to ruin better relations. By telling Oswald he had to leave, he was so unstable he might try and succeed in killing himself. Then we would be criticized for a KGB murder of an American tourist. If we forced him onto a plane for deportation, there was still an image of a student being manhandled by the Soviet security forces. Considering the options, we decided to let him stay. He seemed harmless enough. We could decide where he worked and lived, and maintain surveillance over him to insure he did not cause any trouble or was not an American sleeper agent.”
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Finally, on January 4, 1960, Oswald was summoned to the Soviet Passport Office and given Identity Document for Stateless Persons Number 311479, although he was technically not stateless—he had never returned to the American embassy either to renounce his citizenship or to recover his passport.
⁵⁸²
He was told he was being sent to Minsk in the Soviet republic of Belorussia (also spelled Byelorussia—Belorussia became known as Belarus following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991). He asked the official, “Is that in Siberia?” The official laughed.
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Minsk is in the opposite direction, an industrial city located about 450 miles southwest of Moscow with a population of about 510,000 in 1959.
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Further, he was told that a factory job had been arranged for him there. His disappointment that he had not been granted Soviet citizenship and was not going to remain in Moscow, where he wanted to be, was balanced by relief that the uncertainty was ended; he told Rimma Shirokova that he was happy.
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The next day he went, by direction of the Passport Office, to an agency the Russians called the Red Cross, although it was not a private charity like the International Red Cross or the Muslims’ Red Crescent, but an organ of the Soviet government. They gave him five thousand rubles, or about five hundred dollars at the official exchange rate, a not inconsiderable sum. Oswald thought it “a huge sum!” He used 2,200 rubles to pay his hotel bill and 150 rubles to purchase his railroad ticket to Minsk.
⁵⁸⁶

Always faithful Rimma saw him off at the station. He was depressed and wanted her to accompany him on the overnight train trip, but by now he understood that such things were not as simple in the Soviet Union as they might have been in the states. It was snowing as they said their good-byes. Both of them were crying.
⁵⁸⁷
But through the tears there was a sense of defiance and renewal. After writing in letters to his mother and brother that “I do not wish to every contact you again,” he wrote in his diary, “I am beginning anew life and I don’t want
any part
of the old.”
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Oswald was met at the station in Minsk by two Soviet Red Cross workers who took him to the Hotel Minsk, an impressive five-hundred-room establishment built less than three years before at the direct order of Khrushchev
⁵⁸⁹
—Rimma had been there and thought it especially nice.
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Two women from Intourist, both of whom spoke English, were waiting there for him. One, Roza Kuznetsova, would become a close friend and attend his twenty-first birthday party later that year. “Excellant English,” Oswald wrote as his first impression of her, “we attract each other at once.”
⁵⁹¹

Two days before his arrival in Minsk, KGB officers in that city were informed of Oswald’s pending arrival. They were given minimal details about how he had arrived in Moscow, his alleged suicide attempt, and how he had insisted on remaining in the Soviet Union. Their mission was to determine if Oswald was an American intelligence plant. Surveillance began the moment he got off the train in Minsk.
⁵⁹²
*
The following day Oswald met the mayor, Comrade Sharapov, who welcomed him to Minsk, promised him a nearly rent-free apartment, and warned him against “uncultured” persons who sometimes insulted foreigners.
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The new life for which Lee Oswald had yearned and planned so long was finally to begin—in the city of Minsk, a town about the size of Tucson, Arizona. It had been destroyed twice during World War II, once when the Germans swept through on their advance on Moscow and again when the German army pushed back toward Poland and their homeland by the Red Army. Ninety percent of the town, originally a warren of small, ramshackle wooden buildings, had been destroyed, so the city that presented itself to Oswald in the frosty January of 1960 was, by Russian standards anyway, quite modern.
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After he returned to America he eventually wrote a description of it for a book he hoped to write.
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