Reclaiming History (152 page)

For the Oswalds, leaving the Soviet Union was a momentous, life-changing event. Marina was leaving a country which, however repressive, was well known to her and with which she was comfortable. Her relations with her family had always been trying, at best, but she nonetheless maintained them assiduously, and she relied heavily on her relatives, particularly her aunts. As far as she knew, she was leaving these people forever to go to a country whose language she could not speak at all and where she would be surrounded by strangers. If she were to find any work at all, it would almost for sure not be as a pharmacist, and she would never again enjoy the easy camaraderie of coworkers who were young women very much like herself, with similar backgrounds and experience. In addition, Lee had already demonstrated a desire to control her, to make her live up to his image of what a wife should be. Even though he had already bullied Marina, according to the KGB transcripts of the goings-on in their apartment, Marina was not a shrinking violet (I would find this out firsthand years later) and she had always fought back stoutly or fled to her Aunt Valya, never capitulating. Her new life in America, with its isolation, would greatly exacerbate her problems.

It was also an enormous change for Lee. He had arrived in the USSR as a nineteen-year-old and became a man in the two and a half years he lived there. He had lost his baby fat and prematurely some of his hair, and he had lived independently, out from under the yoke of his mother and the U.S. Marines, for the first time in his life. He had had a job—the longest one he would ever hold and the only one he would neither quit nor be fired from—that did not pay badly by Soviet standards, but his incompetence and insufferable attitude had been tolerated in a way they would never be in a highly competitive and rough-and-tumble capitalist society. He had been exposed to communism in the raw and saw it was not the same as he had read about in the yellowing pages of Marxist literature from the New Orleans public library.

S
ince the train’s route led back through Minsk, where they would stop briefly in the early morning of June 2, Marina wired ahead in the hopes that Valya would come for one last meeting. Marina and Lee walked up and down the platform looking for Valya, but she was not there. Lee grasped Marina, who was crushed and crying. “Don’t worry, don’t cry,” he said. “Everything will be alright.”
⁸³⁸

Later in the day, as the train passed the border at Brest crossing into Poland, one of the guards asked Lee and Marina whether they had any gold or other valuables to declare, and just grinned when Marina pointed to Baby June.
⁸³⁹

All that day the train plied its way across the broad expanse of Poland. They had a brief respite in Warsaw, where they bought beer and Lee took photographs. They crossed into East Germany at Frankfort on the Oder, and later that night Marina woke long enough to notice the stark contrast between East and West Berlin—the former dark, the latter brightly lit in the western manner. They were in the West at last. The next day the contrast was even greater, as the train crawled across the storybook landscape of Holland to Rotterdam, where they were scheduled to stay overnight. Although the shops in Rotterdam were closed for Sunday, Marina could see they were overflowing with what were to her unimaginable luxuries. Lee bought her the first Coca-Cola she ever tasted. That night, in the modest pension booked for them by the embassy, the sheets were so clean Marina didn’t want to lie down in the bed.
⁸⁴⁰

The next day, June 4, 1962, they boarded the SS
Maasdam
, bound for New York and the New World.
⁸⁴¹
During their voyage across the Atlantic, Marina spent most of her time in their cabin with the baby while Lee would disappear to the ship’s library, where he spent many hours writing.
⁸⁴²
What Lee was writing on the voyage appears to have been a preparation for the interviews or interrogations he at once half hoped and half feared to be subjected to on his arrival in the United States. Although he may have started work on this before he boarded the
Maasdam
, he at least rewrote or recopied the pages while on the ship, because they are written on the back of the ship’s stationery. There are two separate drafts of answers to an identical set of eight questions—one, for the most part, seemingly designed to alarm and infuriate his questioners, the second much more velvety in tone with an exonerating spin on them. Although the two sets of questions and answers were written separately, they are presented here with both answers to each question:

Q: Why did you go to the USSR?

1. I went as a mark of discuss [disgust] and protest against American political policies in forenign countrys, my personal sign of discontent and horror at the misguided mind of reasoning of the U.S. Government.
   
2. I went as a citizen of the U.S. (as a tourist) residing in a foreing country which I have a perfect right to do. I went there to see the land, the people and how there system works
   

Q: What about those letters?

1. I made serval letters in which I expressed my above feeling to the American Embassy when in Oct 1959 I went there to legally liquate my american citizenship and was refused this legalle right.
   
2. I made no letters deriding the U.S.!! In correspondence with the U.S. Embassy I made no anti-american statements, any critizem I might have had was of policies not our government
   

Q: Did you make statements against the U.S. there?

1. yes
   
2. no
   

Q: What about that type [tape] recording [a very brief recording undoubtedly made as a favor to Rimma for her employer when he first arrived in Moscow]?

1. I made a recording for Radio Moscow which was broadcast the following sunday in which [I] spoke about the beauiful capital of the Socialist work [world?] and all its progress.
   
2. I made a recording for the Moscow Tourist Radio travel log, in which I spoke about sightseeing and what I had seen in Moscow tourist circles. I expressed delight in all the interesting places, I mentioned in this respect the University, mesuem of art, Red Square, the Kremlin I rember I closed this 2 minute recording by saying I hoped our peoples would live in peace and fr.
   

Q: Did you break laws by residing [or] taking work in the USSR?

1. I did in that I took an othe of allignce to the USSR.
   
2. Under U.S. law a person may lose the protection of the U.S., by voting or serving in the armed forces of a foringn state or taking an othe of alligence to that state. I did none of these
   

Q: Isn’t all work in the USSR considered State work?

1. Yes of course and in that respect I allso broke US law in accepting work under a forign state.
   
2. No. Technically only plants working directly for the State, usually defense, all other plants are owned by the workers who work in them.
   

Q: What about statements you made to UPI agent Miss Mosby?

1. I was approched by Miss Mosby and other reporters just after I had formally requested the American Embassy to legally liquate my U.S. citizenship, for a story, they were notified by the U.S. Embassy, not by me. I answered questions and made statements to Miss Mosby in regard to my reasons for coming to the USSR, her story was warped by her later, but in barest esscens it is possible to say she had the thruth printed.
   
2. I was approcaed just after I had formally notified the U.S. Embassy in Moscow of my future residence in he USSR by the newspaper agenties in Moscow including U.P.I. API and time inc. who were notified by the Embassy. I did not call them. I answered questions and gave statements to Miss Mosby of U.P.I. I requested her to let me OK. her story before she released it, which is the polite and ususal thing. She sent her version of what I said just after she sent it. I immially called her to complant about this, at which time she apolizied but said her editor and not her had added serval things. She said London was very excited about the story (there is how I deduced that she had allready sent it) so there wasn’t much else I could do about it. and I didn’t relize that the story was even more blown out of shape once it got to the U.S.A. I’m afriad the printed story was faricated sensenlionilizism.
   

Q: Why did you remain in the USSR for so long if you only wanted a look

1. I resided in the USSR from Oct 16 1959 to sprig of 1961 a period of 2½ years I did so because I was living quite comfortably. I had plenty of money, an apartment rent-free lots of girls, ect.. why should I leave all that?
   
2. I resided in the USSR until February 1961 when I wrote the Embassy stating that I would like to go back. (My passport was at the Embassy for safekeeping) they invited me to Moscow for this purpose however it took me almost ½ year to get a permit to leave the city of Minsk for Moscow. In this connection I had to use a letter from the head consular, to the Russian authrities in Minsk (the Russians are very beaurocratic and slow about letting foreingrs travel about the country hence the visa) when I did get to Moscow the Embassy immiately gave me back my passport and advised me as to how to get a exit visa from the Russians for myself and my Russian wife, this long and ardous process took months from July 1962 untill _____ 1962, therefore you see almost 1 year was spent in trying to leave the country. thats why I was there so long not out of desire!
   

Q: Are you a communits?

1. Yes basically, allthough I hate the USSR and socialist system I still thank marxism can work under different circumstances.
   
2. No of course not.
   

Q: have you ever know a communist?

1. not in the U.S.A.
   
2. I have never even know a communist, outside of the ones in the USSR but you can’t help that.
   

Q: What are the othestanding [outstanding] differants between the USSR and USA?

1. None, except in the US the living standard is a little higher, freedoms are about the same, medical aid and the educational system in the USSR is better than in the USA.
   
2. freedom of speech travel outspoken opposition to unpopular policies freedom to believe in god.
   ⁸⁴³
   

It is difficult to know what Oswald had in mind with this schizophrenic performance, but he added a significant clue at least with respect to his second set of answers when, at the end of that set, he assigned these words to his anticipated questioner, whom he assumed to be reporters for “newspapers.” They say to him, “Thank you sir, you are a
real
patriot!!”
⁸⁴⁴

Also on the trip back to America he wrote notes on what he called “speech before,” suggesting he was contemplating the possibility of giving a speech, somewhere, upon his return. In the speech notes, he scores segregation in America, writing,

It, is, I think the action of the active segregationist minority and the great body of indiffent [indifferent] people in the South who do the United States more harm in the eyes of the worlds people, than the whole world communist movement…Make no mistake, segregationist tendencies can be unleared. I was born in New Orleans, and I know.

He refers to the “major short comings and advantages” of both the American and Russian systems of government, but notes that

only in ours is the voice of dissent allowed opportunity of expression…I have done a lot of critizing of our system I hope you will take it in the spirit it was given. in going to Russia I followed the old priciple “Thou shall seek the truth and the truth shall make you free” In returning to the U.S. I have done nothing more or less than select the lesser of two evils.
⁸⁴⁵

Other dissertations he worked on aboard the SS
Maasdam
, written on the front of the ship’s logoed paper, could be construed to reveal the considerable thought he gave to the damage his second defection—from the Soviet Union—did to his claim to be a Communist. He put time and effort into a new statement of his political beliefs:

I have often wondered why it is that the communist, capitalist and even the fasist and anarchist elements in America, allways profess patrotistism toward the land and the people, if not the government; although their movements must surly lead to the bitter destruction of all and everything…

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, too the entire land and complete foundations of his socically.
⁸⁴⁶

It’s a rhetorical question, and one senses that one day he would like to be that “somebody.” But first he gropes for some third position between capitalism and communism:

too a person knowing both systems and their factional accesories, their can be no mediation between the systems as they exist to-day and that person.

He must be opposed to their basic foundations and representatives and yet it is imature to take the sort of attitude which says “a curse on both your houses!”

their are two great represenative[s] of power in the world, simply expressed, the left and right, and their factions…

any practical attempt at one alternative must have as its nuclus the triditionall ideological best of both systems, and yet be utterly opposed to both systems.
⁸⁴⁷

After some confused exegesis of the Industrial Revolution, which he seemed to believe began at “the turn of the [twentieth] century,” he decides that the two systems are incompatible because of their competition for markets. The communist system is as much at fault as the capitalistic system.

In the communist experamint serveal factions and unavoidable developments have emerged which Marx and Engels could not possibly have foreseen…Marx envisualized that the aboliaton of class’es would lead to the gruaual [gradual] reduction of state apparous [apparatus]. however this is not the case and is better observed than contemplated. the state rather becomes more extensitve.
⁸⁴⁸
…In the late 1800’s Engels wrote Vanti Dühring which rightly critized Eugen Duhring’s, a german idealist who was supposably not consistent enough in his materialism for the dialectical materilist Marx. [But in] his critical anylis of Dühring Engles said with much heavy sarcism that Dühring only changed a word in his putting forward of his social revolutionary ideas that [the] changed word “was the word community from the word state” whereas Dühring wanted Social Democracy at a local or community level, Marx and Engels advocated a centrilized state which would later “wither away!” But…as history has shown time again the state remains and grows whereas true democracy can be practiced only at the local level, while [as long as] the centralized state, administrative, political or supervisual remains their can be no real democracy.
⁸⁴⁹