Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  But the movie was sold out and they ambled home through the park. People were dancing in a pavilion. “Let’s dance,” he suggested. Marina refused.

  “You don’t know what you want,” Alik said, trying to reason with her. “People get that way when they’re pregnant. You’re not used to it yet. Things look bad to you right now. But you’ll get over it.”

  Marina was unmollified. “You’re not even pregnant, and you think you made a mistake, too. You’re sorry you didn’t marry Ella.”

  “I don’t care about Ella,” he said.

  “Then why did you say you saw her from the balcony that day?”

  “You hurt me, and I wanted to hurt you back.”

  He spent the rest of the evening placating her. “I told you before that I used to go out with her. I even asked her to marry me. But she was scared. She hurt my pride. But I’m not in love with her. She’s gotten so fat it’s awful. She’d have gotten fat as a barrel if I’d married her.”

  Marina was ready to make up. All she wanted was reassurance. “How did you know I wouldn’t get fat?” she inquired as she tumbled into bed. He reassured her, and the two of them made up.

  — 8 —

  Journey to Moscow

  Less than three weeks after his marriage, in a letter postmarked May 16, 1961, Lee Harvey Oswald wrote for the third time to the American embassy in Moscow.1 “… I wish to make it clear,” he said in the demanding tone of his earlier letters,

  that I am asking not only for the right to return to the United States, but also for a full guarantee’s that I shall not, under any circumstance’s, be persecuted for any act pertaining to this case.… Unless you think this condition can be met, I see no reason for a continuance of our correspondence. Instead, I shall endeavour to use my relatives in the United States, to see about getting something done in Washington.

  Oswald repeated his reluctance to come to Moscow for an interview: “I do not care to take the risk of getting into a [sic] awkward situation unless I think it worthwhile.” And he informed the embassy that he had gotten married. “My wife is Russian … and is quite willing to leave the Soviet Union with me and live in the United States.” He said, moreover, that he would not leave Russia unless arrangements were made for his wife to leave at the same time. “So with this extra complication,” he wrote, “I suggest you do some checking up before advising me further.”

  At least two events may have crystallized Oswald’s resolve to return to the United States. Early in May, just after his marriage, he received a letter from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow rejecting his application for admission. It meant to Oswald that the road to a higher education in Russia was closed to him. It spelled the end of his hopes of escape from the dreary, provincial town of Minsk. He was doomed to remain a factory worker forever. So keen was Oswald’s disappointment that he did not tell Marina about the rejection until months later, and when he did tell her, he was still so disappointed that she got the impression that the wound was fresh.

  On May 5, probably on the same day he learned that his application to attend Lumumba University had been denied, Oswald wrote a letter to his brother Robert in Fort Worth. He announced matter-of-factly that he had married but said nothing about wanting to come home. Nevertheless, Robert rightly took the letter as a signal that his brother had tired of life in Russia. He wrote a letter in reply, and they resumed their correspondence. In a later letter Oswald confided that he wanted to return to the United States but doubted that it would be possible. He also wrote a letter to his mother, the first in a year and a half.

  A second disappointment came two weeks after his marriage when Oswald was excluded from the bus excursion to Leningrad. He often complained to friends about the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union. Apparently, he now felt that the many privileges he received as a foreigner were outweighed by the restrictions that were placed on him, for only a day or so later, he resumed his correspondence with the American embassy. As in the case of Ella Germann, a rejection seemed to demand an act of rejection in return. It was a response by Oswald that was to recur again and again.

  Alik still had said nothing to Marina about his desire to return to the United States, despite the statement in his letter to the embassy that she was willing to leave Russia with him. It was, under the circumstances, an irresponsible statement for him to make. Fearful of what the Soviet and the American reactions to his request might mean for him, he was unconcerned about what such a declaration, made through the open mails where it could be seen by Soviet officials, might mean for Marina—pressure on her and perhaps even danger for her family. In fact, he did not tell Marina of his intentions until five or six weeks after he wrote to the embassy.

  It was an evening late in June, and Marina and Alik were taking a walk after dinner. They passed several lighted storefronts and saw nothing they wanted to buy. “In America,” Alik said tentatively, “the storefronts are huge. They’re all lit up, and you can find anything you want inside. If I were able to go back, would you come?”

  “But you told me you couldn’t,” Marina said.

  “If I tried?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re trying to trick me,” Marina said. “You want to see if I married you to go to America. That’s enough of your nonsense now.”

  But that was not the end of it. In bed that night, gazing up at the ceiling, Alik asked, “You mean that if I go, you’ll stay?”

  Marina sat upright in bed. “Are you kidding?”

  “I’m not kidding, Marina. I’m serious.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Marina said. But he persisted, and she promised to think it over.

  Next morning he asked if she was afraid of going.

  “I don’t know the language, Alka,” she said. “I don’t know what your family will think of me. They won’t like me, maybe. And then you won’t love me anymore.”

  “I’ve seen your country, Marina,” he said. “Now I’d like you to see mine. Please, please come with me.”

  For three days he begged her. He showered her with kisses and affection. Marina says that “he literally stood on his knees.” Finally, she agreed. He made her sit down at once and write a letter to the American embassy asking to go to the United States.

  The next day he told her he had mailed the letter. But he never did, and his motive in making her write it is obscure, unless he was trying to commit her so that she would not change her mind. Or perhaps he wanted to keep it in reserve, to send the embassy if it became necessary. A week or so after “mailing” her letter, Alik told Marina that he had received a “reply” inviting the two of them to pay a visit to the embassy. There had been no such reply. In fact, he had not yet received a reply to the letter he had written more than a month earlier.

  Owald’s threat to invoke his relatives “to see about getting something done in Washington” led the embassy to seek advice from the Department of State. But there were other causes for delay, for technically, Oswald’s situation was a tricky one. The embassy first had to ascertain whether or not he was still an American citizen. His citizenship had not been revoked in 1959, embassy officials knew, but they had to make sure that Oswald had not taken any action in the USSR, such as assuming Soviet citizenship, to forfeit his standing as an American. Despite the fractious tone of his letters, the embassy sympathized with Oswald’s desire to leave Russia, and with the difficulties he might have in obtaining permission from the Minsk authorities to travel to Moscow. But it had to insist upon a personal interview and answers to questions about his status in the USSR. Then, and only then, could his American passport be returned to him. After that, he would be free to apply for a Soviet exit visa, and as an American citizen he had at least a chance of receiving it.

  Whether or not Oswald would be able to get one for himself—and for his Russian wife—was a question for Soviet authorities to decide. During the Stalin era, defectors to the Soviet Union who desired to return to their homelands invited
, at best, refusal and, at worst, imprisonment or even death, whatever the status of their citizenship. But this was the Khrushchev era, and no new policies had yet taken shape. There were no precedents, although there was a fair possibility that someone who had not assumed Soviet citizenship, was not needed in the USSR, and was not in a position to know secrets or possess particularly sensitive information about Soviet life might well be permitted to leave.

  Oswald’s concern at the moment, however, was not with the Soviet reaction to his request, but with the American. To him the embassy’s delay in responding to his application and its insistence on a personal interview meant only one thing. A trap was being laid for him, and he would be arrested the moment he passed through the embassy gates. Hence his insistence in all his letters that the embassy guarantee he would not be “persecuted”; i.e., prosecuted. The embassy could make no such guarantee. Its officials knew nothing of Oswald’s history in Russia or, for that matter, of his history in the United States before his defection. But they were required by rules of the Department of State to resolve any doubts about reentry in favor of an American citizen. Moreover, American embassies abroad have no procedure for arresting anyone. Oswald, who, a year and a half before, had known in detail the procedures for swearing an oath renouncing his citizenship, was ignorant of the facts that now concerned him most. Thus he was fearful and suspicious, but the tone of his letters was also full of bravado, as if he expected the embassy to give him everything he asked.

  During the first week of July, just after he learned of Marina’s pregnancy, Alik still had no word from the embassy, and his fears gave way to impatience. He decided to take his vacation and fly to Moscow.2 He did not inform the embassy he was coming.

  Before he left, Alik told Marina that he would telephone to let her know if she was needed. But on no account was she to say a word to Ilya or Valya about his absence. Above all, not a word about his going to the embassy. “If they find out and nothing comes of it,” he said, “they’ll only make fun of me.” Marina was baffled by her husband’s desire for secrecy since she supposed they had nothing to hide. Later, she realized that he was wary lest her uncle forbid her to go to the American embassy.

  Alik made no secret of his fears. He told Marina that the embassy was “entitled” to arrest him and might do so. Why? “I threw my passport on the table and said I didn’t want to be a citizen any more.” Thus their journey to the airport in the dawn hours of Saturday, July 8, was an anxious one. They ordered breakfast while waiting for his flight to be announced, but both were too nervous to eat. Alik was afraid he might never come back, might never see her again. But he tried to keep their courage up: “Don’t worry. Everything will be okay.” Incongruously, he added, “I’ll let you know if anything goes wrong.”

  Breakfast forgotten, Alik took Marina to a deserted corner of the waiting room, clutched her apprehensively by the hand, and kept repeating: “My God! It’s the first time we’ve ever been apart.” He was the last to board the plane. He led her to the gate, kissed her, to her great embarrassment, in full view of the woman dispatcher, then begged Marina to wait so that he could see her from the plane. He glanced back several times as he strode to the waiting aircraft, and Marina saw tears in his eyes. “He loves me,” she thought. “It’s hard for him to go.”

  “Is he your husband?” the dispatcher asked.

  Marina nodded.

  “Is it the first time you’ve been apart?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.”

  At two o’clock that afternoon Richard Snyder was eating lunch in his apartment in the American embassy. A forty-one-year-old, bespectacled Foreign Service officer with sharp, pointed features and an inquisitive air, Snyder had spent most of his career overseas and was known for his fluency in Russian. Like most members of the embassy staff, he lived as well as worked in the tight little compound on the Sadovoye Ring, Moscow’s biggest thoroughfare, which was forever reverberating with the traffic of heavy trucks. His apartment was on the second floor, directly over the consular office. The duty of a diplomat was literally never far away. But Dick and Anne Snyder were at the end of their two-year tour of duty. In three days, on July 11, they would be sailing from Leningrad for home.

  Suddenly, the telephone rang. Lee Harvey Oswald was calling from downstairs. Snyder remembered him immediately; he was one of the most obnoxious young men he had ever met. Snyder was not surprised that Oswald had tired of life in his adopted country, and the embassy was currently awaiting an opinion on his case from Washington. In keeping with the State Department’s recommended procedure of giving a possibly angry or unbalanced defector time to cool down before taking the irrevocable step of renouncing his citizenship, Snyder had put Oswald off during their stormy interview in November 1959, and Oswald had been so furious at the delay that he refused to set foot in the embassy again. Now he was back, and ironically, it was due to Snyder’s tactics, and the fact that Oswald had never officially renounced his citizenship, that he owed whatever chance he still had of returning to America. Yet Snyder had rather hoped, if he thought about it at all, that this particular “bad penny” would not turn up again until after the eleventh.3

  With a vague feeling of annoyance, Snyder stepped into the elevator and rode the single flight down to the lobby. He greeted Oswald with precisely calibrated coolness and led him directly to his office. There they chatted for a few minutes, and Snyder noticed that the young man seemed chastened compared to his behavior during their earlier encounter. He asked Oswald to return on Monday. Oswald left the embassy, and Snyder went back to his lunch. Once again, Oswald had chosen to appear unannounced on a Saturday, when the consular office was closed for business.

  Marina, meanwhile, was facing a dilemma of her own in Minsk. Although she had been married more than two months, some of her old beaux continued to call her at work, and she permitted it. Sasha, who had branded her a prostitute, had the nerve to telephone her there. So did Yury, the young man who had introduced her to Alik. Even Anatoly Shpanko called to ask if he might see her. But Marina had refused. With a pang of disappointment she felt that Anatoly had given her up too easily. He must not have loved her after all.

  Yet Marina had her regrets. Since her pregnancy she had felt a strange sexual aversion to her husband, and she wondered if she had made a mistake. During the third month of her marriage it was not Anatoly on whom her doubts converged but Leonid, her Jewish suitor of the summer before.

  On the morning of July 8, she went straight to the pharmacy after seeing her husband off. There she received a phone call from, of all people, Leonid, asking if he might see her. How on earth, she inquired, had he known her husband was out of town? “Sheer intuition,” he replied enigmatically. Marina agreed to meet him that evening. Halfhoping something might come of it, she went home after work and washed her hair. She took a nap, then rose and carefully put on her best dress. Perhaps the evening would show whether she had made a mistake getting married or not.

  Lonya certainly knew the script. He had an empty apartment at his disposal; he even had a bottle of French apéritif. Once they were in bed, however, his sophistication proved to be a matter of appearances only. He was making love to a woman, or trying to, for the first time. It was all over before it had begun. Marina was furious. She insisted on walking home by herself—at two o’clock in the morning.

  The following evening, Sunday, she went to the central post office to receive a long-distance telephone call. It was from Alik in Moscow. “I went to the embassy,” he told her with a breathless, conspiratorial air. “It was okay. They didn’t arrest me.” He wanted her to fly to Moscow the next morning. She was to call him at his hotel the moment her plane touched the ground.

  Marina now faced a new dilemma. She would have to get out of work for several days and must explain the reason for her absence, or under the regulations she would be fired. Yet Alik had commanded her to tell no one where he had gone. What excuse could Marina give? She decided to tell th
e truth. “Evgenia,” she told her supervisor over the telephone, “Alik’s been called to the embassy. He wants me to join him there.”

  Marina boarded the plane to Moscow on Monday morning, July 10.4 It was her first flight, and she was deliciously apprehensive. She threw up twice on the plane. From Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow she took a bus to Sverdlov Square, in the heart of town. Alik was there to meet her. “I missed you so!” he greeted her. “I had no idea I’d miss you so much in two days.” He rushed her to the Hotel Berlin, only three blocks away. Their room was filled with blue cornflowers, which he had bought to welcome her. They made love right away. “I feel as if we’d been apart for a year,” he said. There was a mirror at the foot of the bed, and he liked that very much indeed. Later he often said that he wanted a bedroom with mirrors on every side.

  Alik had an appointment that afternoon at the embassy.5 He was nervous as they careened up to the big boxlike fortress in a taxicab, for despite his easy reception by Richard Snyder two days before, he still thought he might be arrested. Marina had cause to be nervous, too, for without being aware of it, she, as a Soviet citizen, was forbidden to enter a foreign embassy without permission from her country’s authorities, which was practically unobtainable. Even though she was unaware that what she was doing might be dangerous, she was nonetheless apprehensive as they approached the building. What was her astonishment, then, when uniformed militiamen, far from stopping them to examine their papers, actually snapped to a stiff salute as they sauntered through the embassy gates. It was like going to a palace to be decorated, Marina thought, when you had done nothing to deserve it.

  Marina was wearing her best cotton dress and her wedding shoes, made in England, and the militiamen apparently took her for American. Indeed, whenever she saw anyone in the offices and corridors of the American embassy that afternoon, Marina’s eyes traveled as if magnetized to their feet. For no matter how clever a Soviet girl might be at procuring things from abroad, her shoes, her heavy Russian clodhoppers, seldom failed to give her away. The first person she saw was the pretty young receptionist who greeted them as they walked in the front door. The girl was so poised in manner and her hair so neatly done that Marina was thoroughly awed.