Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  “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 eve
n 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.

  — 11 —

  Birth of June

  Marina and Alik were in splendid spirits when they went to the Zigers’ on New Year’s Eve. They found Mrs. Ziger alone in the kitchen and told her the good news. She kissed them and confessed that she had prayed for this every night. “Maybe, next year,” she added softly, “we will have news, too. Maybe, after all, we shall see one another again.” If life was hard in America, if they suffered disappointments there, go to Argentina, she said. “And if you don’t like it there, go somewhere else. Go anywhere in the world. But never, ever come back here.”

  That night the Oswalds told none of the other guests of their good fortune. They were Russians, after all, and it might be an affront to their sensibilities. So they were silent. They ate Spanish rice and Mrs. Ziger’s Polish nut cookies, and Alik danced with no one but Marina. He was in as triumphantly happy a mood as she had ever seen him. He even got a little tipsy.

  Pavel Golovachev was the only other friend with whom they shared their good news. He let out a low whistle. “Hm,” he said, “I never thought they’d let Marina out.” To him it meant that things were easing up, and that life might soon be better, not only for those who were allowed to go but for those who were left behind.

  Once their
visas had been granted, Alik began a flurry of correspondence with the American embassy. The problem now was Marina. The embassy needed several documents to back up her application for an immigrant’s visa to enter the United States, among them an affidavit of support or some other proof that she would not become a public charge. Alik had no job waiting for him, and no proof that he could support a wife. Twice in the first half of January, the embassy suggested to Oswald, who was touchy enough at the best of times and very sensitive on this point, that he precede his wife to the United States.1 There, he could find a job and obtain the documents he needed. Alik was outraged—“I certainly will not consider going to the US alone for any reason.”2

  Although this had been his position from the start, the embassy letters gave rise to an angry scene with Marina. She was furious and hurt. She thought the embassy did not want her in the United States and she was not going to be allowed in. She stomped into the kitchen, stood on a chair, plucked her husband’s suitcase off its shelf, and proceeded to pack it for him. “There,” she pointed in fury. “What are you still doing here? There’s your suitcase. There are your things. Take it and go to your America!”

  Alik turned the suitcase upside down, dumped the contents on the sofa and the floor, put it back on the shelf in the kitchen, and placed an arm around his wife. “Look,” he said, “I know you don’t love me. But I love you, and I’m not going to leave without you.”

  It all ended rather nicely, so both found occasion to repeat the scene. Alik sometimes taunted her: “If it hadn’t been for you, I could have gone to America long ago.” Marina was ready with a reply: “The only reason you’re waiting for me is—you’re afraid they’ll arrest you if you’re alone.”

  “No,” he said. “The reason I’m going to wait is, if I go first you’ll never come. Your Aunt Polina and Aunt Valya and Uncle Ilya will keep you here and never let you go. We’ll all go together. And if you don’t get your visa, I’ll stay here.”