Reclaiming History (146 page)

That all mail sent to every embassy in Moscow was intercepted, read, and possibly photographed was no secret—Richard Snyder told the Warren Commission in 1964 that “every embassy there knows the system and operates within it. All mail from or to a foreign embassy in Moscow goes to a separate section of the Moscow Post Office called the international section, and this is the screening office for all mail to and from any embassy.”
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It is interesting that Oswald had already requested help in returning to the United States even before he proposed to Ella German, although he never intimated that to her. It is also interesting that the KGB already knew that he wanted to return to the United States when it called him to the Passport Office and asked him whether he still wanted Soviet citizenship, although it is possible that the KGB branch responsible for intercepting the embassies’ mail in Moscow had not yet told the KGB office in Minsk about the letter.

Oswald’s second letter, the one from February, not only got through to the American embassy, it got results, though delayed. Snyder, who, as indicated, had not heard from Oswald since November of 1959 and had no idea of his whereabouts since then, wrote back to Oswald about two weeks after receiving his letter (“Mr. Oswald had no claim to any unusual attention of mine,” he would later say) to say that Oswald would have to appear at the embassy personally to discuss a return to the United States. “Inasmuch as the question of your present American citizenship status can be finally determined only on the basis of a personal interview,” Snyder wrote, “we suggest that you plan to appear at the Embassy at your convenience.”
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That same day, Snyder wrote to the State Department to report on Oswald and included Oswald’s address in Minsk as taken from the envelope containing his letter. He also suggested that State might want to forward Oswald’s address in Minsk to Marguerite, who was increasingly frantic about her son’s disappearance, even enlisting the services of her Fort Worth congressman, Jim Wright, and, as previously noted, U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter, but up until now they had been unable to help her locate Lee. In the bitterest of ironies, on January 26, 1961, Marguerite had even gone to Washington, D.C., in the hope of moving the newly elected administration of John F. Kennedy to locate her son in the Soviet Union, undoubtedly so she could try to induce him to come back to the United States. After asking to see President Kennedy and told he was in a conference, she asked to see the new secretary of state, Dean Rusk, who, she was told, was also tied up in a conference. She kept persisting, however, and finally found someone, in fact three people, willing to listen to her at the State Department: representatives of the Passport Office, Office of Special Consular Services, and the Office of Soviet Union Affairs. Typically, she had developed a conspiracy theory regarding her son’s disappearance. She thought Lee had gone to the Soviet Union as a “secret agent” and that the State Department was not doing enough to help him. Perhaps even more typically, she thought she might be able to make some money out of this. She told the three State Department officials that she was destitute and should receive some compensation from the appropriate authorities. The officials hastened to assure her that they had no reason to believe that Lee had gone to the USSR as an “agent,” but they did offer to do what they could to locate him. A few days later, on February 1, they sent a new instruction to the American embassy in Moscow to seek the help of the Soviet Foreign Ministry to locate Oswald.
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The riddle was finally solved when Oswald’s letter from Minsk arrived on the thirteenth of that month.

Oswald sent another letter postmarked March 5, which reached the embassy only on March 20. He once again noted that, as a resident alien, he was unable to leave Minsk without permission, and therefore asked that “preliminary inquiries…be put in the form of a questionaire” and sent to him. He did not want to be in a position of “abusing” his “position” in Minsk.
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He wrote a diary entry covering the first two weeks in March and noted, “I now live in a state of expectation about going back to the U.S.,” but he also “confided with Zeger he supports my judgment but warnes me not to tell any Russians about my desire to reture [return]. I understade now why.”
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The last remark, otherwise unexplained, may have to do with the fact that his monthly payments from the Soviet “Red Cross” were cut off, effectively halving his income. Although he had not approached any Soviet authorities about returning to the United States, he did not think it was a coincidence that the Red Cross subsidy ceased as soon as he started to correspond with the U.S. embassy in Moscow to come home.
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The embassy responded to Oswald’s letter on March 24, insisting that he would indeed have to come to Moscow. Richard Snyder suggested he show the embassy’s letter to the Russian authorities and ask for permission to travel to Moscow, which he felt would be granted since it was not the Soviet government’s policy to raise obstacles to foreign citizens visiting their embassies.
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Meanwhile, on March 17 Oswald went to a dance organized by his trade union at the Palace of Culture for Professional Workers with his pal Erich Titovets. His diary entry for March 17 describes what turned out to be a red-letter day: “Boring but at the last hour I am introduced to a girl with a French hair-do and red-dress with white slipper I dance with her. than ask to show her home I do, along with 5 other admirares [admirers] Her name is Marina. We like each other right away she gives me her phone number and departs home with an not-so-new freiend in a taxi, I walk home.”
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Marina Prusakova was born in Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk), a village about thirty miles from Archangel, a seaport in the northwestern part of the Soviet Union, on July 17, 1941, less than two months after the German invasion of Russia.
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For reasons she does not know, her mother, Klavdia Prusakova, was unable to marry her father, and she would use her mother’s last name until she married. Marina was born two months prematurely and weighed only a little over two pounds. It was a while before it became certain that she would survive at all, but when she did, Klavdia, a twenty-three-year-old laboratory worker, took her into Archangel and turned her over to Klavdia’s mother, Tatyana Yakovleuna Prusakova, who would rear Marina until she was almost six. Like Lee, but for different reasons, Marina would later say, “I had no father. I never knew him.”
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Although the war brought disaster to much of eastern Russia, there was no combat around Archangel itself, and Marina’s memories of the medium-sized, woodsy city with some cobblestone streets on the White Sea were mainly pleasant. Her grandmother doted on her, and her mother’s sister Lyuba lived with them in a clean and relatively spacious three-room apartment. Tatyana’s husband, Vasily Prusakov, was the captain of a Soviet commercial vessel working overtime on the resupply of the Soviet Union. Unlike Murmansk, the only other usable port in northwestern Russia, Archangel’s river and harbor froze for about six months of the year, but it was kept open by ice breakers, and, with the major port of Leningrad under siege and most land routes cut, the town was vital to the war effort. Vasily was seldom home during those years. Marina recalled, though, tasting Spam from America and special treats—peppermint sticks or gingerbread—sent to her by another aunt, Taisya, who worked as an accountant on a commercial ship that traveled between Russia and the United States.
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In 1942, Marina’s mother married a wounded soldier named Alexander Medvedev, but Marina never saw him until 1945, after the war, and then she was under the impression that he was her real father. Medvedev and Marina’s mother went off to live in Murmansk, while Marina continued to live with her grandmother until her grandfather finally came home to die of throat cancer. Marina then joined her parents in Murmansk, where her half brother Pyotr was born in 1945.
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In 1947, the family moved to Zguritza, a small rural village in Moldavia, a largely agricultural province of the Soviet Union wedged between Rumania and the Ukraine. There, her mother had another daughter, Tanya.
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In 1952, the family moved to Leningrad, where Marina’s stepfather, an electrical worker, obtained a job in a power plant.
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In 1955, when Marina completed the seventh grade, she convinced her mother, who was very frail and ill at the time, and who knew that when she passed on Marina would have to stand alone without her, to let her enter a pharmacy school (Pharmacy Technikum). She told her mother the white coats pharmacists wore and the extremely clean shops in which they worked greatly appealed to her. In November 1957, when she was in her second year, Marina received a terrible shock. From a school friend whose aunt was friendly with Klavdia, Marina learned that she was illegitimate. As indicated, she had begun by believing that Medvedev was her father. She later thought that her real father had been killed in the war, and now, finally, she learned that an unknown father had never married her mother. Klavdia refused to provide details, only telling Marina, from her sickbed, “Not now. I’ll tell you when you’ve grown up a bit.” All Marina ever found out about her real father came from her school friend, who knew only that he had been an engineer denounced as an enemy of the people when he was blamed (possibly framed) for drawing up a faulty blueprint for a bridge or some other public project. As happened all too frequently in the Soviet Union during those years, he had simply vanished forever. Marina would never even learn his last name. Although about one in five of the children born in the late 1930s and early 1940s in Russia were illegitimate, Marina took the news very hard. It seemed to italicize her feelings of worthlessness. She desperately wanted to believe—but was never able to find out—that her mother’s relationship with her father had been a serious one, that she had not resulted from an unloving and brief sexual tryst.
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Marina’s mother died of cancer in April of 1957 after a long, agonizing struggle. Marina was fifteen, and she continued to live with her stepfather, his mother, and her half brother and half sister. But she didn’t get along with her stepfather, who had never adopted her, Marina being too willful and difficult to discipline for him.
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There was another problem.

Marina’s stepfather was of the firm opinion that she was leading a very loose life morally in Leningrad. The day after her mother’s funeral, he said to her, “And when will you be taking yourself out of here?” Later, he would put it even more bluntly: “You’re not my daughter. I’m under no obligation to feed you.” She stayed, but the situation at home became worse and eventually Alexander and his mother told Marina she could no longer take her meals with the family.
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Marina undertook to feed herself at home. Since her birth certificate listed no father and her mother was dead, she qualified for a small orphan’s pension worth about sixteen dollars a month. In addition, she had her student’s stipend of about eighteen dollars a month. Over the year-end holidays, she took a job delivering telegrams, and somehow she managed to squeak by. But she was much on her own and began to live what was, by the puritanical standards of Leningrad in the late 1950s, something of a wild life, going to many parties and frequently coming home very late. She continued in school but became, not surprisingly, apathetic. The long day was too much for her—six hours of school and four hours of practical work in the pharmacy. She began to cut classes. Her grades plummeted, so much so that by the middle of the year her student’s stipend was withdrawn and she had to get by on her pension and whatever her grandmother Tatyana could send her from Minsk, where Tatyana had since moved to live with her son Ilya and his wife. Just two weeks before Marina’s examinations she was expelled for “academic faults and systematic non-attendance at class.”

Emaciated and often ill, Marina found a somewhat informal job at a “commission shop” where a friend was a deputy director. This was not unlike a pawnshop, a place where goods from abroad or before the revolution were sold on commission. The shop was frequented by the young Estonians and Latvians who worked in the Soviet commercial fleet and who brought in foreign shoes, cigarettes, and clothes for resale. Many were eager to ask her out, and by accepting she found a solution to the problem of feeding herself. She later recalled one two-week period during which she had eaten dinner every night in one or the other of the best hotel restaurants in Leningrad.
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In this rendition of her life in Leningrad that Marina gave author Priscilla McMillan, who studied Marina more than anyone ever has and wrote the definitive book on her relationship with Oswald, she speaks of many dates and relationships, but never of losing her virginity, though she said she was willing with one young man, and another attempted to rape her.
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But when an interviewer for author Norman Mailer said to her he had been told she felt very bad about her life in Leningrad, “and that you had to resort to things to survive, to eat,” she responded, “I never once in my life was paid money,” which certainly implies a rather loose sexual life, and a rather loose one for a girl still in her teens, particularly in morally strict Russia. But then Marina added, “I was looking for love in some wrong places and sometimes I had to pay for that. I actually was raped by a foreigner [presumably the same incident in which she told McMillan there had only been an attempt]…He threw me against him. He said, ‘Well, if I knew you were a virgin, I would not have touched you,’” a statement that tends to confirm, if this was near the end of her Leningrad years, that she in fact had not been sexually promiscuous.
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Whether warranted or not, what has hurt Marina’s reputation through the years perhaps more than anything else is her own acknowledgment to author Priscilla McMillan that one time during the heated apex of her life in her stepfather’s home after the demise of her mother, he said to her, “Don’t come to me bringing a baby in your skirts…I don’t want any prostitutes around me.”
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That pejorative word has stuck, and most likely unfairly. Indeed, even if Marina had been sexually promiscuous in Leningrad (and, the evidence does not appear clear one way or the other), as author Gus Russo points out, “In many cultures, a beautiful woman who likes to have carnal fun is often [erroneously] branded a prostitute.”
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