What of Alik? Why did he marry Marina? He acted for a variety of reasons, of which he himself appears to have been aware of only one. He confided to his diary that he was still in love with Ella Germann, the dark-haired Jewish girl at the factory who had rejected his proposal of marriage three months before. He was, he wrote, marrying Marina “to hurt Ella.”[4]
Of course, Marina herself played a part in his decision. She set her cap for Alik, and she won. From the outset, she showed just the right blend of eagerness and hesitation. She made him feel jealous with her many boyfriends; she made him feel wanted with her sympathetic visits to the hospital. Then, too, she came as part of a package, a family who made Alik feel welcome, and especially an aunt who may have reminded him of his own aunt in New Orleans, a female relative whom he genuinely cared about. Finally, Marina teased him sexually, exactly as an American girl of her age might have done. She led him on, made him desire her, then refused herself unless they were married. Alik could have searched the length and breadth of Russia and not found a girl as American in her sexual behavior as Marina. He, too, may have felt that she was exotic—yet somehow familiar.
But there were other, deeper reasons that enabled Alik, for the first time in his life, to think about marriage at all. Emotionally, he was freer than he had ever been before; free, that is, of his mother and the inner conflicts she incited in him. Thousands of miles from home, he had not written her in more than a year. Apparently, it was only at such enormous distance from Marguerite, emotionally as well as geographically, that he was able to summon up the strength to marry; that is, to replace her in his life.
While Alik’s distance from his mother may have been the principal key to his emotional wholeness at this time, it was not the only one. He was, in Russia, receiving tremendous support from his environment; a job from which he could not be fired, an apartment, his “Red Cross” subsidy. And in addition to the government’s munificence, he was on the receiving end of a great deal of generosity from the men and women he met. Left to themselves and unafraid, Russians are extraordinarily hospitable. They go out of their way to help the foreigner. Thus, in Russia Alik was liberated a little from the American myth of independence, the idea that it is a sin to be weak and in need. Russians do not feel that way. Their history has been far too studded with catastrophe, each family has suffered far too many random disasters, for people to cherish such illusions. Dependence is a reality of life—the weak simply accept succor from the strong. There is a huge amount of cheerful give and take.
Alik was deeply dependent—and he was ashamed of it. It was something he tried to deny, but in Russia he hardly had to bother. There, this quality of his received protective coloration—from his special needs as a foreigner, from the naturalness of giving and taking, and from the generosity of nearly everyone around him. And being camouflaged on the outside, his need was very nearly masked from Alik himself. Cradled and buttressed by Mother Russia, he was on more gracious terms with himself than he had ever been before.
Marina says that Alik was happy in her country, happier than he had ever been before and was ever to be again. He was receiving an enormous emotional subsidy from everything and everyone around him. But for all that Mother Russia was giving him, it was not enough, for his dependence was bottomless. He disliked his job as a manual laborer, he disliked the dull provincial city of Minsk. He wanted to continue his education, but thus far Soviet authorities had taken no action on his request to attend the Patrice Lumumba University of Friendship of Peoples in Moscow to study as a full-time student—not technical subjects, but economics, philosophy, and his real forte, so he believed, politics. He was no longer interested in Soviet citizenship and had already made the opening moves in his campaign to return to the United States. It is paradoxical that just as he was courting Marina, preparing to accept her as his future wife and acting positively to meet his needs, he was also planning to reject her homeland, the country that had given him the energy and inner coherence to marry in the first place.
For more than a year, no one at the American embassy in Moscow had known the whereabouts, or the fate, of Lee Harvey Oswald. Then in February of 1961, the embassy received a letter from him postmarked Minsk.[5] Oswald accused the embassy first of ignoring an earlier letter, which he had in fact not written; then he stated his desire to return to the United States, “that is if we could come to some agreement concerning the dropping of any legal proceeding’s [sic] against me”; and reminded the embassy of its obligations toward him as an American citizen, although it was by no means certain that he was one. Despite his attempt to renounce his citizenship, and his fear that he might have committed some crime for which he could be prosecuted, he acted as if he expected the very best from the embassy and the American government.
Oswald also stated that he was applying by letter rather than in person because he could not leave Minsk without permission. That permission might easily have been obtained, but the authorities would have been alerted that he intended to visit the American embassy. Oswald preferred not to tip his hand to the Russians until he was certain of his reception by the Americans. Actually, the letter did alert police officials in Moscow of Oswald’s intention, and his subsidy from the Red Cross was stopped immediately. But it was many months before the authorities in Minsk became aware that their American wanted to go home.
The embassy’s reply, dated February 28, 1961, asked Oswald to appear in person for an interview.[6] But puzzled by Oswald’s reference to “legal proceeding’s,” the American consul, Richard Snyder, in a dispatch to the State Department the same day, inquired whether Oswald might have to face prosecution on his return, and, if so, could Snyder be frank and tell him so? If it became clear that Oswald had committed no expatriating act, Snyder added, he would be inclined to return the boy’s American passport to him through the open mails.[7]
Since the case was not an urgent one, Snyder had to wait for a reply. The answer, when it came, was that the department had no way of knowing whether Oswald might have violated some state or federal law and was in no position to issue guarantees. Nor was the embassy under any circumstances to return Oswald’s passport to him through the Soviet mails.[8]
Oswald was overjoyed by the embassy’s reply, and on March 12, five days before his first meeting with his future wife, he wrote a new letter.[9] It was quite as impertinent as the first. “I find it inconvenient to come to Moscow for the sole purpose of an interview,” he wrote. Requesting instead that the embassy send him a questionnaire, he ended the letter petulantly. “I understand that personal interview’s undoubtedly make work of the Embassy staff lighter, than written correspondence, however, in some case’s other means must be employed.”
Snyder’s reply, dated March 24 and carefully drafted to enable Oswald to use it to obtain the necessary permission to travel to Moscow, again requested that he appear in person.[10] And there, for the moment, the matter rested. Alik Oswald was caught up in his courtship and forthcoming marriage, a marriage that appears to have been incompatible with any firm desire to leave Russia. He was happier now and not so lonely. Perhaps he was wavering in his plan, but he had not forgotten.