Her friends had no such compunctions. They urged him to bring it with him the next time they all went to the country, and he did. The day was dull and overcast, and although it was not yet the end of August, there was a hint of autumn in the air. The birches and aspen were turning yellow; the pine trees whispered overhead. The girls picked mushrooms and hazelnuts and built a fire under a canopy of pines. The boys went off in search of doves. There was a crack of rifles, and when they returned they were empty-handed, but joking and in obvious good spirits. Halfway through the shoot they had given up doves and looked for squirrels and rabbits. They claimed to have hit a few, but no one had been able to locate his prey. None of the boys mentioned whether Alik was a good or a poor shot.[4]
He did, in fact, belong to a gun club, a necessity to possess a gun in the USSR. And before he met Marina he had gone on a few outings. But he complained that the club held more meetings than outings, and after their marriage their expedition to the country was the only time he used his gun. Marina thought little about her husband’s having a gun; she supposed merely that it was one of those things men do.
When Alik and Marina were alone in the apartment, he spent a good deal of time on his writing. Marina calls everything he wrote his “diary,” but actually, in addition to the diary proper, he wrote letters home, a memo on his love affairs in Russia, and two essays, which he called “The Collective” and “The New Era.” When Marina first noticed that he was writing, in mid-July soon after their return from the American embassy, Alik was furtive and uncomfortable about it. The moment she came in the door, he snapped his folder shut and put the writing away. As time went on he grew accustomed to writing with Marina in the room but continued to show the old uneasiness if any of their friends came by. He would close his folder and quickly hide it, and Marina sensed that he was shifting uneasily in his chair, waiting for the visitor to go.
He wrote on a large pad and the pages were carefully numbered. The pad was in a yellow folder, which he kept on the topmost shelf of the kitchen, at the very back, behind a stack of suitcases and well out of Marina’s reach. Once she suggested that he keep it in a place that was easier to get at. Marina promised not to touch it. He refused: “You’ll give it to someone else to translate.”
Marina was, indeed, a little curious. She did not know English, but she was familiar with Latin script and had spotted her name and the names of other girls in the Diary. “I hope you’re writing nice things about your old girlfriends,” she teased. “It’s none of your business,” he snapped. Another time she asked him to translate a little of the diary aloud.
“I write in English so you won’t be able to read it.”
“Is it secret?” she asked.
“No. I just don’t like people reading my things.”
Marina decided to study English at the Institute of Foreign Languages. But Alik was not enthusiastic about the idea and refused to help her learn. “Study by yourself,” he told her. “Or study if we go to America.” Once she asked why he had not found a wife who knew English. He replied that he much preferred a wife who did not.
Alik’s diary sprawled over twelve large, handwritten pages, but he lavished much of his attention on “The Collective,” an ambitious fifty-page essay.[5] On the surface the essay is a description of the Minsk Radio Plant, loaded with facts and figures. At a deeper level, however, the radio plant is a metaphor for the whole of the Soviet Union, and the major theme is political control and how the Communist Party runs the country. The essay does not come off. It is not well organized, and the analogy between country and factory on which it depends breaks down. It is also biased by a rather special insight, the kind that is born of hostility. But although the handwriting is almost illegible and the spelling and punctuation erratic, it is thorough and thoughtful, and it reflects a good deal of work—by no means the work of someone stupid. The message that emerges is clear: Alik felt suffocated by the rigid controls that the Communist Party exercised over Soviet life.
While he was working on “The Collective,” Alik pelted Marina with questions: the retail prices of countless items, as well as details of Komsomol meetings she had been to. He also wanted to know the salary and rank of her Uncle Ilya, both of which, since Ilya held a sensitive post, were something of a secret to her. However, by discreet questioning of her Aunt Valya and the neighbors across the hall from the Prusakovs, she learned that Ilya was a full colonel of the MVD, to which rank he had only recently been elevated, and that his salary was nearly three hundred rubles (three hundred dollars) per month, though Valya claimed it was only two hundred.
Alik was probably planning to use Ilya’s salary, rank, and the size of his apartment in “The Collective,” to illustrate wage differentials and the role of privilege in the USSR. But Marina was apprehensive. She knew that her husband hoped to publish what he was writing, and she was afraid of the repercussions on her family. She asked Alik not to write about her or her relatives, and he complied.
In spite of his difficulties in expressing himself in his own language, due in part to his lack of education and in part to his reading disability, Alik’s spoken Russian was good. Before he came to the Soviet Union, he had studied the language by himself for two years with the help of a Berlitz grammar, and he was still at a loss. But by the time he met Marina, a year and a half later, his Russian was colloquial and idiomatic. He used, more or less correctly and with apparent ease, words she herself avoided because she thought them obscure. From this and from his conservative way of dressing, Marina, who is something of a language snob herself, inferred that he was better educated and from a higher social class than in fact he was.
Marina learned that her husband’s mastery of the language was largely due to the help of his coworkers at the radio plant. From the day he first appeared among them in January 1960, they took him into the courtyard after lunch and started in on his Russian. Seated in the sun in their shirtsleeves, they would pick up an insect and point to it. “Come on now, Alka,” they encouraged him, “what’s this little fellow here?,” and he would commit to memory the word for “ant.”
“They were really great,” he told Marina. “Each day they taught me a new word and went over the ones I’d learned already. They even taught me to swear.” Meanwhile, they laughed and joked with him and asked him questions about America. Since they had no English, he had to answer in Russian. It gave him the push he needed. He came home at night after that, took up his grammar books again, and really began making headway. He had other help, too, from his friend Erich and from a girl at the Foreign Languages Institute who helped him in Russian in return for his help with her English. But it was the men at the plant who got him going.
Marina was impressed by Alik’s Russian. What she liked best was his concision. He could say in three words what she would say in six. Both of them spoke in shorn-off, staccato phrases; Alik spoke English the same way, suggesting ideas rather than completing them. And while his English sounded abrupt and unschooled, perhaps, such speech in Russian was the fashion among the young.
Although she was proud of the way her husband spoke, Marina noticed weaknesses, too. She observed that he never read Russian for pleasure, and when he went to the public library, with the whole of Russian literature before him, he never took out a volume in Russian. Every day he bought a newspaper, Pravda or Izvestia or the Belorussian Communist Party paper. But he said they were boring—“They always say one and the same thing”—and most of the time he merely glanced at them. The only thing he claimed to read were the speeches of Nikita Khrushchev, which were colorful, frequent, and entertaining. They were a great source of knowledge about the country and were given, no doubt to Alik’s delight, to flaying one of his favorite enemies—the Soviet bureaucracy.
4
Oswald reported to his brother Robert: “I went hunting last weekend…. I shot a couple of birds with my single-barrel 15 gauge shotgun, but I couldn’t find them” (Exhibit No. 303, Vol. 16, p. 836). The letter was dated Monday, August 21, so the expedition must have taken place on Saturday or Sunday, August 19 or 20, 1961.
5
“The Collective” appears in Oswald’s handwriting in Exhibit Nos. 94–96, Vol. 16, pp. 347–421. For the version typed for Oswald in June 1962 by Miss Pauline Virginia Bates, a public stenographer in Fort Worth, Texas, see Exhibit No. 92, Vol. 16, pp. 285–336.