All through the fall, America was very much on Alik’s mind. He pored through copies of Time magazine that began to arrive in bundles from his mother in Texas, issues that were full of stories and pictures of the Kennedys, and of another public figure who was to become important in Alik’s life, Major General Edwin A. Walker. Still there was no word from the Soviet authorities, and Alik made visits to three Soviet government offices in Minsk to inquire about the progress of their visas: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Office of Visas and Registration (OVIR) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. They could tell him nothing. He began to complain in letters to his brother Robert about the slothfulness of Russian bureaucrats, suggesting that his rights under international law were being violated, protesting the American embassy’s lack of interest in his case and stating his determination not to stay in the USSR a single moment beyond the first of the year (his Soviet residence permit was due to expire on January 4). His complaints were designed not so much to impress Robert as the Soviet officials whom he presumed to be reading his mail. But there were signs of uncertainty and hints in his letters that Alik was aware that life would not be so easy when he got back home. On one occasion he wrote Robert: “Its not going to be to convient to come back to the States and try to start life over again.”[6]
Meanwhile, an event of great public magnitude had occurred, an event that Alik soon saw was to have a bearing on his life. While Marina was on vacation in Kharkov, the Twenty-Second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party opened in the Kremlin in Moscow, and a new wave of “de-Stalinization” got under way. Stalin’s body was removed from its marble mausoleum on Red Square, and Khrushchev began to move away from the alliance with China and toward better relations with the United States. As his friends Pavel and Ziger probably suggested to Alik, it was a hopeful omen as far as his and Marina’s visas were concerned.
A week or so after her return from Kharkov, Marina was trudging home from work one night through Stalin Square, a vast, cobblestoned area in the center of Minsk, when she noticed with mild surprise that a space the size of a city block had been roped off around the gigantic statue of the dead dictator that towered over the square. Later that night, houses trembled and shook to the heavy tread of tanks and trucks as they rolled through the city streets and took up position around the statue. By morning a high fence had gone up to conceal the tanks.
Of course there was talk at the pharmacy. “They’ll never get it down with chains and tanks,” one of Marina’s coworkers said. “It’s too big. They’ll have to use dynamite.”
The next night Marina was wakened out of a sound sleep by a series of loud explosions. She sat bolt upright in bed. “Do you hear?” she nudged Alik. “Is it war?”
“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.
7
Oswald was so impressed by the demolition of Stalin’s monument in Minsk that he wrote the second of the two essays he composed in Russia. Titled “The New Era,” it briefly describes the destruction of the “10 ton bronze figure of a man revered by the older generation and laughted at by the sarcastic younger generation.” He ends, however, on a pessimistic note: “But Bellerussia as in Stalin’s native Georgia is still a stronghold of Stalinism, and a revival of Stalinism is a very, very, possible thing in those two republics” (Exhibit No. 96, Vol. 16, p. 421).