“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 even 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?
8
In an FBI interview dated February 28, 1964 (Warren Commission document number and declassification date not legible), the defector Yury Nosenko stated that the KGB had no objection to Marina’s leaving the USSR. This was a crucial determinant.