Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

  Everyone in his family was scared. How many people would find out that it was Ilya’s niece who was involved in Kennedy’s assassination?

  At this time, he and Valya had an apartment with three rooms. They were only two people living in a three-room apartment. So, shortly after President Kennedy’s assassination, everyone started to blame them, began to say they lived in too luxurious a place. That was not true. Just a nice apartment with a lot of books. There was even an article in one newspaper that Ilya was a Communist Party member and lived in a more privileged way than other people. Valya said, “My husband was very honest. So, when this one man from Byelorussian Star, a military paper, came to us and then wrote an article—‘Look at these two people, they live in this luxurious apartment’—Ilya decided to move. Some of our neighbors said, ‘Don’t hurry. Wait. Something will change,’ but Ilya said, ‘No, I don’t want my name to be used in this way; I don’t want to know this type of shame,’” and so we moved to a two-room apartment.”

  On the other hand, five people were given the old three-room apartment. So, says Valya, maybe that was fair.

  Ilya never showed what it cost—he still remained interested in painting and in books, his second hobby. He kept buying new sets of books and lining every wall of his apartment with them. You couldn’t say he lost interest in literature.

  Among Ilya Prusakov’s collected sets of Russian authors in five to twenty volumes were Tolstoy, Petrov, Lermontov, Kuprin, Nekrasov, Adamov, Bunin, Ilya Ehrenburg, Chekhov, Alexei Tolstoy and Konstantin Simonov, Turgenev, Pushkin, Sholokhov, and Dostoyevsky. In collected sets translated into Russian were Jules Verne, Swift, Emily Dickinson, Romain Rolland, Zola, Dreiser, Balzac, Hugo, de Maupassant, Rabindranath Tagore, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Heine, Feuchtwanger, Stendhal, Steinbeck, Boccaccio, Prosper Mérimée, Galsworthy, Proust, and Jack London.

  Thirty years later, in 1992, Valya and Marina spoke on the phone. They cried, and Marina said, “I understand that you were very upset about Ilya and all that happened to him after I left, but you know, Ilya didn’t die when I left—he was eighty years old at the end, and I became a widow with two children when I was twenty-two.”

  After Ilya’s death, in 1989, Valya was going through his papers and discovered that he had a collection of nude pictures. Professional photographers had taken them; they were postcard size. Something he had bought. But she was philosophical about it. She said to herself, “Of course, every man has a secret life. That’s why he’s a man.” And then, in her heart, she said to herself, “I allow him everything. I allow him to like young women.”

  When Kennedy was assassinated, Ella was waiting to be asked, “Come to our KGB office. Sit down and give us your information.” But she was never approached.

  Ella remarked that she could invent stories now: “It’s very fashionable to say, ‘I was abused by the Organs. They ruined my life.’ It’s very high style to have been approached by them and suffer.” She says she could invent a story, but she’d rather tell the truth. She was not approached.

  After the assassination she had worried that they would come, and she did live in fear—kept thinking they were going to ask her to come in—but nobody did. Now that she thinks about it, she would say she might have had friends who were approached. From what she’s learned since, she believes Lee must have been watched constantly, and she thinks she must have been watched, too. But since there were only two of them, she thinks Pavel must have been more interesting, because Pavel brought people to meet Lee. She was always alone with him, so maybe she was of less interest.

  As for whether Alik was guilty of assassination, she cannot believe that. “He was so gentle,” she says.

  Sometime around the end of March of 1962, Kostya’s uncle, Professor Bondarin, told him that he was living the wrong kind of life in relation to women. Moreover, it was not considered proper that he had a pornography collection. His uncle told him, “If you don’t want to be expelled, stop chasing skirts.” And Kostya had to destroy all his French postcards and his diary. He was keeping a purple diary at this point, where he maintained a brief record of personal events whose references nobody but himself could understand—he had never written “Marina,” for example, only “M.”

  When the assassination occurred, Kostya was summoned to KGB, and so too, he is certain, were his friends. They all went in different directions afterward, and didn’t have anything to do with each other. This was years after Stalin’s time, ten years later, but contact with the Organs evoked fear. They could take you somewhere. You might not return home.

  His own family had suffered. In the Thirties. During the civil war, his grandfather had served as an officer in Tukhachevsky’s army, so naturally, when they arrested that General in the late Thirties, this affected his grandfather as well. Kostya grew up hearing about interrogations conducted in Stalin’s time.

  So when Kostya walked through the front door of the building, his legs were weak. But, actually, it proved to be only a short conversation: What sort of relationship had he had with Alik, and had he corresponded with Alik and Marina? He was able to reply in the negative. They did not ask him whether he had ever slept with Marina. This man who was interrogating him sat down at a desk and Kostya stood. There was someone else present, also in civilian clothes, but Kostya didn’t know whether he was taking notes or not—never dared to look in that direction.

  The man questioning him wanted to know if Kostya possessed photographs of Alik and Marina. He had had a few, but by now they were ashes in his stove.

  Because Yuri and Kostya and Sasha had been certain that there was official surveillance of Alik and Marina after those two made a decision to go to America, they stopped visiting them. But Erich didn’t. He remained Oswald’s friend. Could it be, the American interviewers now asked Kostya, that Titovets had had some special relation to Oswald? To which Kostya replied that Erich had managed to keep everything he wrote during that period. Everyone else had his papers confiscated or took pains to destroy them, so Kostya was surprised when Erich said, “You all ran. You hid like a bunch of cowards and threw everything overboard.” But, Kostya asked, why was Erich so brave? One could only guess how he had been able to keep his papers.

  In any case, it seems to Kostya that, in this period after the assassination, Erich should have been shaken like a pear tree. Yet, he got out of it; nothing really happened to him, even though he had had the closest relationship with Alik.

  As for his present opinion of Oswald, Igor Ivanovich said, “Lee was the scum of society, a person spoiled from the cradle, so to say. Not serious. Inconstant. Something was probably wrong with his state of mind.”

  Igor Ivanovich was asked, “After the assassination, you must have felt bad?”

  And he replied, “Bad? I felt horrible. In fact, it was the worst moment of my life.”

  When asked if KGB had interrogated any of their prime sources after the assassination, Igor Ivanovich suddenly became emotional. He looked as if he might burst into tears. He did not answer the question. Instead, he cried out: “Everybody blames me for this! It was as if I knew he would shoot.” After a minute or two, he added, “We had no data. You could not find one single person from Minsk who would say, ‘Yes, Oswald had these intentions to go back to America and cause all this trouble.’”

  He and Stepan had tried to consider where they could have failed. Their inner fear: “What if the preparation of this action commenced in Minsk?” They were considering everything.

  Then he added, “Quite frankly, we were not worried about public opinion in America. We worried about what Moscow would say once we sent them Oswald’s file. Would they consider our job well done or poor? That was what we worried about.”

  When Stepan Vasilyevich heard the announcement on the radio, his second thoughts, after first saying to himself, “It’s impossible!” were more complex. As more news arrived from various broadcasts, he came to a conclusion that Oswald could not have done it alone. Oswald had been sucked
into it somehow. Because a single fact was being exploited—that Oswald had been in the Soviet Union. A convenient shield for certain people! “Their mass media started blaming everything on our Soviet Union. My opinion is that it was all sewn together with white threads. To cover their tracks in this crime.”

  When asked how long it took for word to come from Moscow that they wanted Oswald’s file, Stepan’s reply was that Moscow Center’s request came late on that night of November 22. Igor Ivanovich was given an order, and he told Stepan to take Likhoi’s file to Moscow. Gather it together and leave.

  No preparations were necessary. Both men knew Oswald’s materials well, and the file had been stored in the archives of their building. So, all Stepan had to do was take it out, put it in a sack, sign for it, and leave. He used a gray mailbag, the kind used for sending quantities of mail, and the file was not large enough to fill it.

  Then, Stepan flew to Moscow on November 23, and arrived at Lyubertsy Airport, accompanied by another KGB man from Minsk, who was armed. It was not a regular flight, since Moscow wanted it quickly, but there were two seats open on a military plane.

  When asked if he was very nervous, he said, “I don’t think so. I didn’t feel any guilt. I was pure as crystal. What could I be afraid of? Of course, it was a tragic situation. But being nervous, hands shaking, so forth—why? I was flying to our Center in Moscow with a clean conscience. I didn’t have any excessive emotions or anything like that. I just thought about what sort of questions they would ask. And I had only one answer: Oswald did not have any undisclosed relation to our agency. What worried me more was whether official people would be there to meet me at Lyubertsy Airport because, otherwise, how would I get to Moscow on public transport?”

  He did not have to worry. Official people greeted him right away, introduced themselves, showed their identification, and they all drove off. It was an overcast day, but no rain, no snow. Gray.

  They went to the main building, to Lubyanka, drove directly into the edifice, and were received by higher-ups. Stepan thought it might be the Assistant Director of KGB. He didn’t know these high officers personally. It was his first visit to Moscow Center, and this legendary building, Lubyanka, was full of labyrinths. He had to follow closely behind whoever was walking in front of him, down endless narrow halls. A thin red carpet ran the entire length of each long hall.

  Later he would go to Lubyanka many times on business trips, so he was able to find his way along some of these halls, but he can’t say he ever got it all down. You could go there and go there and still get lost. If he had to get out of that building on his own, he might lose his way. From the exterior, it was a large building of yellow stone, but inside it was strange, with these narrow corridors. In Minsk, their corridors were wide and you could walk more freely.

  When he finally was led to the appropriate office, several people were waiting for him in a reasonably large room, but there wasn’t anything on their table. He doesn’t know if it was in their American Division or some other department, but Stepan merely said, “According to your instructions, our file on Oswald is now delivered.” And they said, “Good, just leave it here.”

  Their first question came: “Did you attempt to recruit Oswald?” He said, “You can cut off my head, but not only did we not try to, this very thought did not even enter our minds. Read these documents. It’s very clear in which direction we were working. In accordance with your instructions.”

  He looked at them and noticed that they practically sighed with relief. He wasn’t worried about their believing him, because the documents made it clear what kind of work they had been doing. You couldn’t falsify something like that. Of course, Stepan was somewhat disturbed, but he had no large fears. These documents made it clearly visible how they had been conducting their operation.

  Afterward, when slanders concerning the Soviet Union kept circulating, he thought maybe Nikita Sergeivich Khrushchev would give these files to the American government. All these American rumors would then burst like a soap bubble. But it didn’t happen.

  On this day, at this meeting on November 23, 1963, they invited him to sit down; they were polite. He remembers he even tried to stand up, and they said, “Sit down, sit down,” but there was nothing on their table, no tea. He doesn’t recall whose picture was on the wall, maybe it had been Dzherzhinsky, but no flag—that, he would have noticed. And the room was brightly lit. The last thing they said was, “Leave this file. And thank you. Your mission is over. We’ll organize a return ticket for you.”

  He took a regular night train back to Minsk with the same fellow he had taken off with. Before leaving, they strolled around Moscow and went shopping. He bought something for his children.

  On his return trip, Stepan didn’t have special thoughts. If Oswald had been CIA, he could not have done any more in Minsk than gather information in a contemplative way, not manifesting anything, not being an active agent. He could have studied Soviet life, and then disclosed such information later in America. Such a version could not be excluded. As much could be said for any foreigner who spent two years in the Soviet Union. “Besides, when Oswald came to Minsk in January 1960, Kennedy wasn’t yet elected President. So, Oswald could not have been sent with such a goal in mind.”

  If Stepan had any troubled thoughts on his return trip, therefore, it was not over his own performance. He explored various scenarios, thoughts came into his head, various versions appeared, but in the end he said to himself, “Ach, it’s time to go to bed. Americans cooked it up. Let them figure it out.”

  When he got home, which was Sunday morning, it was still Saturday night in Dallas, so Oswald would not be ambushed by Ruby for another ten hours; about six in the afternoon on Sunday in Minsk is when Stepan would receive that word. When he returned, therefore, on Sunday morning around eight o’clock, the first thing he did was go to his home to shave. Leaving in such a hurry for Moscow, he had not taken his toilet kit. He washed, then had something to eat and went straight to work, where he reported to his superiors. People, of course, were talking about it in the building. Everyone was listening to radios. Even then, a lot of his colleagues did not know he had worked on this case, but everyone’s opinion was stirred up. After all, it was a shadow on Minsk.

  People who knew Oswald immediately said Alik couldn’t have done it. So said people who knew him.

  Even many people who didn’t have contact with the fellow didn’t believe it: We’re getting along with America a little bit better, so now all this business?

  They didn’t do further analysis. Their file was in Moscow; they didn’t have materials. Besides, what could they have analyzed any further? When the file came back from Moscow some twenty-seven years later, nothing had been removed or commented upon; everything was there as he recalled it, certified and signed by him. Stepan was asked why then had Igor Ivanovich reacted so strongly as to say, “Everyone blames me,” but Stepan indicated that Igor was a more sensitive person than he was.

  2

  Veracity

  The bulk of the interviews in Minsk had been completed, but the interviewers still had one large problem. It was whether to give any credence to Yuri Merezhinsky’s account of his relations with Marina. If she was anywhere near as promiscuous as he stated, then all interpretations of her life with Lee Harvey Oswald would be colored by such information: It would suggest a different subtext to her marriage than what had emerged from her account of their difficulties.

  Kostya Bondarin had, of course, been dubious of Yuri’s claims, but then, he was only one witness. The real question must be whether Yuri was a liar of dramatic proportions or was telling some kind of truth—exaggerated, perhaps, by the intensity of his presentation, but still not unpossessed of its own veracity.

  So, the interviewers went back to Yuri Merezhinsky one more time, which is to say that they asked him to come to Minsk from his sanatorium several hundred kilometers away and subject himself to an interview about his experiences after the assassination, to whi
ch he complied, and met them at his mother’s apartment, had his vodka, and talked. Given his personal style, which consisted of dictating the content of the interview from his own point of view rather than responding particularly to most of the questions, he began by speaking of his parents:

  Very important people, he would say. He waved a finger in warning. Let nothing in the air be ready to disagree! Very important people, he repeated, but all the same, obedient! When they received their big Soviet encyclopedia and an order followed years later to cut out certain pages because they were now historically incorrect, his father obeyed. Yuri’s parents were not average people, but still, they were afraid. For example, his father kept a private diary, yet even his own pages were not truthful. They never mentioned that every day Yuri was asked to go over to KGB. It had been a nightmare.

  This was when he started to understand life. Every day, he would tell you, he was called to come to KGB, a terrible nightmare.

  “When was this?” his interviewers asked.

  He waved his hand. “First they said, ‘Confess, confess, are you an agent of Japan? Are you an agent of CIA?’” Instead of going to his Medical Institute for his daily lectures, he had to visit the Organs and spend his whole working day there. Each time, he had to register; then, he would sit in front of one person, Captain Andreyev. This Captain would sit with a newspaper in front of his face and pour so much hot coffee for Yuri that afterward Yuri could not stand coffee—he vomited when he saw it. For a long time.

  They asked: Was this after Lee was accused of killing Kennedy?

  “Yes,” said Yuri.

  The interviewers asked, “Earlier, when Lee Harvey Oswald married Marina, did the KGB bother you?”