Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

  He shook his head vigorously. His parents were high people, said Yuri. When he did something that KGB did not like, they would call his mother and say, “Your son got drunk,” or, “He is making love with a certain girl, the wrong girl.” His family was watched because they were high-ranked people.

  After Kennedy’s assassination, however, he was called directly to KGB. It happened in this manner: Every Institute has a resident officer from the Organs—in this case, Captain Andreyev, who invited him into his office and had a conversation with him there. All subsequent conversations, however, were in the main KGB building, on Lenin Street.

  The first questions were: What kind of relationship did you have with Lee Oswald? What did you talk to him about? Was he a spy? Was he CIA? No one was taking notes, just two of them.

  “Tête-à-tête,” said Yuri.

  After this first meeting, Yuri went home and told his parents, and they responded with fear. They didn’t blame him; they started to discuss what protective measures could be taken. They wanted to use their friends.

  Another interrogation from KGB was started on the following day. They called him at home and asked him to come over to their main building. He went alone. He bought a pack of cigarettes and walked in.

  At the entrance was a booth with a window. There he gave his name and showed his passport, and Andreyev came down in civilian clothes and took him back to his office, where they sat at a table. He had to answer the exact same questions he had been asked at his Institute, and he thinks this new room may have been bugged, although, unlike yesterday, Andreyev now took notes. Their meeting consumed six or seven hours. Every day after that they met, except on Sundays. It was now Yuri’s daily job to go to the main KGB building on Lenin Street.

  He smoked cigarettes. There were always Prima cigarettes on Andreyev’s table, and coffee. Sometimes when Yuri arrived, Andreyev did not even speak to him. Merely read his newspaper while Yuri sat before him. They would give him an hour for lunch. Then he had to come back. He didn’t sign anything. They told him to, but he never signed one paper. Not one. His parents told him not to. This officer said, “You don’t want to sign? Then don’t. Any punishment will come through a court; they will decide how to treat you.” Of course, at that time you didn’t need a lot to be punished. He was asked if he had been a Japanese spy. He didn’t know why they’d choose Japan, except that Oswald had been there. No Japanese in Minsk.

  Since he went to this office every day except Sunday, he stopped going to his Institute. Education was no longer something that he worried about. And every day when he went home he told his parents what had happened, and every day they gave advice. They thought maybe some of his friends were also being questioned, but he didn’t worry too much about that. When you spend your entire day at KGB, you don’t think about your friends. He had even been warned not to talk to anybody.

  These interrogations went on for a few months—same time, same man, same room. It was a big stone on his shoulder. The only picture in this office was a portrait of Felix Dzherzhinsky. Plus a safe, a table, chairs. That’s it. Plus a window through which he could see the street. And every day he went with a feeling that this would be the day they would not let him leave. He had a signal to give his parents. He would make a point of coming home every day by a certain hour. If not . . .

  His mother worked at the Academy of Sciences. She was doing secret work on space. So, there were KGB Colonels who worked in association with her. His mother was always trying to use such a connection to save him. During this period, his parents were worried much more about him than over their own careers. And his father kept telling him not to sign anything, because among such papers usually there is a special paper which states that you are not allowed to leave your city. Finally, his father told him: “Leave Minsk. Don’t take any suitcases. Just go the way you are, in your own suit.”

  They gave him lots of money, several thousand rubles, and he went to the railroad train station and jumped on the night train to Moscow without a ticket and paid the conductor. In Moscow, he never lived for more than two days in any hotel; he changed his residence every two days. Yuri had many relatives in Moscow, and many good friends, but he never went to visit any of them. He had arrived with no more than what he was wearing on his back, and he never worried about growing a beard or dyeing his hair.

  In Russia, said Yuri, all you needed for travel was your residence passport, so on each night that he went to a new hotel, he handed it over, and by morning he’d be given it back. Then, in forty-eight hours—no more—he would move.

  For two months, he did that. He spent each day in museums or at the movies, and he enjoyed his time. He was free; he was not under arrest. He never called home; he never wrote a letter. He had fear inside him, of course. It was uncertainty. So, he only made new acquaintances. Because it was safer, he never took a single room. That would attract attention. It was better to share with strangers.

  Then, on December 31, 1963, he decided to go back to Minsk. He still had a lot of money, but he was lonely and he wanted to have a good New Year’s Eve. So, he bought an airplane ticket and flew to Minsk, took a taxi, came home. His parents were pleasantly surprised and happy.

  They told him that his file was closed. His whole investigation was now closed and over. He thinks maybe some people in KGB, some ugly elements, thought they could make a career on his mother, his father, and himself. So, they had tried to damage his parents through him. But it had not worked. His parents were too strong.

  In fact, it damaged Andreyev, the man who interrogated him, because his parents had gone to the highest people in Byelorussia.

  Yuri saw Andreyev again, fifteen years later, on Lenin Street. Andreyev smiled at Yuri, came up to him and said, “How are you?” as if, after fifteen years, they were best friends meeting again. Yuri was so taken aback that he just turned away. He was trying not to spit into Andreyev’s face. Andreyev even asked him to obtain medicine for him.

  The interviewers were puzzled. Yuri’s story had taken them around one turn too many. If the Organs had interrogated him all day long, six days a week, for months, what had they talked to him about? The interviewers encouraged him to tell his story again. In more depth.

  Underneath all of this, Yuri said, was an undertext, a subtext. It concerned Komsomol. There were really two groups studying then at Minsk Medical Institute: First were those who had already done their military service and so were now high Komsomol members. The rest were like himself, who had come into Minsk Medical Institute from high school and so had been in severe competition to pass their entrance exams. For that reason, they knew how to study. So, people from that first group, who had done military service, were envious and tried to humiliate all these younger students.

  For example: When they all went out in summer to work on a collective farm and bring in the potato crop, these high Komsomol members said that Yuri, Kostya Bondarin, and Sasha Piskalev had stolen a large piece of salo. That, he explained, was high-grade pork fat and very tasty if eaten with pickled cucumbers, bread, and vodka. A thin slice of salo coated your stomach. You could drink more.

  Salo cost very little, but Komsomol acted as if such an act of petty theft, a prank, had been highly irresponsible. It was built up into a big moral issue—they said that Yuri and his friends were not only well educated, the cream of their country with the best chance for a future, but had been educated free of charge and with a stipend taken from the taxes of other people less well educated and so the future of such an elite group belongs to the country, not to themselves. Stealing one piece of fat brought moral damage to their Medical Institute: One piece of fat, five centimeters by ten centimeters by ten centimeters! It was small enough to shove into your pocket!

  Yet, they were all three brought up before a Komsomol meeting at his Medical Institute, and all his personal feelings, said Yuri, were treated with contempt. “They mixed me up with dirt.” And his friends Konstantin Bondarin and Sasha Piskalev were also mixed with suc
h dirt.

  It was all because Yuri’s father was Vice-President of this Institute, and they wanted the dirt to reach up to his father. Ugly elements were opposed to his father and were using Komsomol members recently discharged from the Soviet Army, people whose highest entertainment was to get drunk in a hostel, get down on their knees to fart, and put a match to their ass—lightning! This was the very best entertainment in their life. This was their culture! All the Komsomol leaders at his Institute. These were his judges concerning that theft of salo!

  Highly confused by this enrichment, the American interviewers went through Yuri’s story again. If they understood what he was saying, on the second or third day after President Kennedy’s assassination, he had been asked to come to Andreyev’s office, and that had set off a process of going to the main office for two consecutive months, so it could only have been well after New Year’s that he quit Minsk and went to Moscow. But then the interviewers pointed out that he had stayed in Moscow for two months, so it would have been something like three months after New Year’s before he came home.

  Now Yuri decided that the Organs had begun to interrogate him before Kennedy’s assassination. Perhaps it had been in the first days of August 1963, after he had been caught in the embarrassment of helping to steal a little pork fat. Then they interrogated him for a very long time, for two or three months, until November, he would guess. Then, after the assassination, he had gone to Moscow. In fact, he now remembers every detail of how he left town. He was with friends, and they were all drunk, and he was drunk, and they all went to Minsk railway station to see somebody else off on another train to another place. But since the next train happened to be for Moscow, he got on. And he slept on the third bench, the top rack in a third-class car, where mattresses and pillows were kept.

  It had been planned he should go away. His father knew how to act in situations. His father had worked years ago for Stalin, and when Stalin ate a meal, his father had been the man chosen to be in charge of Stalin’s food. So, if the Soviet leader took one piece of meat, his father had to take two. Yuri’s father’s name was Mikhail Fedorovich, and he had learned a lot in those years, so he also knew how to run away from the Organs. His father had once been on a business trip, but they had taken him off his train and put him in a line of people waiting. He had asked, “What is this line for?” and they said, “Here is where they take away your Party membership.”

  His father said: “You didn’t give me my Party membership and you are not going to take it away.”

  That very same day, years ago, Mikhail Fedorovich left that line and took his wife and son and went away to the Urals. Years later, on another day when his father was working in his own office and his mother happened to be standing next to him, some officers came in and said to Yuri’s mother, “Good news for your family. Here are official papers proving that your husband was shot for nothing back then.” They didn’t even know Mikhail Fedorovich was the person next to her. Obviously, this Soviet system was like some compartmental organism in which all kinds of different processes were happening at the same time. There was no core to the system. Not really. Nothing really central. So, it was his father’s fear that if Yuri stayed in Minsk, he would be selected as a victim, while if Yuri went away, they would, bureaucratically speaking, soon be paralyzed. The big machine was so big that you could exploit it.

  So, he got to Moscow. Now that he was there, he could say that when you were on the run, you didn’t care whether your roommate for one night was simpatico or a zhlob. Main thing to consider: that your roommate should not be a danger to you. But Yuri was lucky. He only met good people. If someone asked him why he was there, he just said, “Vacation.” He was a student. He was big, he looked respectable, so no one was interested. Of course, he had to say he was from Minsk because of his passport.

  Nor was he afraid of being robbed. At each railway station, they had deposit boxes. For 15 kopecks a day, he would leave most of his money in a locker. While he was in Moscow, he stayed at the Peking, the Leningrad, the Ukraine, the Exhibition—everywhere. If you took a map of Moscow, he would live two days in one hotel, then he would take a taxi crosstown. He had no system—he would just go far away from his last hotel. In those days, you could get into any hotel—it was easy.

  Nor were rates bad. At a restaurant, you could drink vodka and eat expensively or just take a side of cabbage. Of course, he didn’t count his money; he had so many rubles he never looked at how much he spent. It was cheap. One meat pie cost 7 kopecks. For good meat and beer, 22 kopecks. Movies, 20 kopecks. Everything was kopecks, not rubles. If you had a buddy, you could go to a hotel dining room or a hotel canteen and eat bread together free of charge, then put mustard on bread, plus pepper, salt, then pour a glass of vodka, have more bread—it was a meal.

  He had no close calls in Moscow, and he didn’t worry about it, but he was homesick even if he was having a good time with girls. He had no problem there—he did not have to find his pennies in garbage. He never paid for a woman. He was young, good-looking, he knew how to talk. If he liked a woman, he invited her to a restaurant. Beautiful women were everywhere, plus shop girls. Then, he flew back to Minsk on New Year’s to see his parents. At that time he could drink a whole case of vodka, six bottles. Today he can only drink two bottles of vodka, as he had done today. Two bottles before he came to this interview. Now, more vodka during his interview. In those days he and a buddy could drink their first bottle of vodka in fifteen minutes, the second in twenty, the third in thirty. Just a little more than an hour for three liters. Now, he can still drink a lot of booze, but not like then, no, c’est dommage.

  What was to be made of his story? Toward the end of this interview, Yuri’s mother, Lidia Semenovna, came into the room. She was small and frail and had the title of Honorable Scientist of the Republic of Belarus.

  Lidia Semenovna did work on marrow chemistry and radiobiology, and she was proud of having traveled on scientific business trips to international congresses, even to America. When she came back to Minsk in 1961 from America, she had been asked to share her impressions about her visits to different American Universities. “A great many students from the Medical Institute wished me to speak.” She even thinks it was those students who arranged to have her give a lecture at the Trade Union Palace.

  She remembers that Oswald, as one member of her audience, came over afterward to say that he was an American, and that Yuri then asked if this American could come home with them. That’s how Oswald happened to visit their apartment on March 17, 1961.

  She didn’t have a first impression of him—she was too busy talking to people after her lecture. He was just a young man, a boy really.

  At that time her team did research on a nuclear reactor with cobalt sources. She had a large group under her, about thirty people, and her project was under closely held security, like all other subjects concerned with radiation. So, after Oswald appeared at her house, the Organs soon told her it was undesirable, even inadmissible, that he should come again. Such sentiments were also passed on to her husband, Professor Merezhinsky. Their house was not a place where any unknown foreigner should be able to come.

  Now, the interviewers asked her about Yuri’s extended trip to Moscow, and she immediately replied that he had gone in the fall of 1963. He had been ill, and he had stayed in a hospital there.

  At this point, Yuri interrupted to say: “Mother, I ask you . . . the truthful way of life. Please. Forget that you are a Party member. Don’t lie.”

  Mother: “Then I won’t talk. I am saying how it was.”

  “Say the truth,” said Yuri.

  “I’ll say the truth,” said his mother. “There was an unpleasant story about an episode on a farm, an unpleasant story . . . Komsomol said three boys should be excluded from the Medical Institute.”

  It was not enough, Lidia Semenovna said, to justify this attempt to expel Yuri from his Medical Institute. But what has to be understood is that at this farm, Yuri had also been sick
, with a constant temperature of 39 degrees centigrade. An inexplicable temperature. Equal to 102.2 Fahrenheit. Since their daughter already had TB, the obvious question was whether Yuri now also had it. No doctor in Minsk Hospital, however, was ready to give a diagnosis. She and her husband were too high in medicine, and so these Minsk doctors did not wish to make a serious mistake. They told her it was better to go to the Tuberculosis Hospital at Second Moscow Institute. So, Yuri spent four months that fall in Moscow—the fall of 1963—and was given a leave from his Institute in Minsk. When he came back, in order to prevent more talk, Yuri’s mother made her son a lab assistant at her own Institute.

  After this exposition, mother and son argued in English and in Russian:

  YURI: Mother, be truthful at least once in your life.

  MOTHER: I’m saying only truth.

  YURI: Throw away your Party card.

  MOTHER: It has nothing to do with my Party card.

  YURI: You have Party card in your brains. Why did I leave for Moscow? Because I was ill?

  MOTHER: You were ill.

  Lidia Semenovna would explain: This man Andreyev had, in fact, participated in a situation against Yuri to injure her husband. Yuri had been used. That was one more reason for Yuri to go to Moscow—so he wouldn’t be expelled from his Medical Institute because of his trouble with that salo in the summer of 1963. Once he was in Moscow and medically excused from the Institute, Andreyev and his people couldn’t hurt Yuri, and so they couldn’t hurt her husband. This also coincided with the inflammation of Yuri’s lungs. So, their move had logic. She could say that because Yuri was suffering this inflammation, it did help her to send him to Moscow, but she was also trying to find a doctor in Moscow who could help him.

  She could explain further: Being a nuclear researcher, she had her own KGB people to inform her, a Colonel. She was close to her Colonel, because he would go abroad with her when she went to international congresses and so he always alerted her. Whenever trouble started, her KGB Colonel was telling her, “Lidia Semenovna, please keep in mind, don’t let Yuri see this person. It is better if he does not.” They told her about Oswald and how it was better Yuri didn’t meet with him. They talked to her about Yuri’s relations with different women. They didn’t advertise it, but she knew all about Marina and her bad biography in Leningrad. Marina was a beautiful girl, and Lidia Semenovna was worried that Yuri could have interest in her, because she had been warned that this relationship should be stopped.