Oswald in the Soviet Union

Oswald reached Moscow on 16 October 1959 and registered at the Hotel Berlin as a student. His Intourist guide was a woman named Rima Shirokova. When he was told his visa had run out and he had two hours to leave Moscow, he cut his left wrist in his hotel bathroom. He spent three days in the psychiatric ward of Botkin Hospital. [1]

On 31 October he went to the U.S. embassy, handed over his passport and asked to renounce his citizenship. The consul, Richard Snyder, stalled him; the formal renunciation was never completed, which is why he could come back. [2] The embassy’s cable to Washington said Oswald had told Snyder he had offered the Soviets “any information he has acquired as [an] enlisted radar operator.” [3]

In the Marines Oswald had been a radar operator at Atsugi, Japan. His security clearance was “confidential”, and he never held a higher one. [3]

On 7 January 1960 he was sent to Minsk. He started on 13 January at the Belorussian Radio and Television Factory, which employed about 5,000 people, and was promised a rent-free apartment by the city’s “Mayor”. [1] In September 1960, back home, the Marine Corps Reserve gave him an undesirable discharge, which he spent the next years trying to overturn. [1]

He married Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova on 30 April 1961 and their daughter June was born in February 1962. The State Department approved a repatriation loan, and he signed a promissory note for $435.71. The family landed at Hoboken on the Dutch liner Maasdam on 13 June 1962. He had $63. [1][2]

The Warren Commission looked at whether the Soviets had trained or used him and found no evidence of it. It also noted that the Soviet government had given it about 140 pages of records on Oswald. [3]

Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who first contacted the CIA in June 1962 and defected in January 1964, said he had seen Oswald’s KGB file. He said the KGB thought Oswald unstable, never debriefed him and never considered recruiting him. [1][2]

The CIA did not believe him. It held him in solitary confinement and hostile interrogation from 1964 to 1968. The Warren Commission decided not to call him. When the House committee questioned him in 1978, his story had changed: in 1964 he said Oswald was not watched closely; in 1978 he described extensive surveillance. Two other KGB defectors told the committee Oswald would have been debriefed. [1][2]

The committee was “certain Nosenko lied about Oswald”, whether in 1964, in 1978, or both. It could not say why, and listed reasons from ego to deliberate Soviet disinformation. It settled for calling him “an unreliable source.” [1]

It also judged it “highly probable” that the Soviet government had KGB surveillance files on Oswald and Marina that it never handed over, even after telling the committee it had sent everything. It found no evidence that Marina was a Soviet agent. [1][3]

Both the Warren Commission and the House committee concluded the Soviet government was not involved. The committee found no evidence Moscow had any interest in removing Kennedy, and wrote that the reaction of the Soviet government and people “seemed to be one of genuine shock and sincere grief.” [1][2]

The Soviets did take an interest afterward. According to notes the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin smuggled to Britain, the KGB secretly helped fund research by the critic Mark Lane through an intermediary, and forged a letter from Oswald to a “Mr. Hunt” to steer suspicion toward the CIA. That is consistent with this site’s Soviet file. [3]

The “two Oswalds” theory held that a Soviet look-alike came back from Minsk in Oswald’s place. On 4 October 1981 a team of forensic pathologists and dentists opened the grave and examined the skull. [1][2]

They found a defect in the left mastoid bone matching the mastoid operation recorded in Oswald’s Marine Corps medical records. They compared the teeth with his Marine dental charts and X-rays, explained each charting discrepancy as a recording error, and announced a “positive dental identification.” [1][3]