But your experience reflects that of a native citizen. Osawald’s “importance” was that he was an American defector (and, let’s face it, there weren’t a lot of those), so the KGB had to watch him. But all he did was go to Minsk and live a boring life. At that point, he’s a nuisance and a liability, since killing an American could conceivably set off a diplomatic incident.
Better to just let him leave. Espeically when he’s the kind of wing nut pain the ass that Oswald was.
Yes, that’s it exactly. Nobody was going to do the saboteur thing to him. They were afraid he had been sent there for just that reason.
Terr, I’m not trying to pretty up the Soviet Union in any way. But there was business going on between the Soviets and the rest of the world, and as demonstrated with Oswald’s wife, occasionally people got out, because someone saw it as in their interest. She might have been assigned with the task of keeping an eye on Oswald, someone may have been bribed, we might have turned someone over to them. There are a lot of possible reasons. And as you point out, being a lousy worker didn’t get you sent away, pissing off the wrong people did. If Oswald had been born in the USSR, I’m sure he would have disappeared. And it makes perfect sense that less important people had less chance of getting out. But Oswald’s wife wasn’t unimportant, she was the key to getting rid of the white elephant they had accepted. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone over there involved in Oswald’s defection disappeared along the way though. There were probably some really ‘right people’ who were pissed off about the whole fiasco.
But you see, that’s exactly my point. If all there was to the story was “boy is adventurous, goes to Russia, meets girl, gets bored of Russia, takes girl back to US”, it wouldn’t have happened. There must have been quite a bit going on behind the scenes.
It’s not even the weirdest story I’ve heard this week.
The Aristocrats!
Oh, well then we’re pretty much in agreement then. I just don’t think it had anything to do with JFK. It was just all a big mess because both the US and the USSR didn’t see what a nut job Oswald was. We’ll never know how much of the Cold War was people covering up their mistakes.
It’s by far the most significant thing he did in his life and it’s what he wanted to be remembered for. So if there’s any shame here, it’s that a flakey wife-beating murderer got what he wanted. A guy who defected from the U.S. to the Soviet Union and back at the height of the Cold War definitely did something interesting, but when you look at the larger picture of his life, you see a guy who was crazy and erratic and felt like a nobody, and who couldn’t think of anything to do with himself except trying to kill people he disagreed with.
Cool story, bro.
He was vermin. You can google a picture of his rotting decapitated head, if you like. That’s the only birthday remembrance I’d personally grant the little weasel.
Larvey.
…
I think the point of interest in his Soviet exodus is unfortunately overshadowed by conspiracy theories linking it (however remotely) to the assassination.
The USSR had an absurd number of options available to them short of letting him and his wife leave. They could control his access to the outside world and media–they could have simply left him where he was and told his handler(s) to buck up and deal with his incessant whining. Or just stopped listening. Peer pressure from his neighbors. Cutting his rations for poor performance. Sending his wife ‘away’ for a while. Sending him away for a while. Ignoring his phone calls. But letting him and his wife out? Very uncharacteristic.
So, forget about the link to the assassination for a minute. There doesn’t even need to be a high level of intrigue or upper-echelon diplomacy. There still remains an interesting story of what he did/said and the bureaucratic wrangling and maneuvering in the USSR that lead to the decision to let them leave. Maybe not Oliver Stone-worth, but interesting nonetheless.
Were the Soviets so desperate for people that Oswald was worth the bureaucratic hassle? Once he started expressing his desire to leave… let him. Close the file. There are other, more pressing problems to deal with than some pesky malcontent with a foreign passport.
Actually… no, there wasn’t a whole lot more. Some Soviet records are available, and the truth is that…
Oswald was a naive chump with a chip on his shoulder. He believed, or wanted to believe, that the Soviet Union would be something better. Oswald bothered them until they allowed him in. They somewhat hoped to get a small proaganda victory out of it, but relegated him to an unimportant role. Then he bitched until thil they let him out. From what it looks like, the decided he was such a useful git they’d rather stick us 'Mericans with it.
His life only sounds interesting if you already think he was adventurous. In fact, he was a miserable man with a dull nature.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of life in the USSR.
Those he expressed his desire to leave to were not the same as those with the authority to let him leave. Those with the authority to decide whether he should he stay or should he go were not bothered by their underlings headaches with Oswald’s whining; they were primarily concerned with the question of whether there would be trouble if he stayed, or whether that trouble would increase by twofold if he left.
During the period of their indecision, who would he have been bugging to let him know? His simple case (if they don’t want him, they should let he and his wife should be free to emigrate) would only go so far as the people he had access to. No press, domestic or foreign. The whole system was set up against leaving, so the bureaucratic hassle was on the side of letting him leave.
Again, the intrigue doesn’t necessarily need to go that high. Did they tease him for a while to keep him quasi-productive? Did they alternate between one day being fine, then the next making his life somewhat black?
Given the potential (real or imagined) for bad publicity, etc., there had to be some bureaucratic Clash over the question. Whether it was resolved by a somewhat third party (say, a diplomat from England called), he was a bargaining chip to avert a small hot war breaking out on some distant rock, or some completely random-seeming scheme (e.g. some remote connection to Algerian independence), how he got over the default answer ('no, you’re staying rights here) is an intriguing question.
I think Oswald was under close observation the entire time he was there. His desire to leave would have been known very quickly. He didn’t fit the pattern of a western defector at all. He had no strong political ideology, he had no one in the US who cared about his experience in the Soviet Union, he had no useful propoganda purpose, he had no useful intelligence (what ever he did tell them probably proved to be fabrications), and he wasn’t even a good example if they disappeared him because nobody there cared about him.
The Soviets weren’t simply a bunch of sadists denying their citizens its rights. They had a political purpose and Oswald didn’t serve that purpose. Now I believe also he was some bargaining chip, in that environment neither side did anything without a purpose. Both sides would lose if he didn’t come home. The US didn’t want to get sucked into an unplanned confrontation, and they also couldn’t ignore him and risk headlines that said “US leaves brainwashed citizen to die at Commie hands”. The Soviets didn’t want to face “US citizen defects to USSR, then commits suicide”. And both sides realized he was a just a gnat. If they weren’t so suspicious of each other they could have agreed to a joint elimination. The Soviets probably considered themselves the winner in a game of Old Maid.
The biggest problem with the Soviet conspiracy theory is they found Kennedy to be a president they liked. In the end they benefitted from Johnson’s ascendency, but they had no way of knowing that. They sent Yuri Nosenko over to convince the US that Oswald was not acting for the Soviets, and in the end Nosenko’s claims have been proven out by the evidence. They were extremely worried about being blamed for the assassination of JFK.
Really? because you kinda did.
You really don’t “get” the Soviets, do you? It’s ok - very few Westerners do/did.
It was not the question of the hassle. It’s the question of principle. The following is not what people actually thought (though some did), but it was the official dogma according to which the state operated. Wanting to leave the socialist paradise is a sign of some kind of mental illness. Mentally ill people need help, they should not be encouraged in their delusions. The more they insist on wanting to leave, the more the evidence of the mental illness and the more help they need - help such as peer pressure, work measures such as assigning menial jobs so they have less time for their delusional behavior, pressuring relatives to influence the mentally ill person and up to and including incarceration.
Oswald and especially his wife being allowed to leave was a special and extraordinary thing. I am not trying to connect that to Kennedy assassination (I have my own ideas about who was behind that, and it was not Soviets). But that’s the fact - it was not in any way regular business. And for those who’re saying that he was a bargaining chip in some kind of diplomatic trade - huh? Who in the world cared about him enough here in the US to put any kind of value on his being allowed to leave?
Leaving the main issue momentarily, how many people, and what kind did believe this? I’m curious. As a child my father’s business brought him into contact with people from the USSR and associated states. Visitors were in our home in the 60’s, and he traveled in the USSR around 1970 as relationships began the slow thaw. Although the official line was always that the US exagerrated and misunderstood the state philosophy, they also let out that they didn’t believe in it at all. And in the end, every one of them, after claiming to only be scientists and engineers, turned out to be closely associated with the KGB (which was no surprise).
Their association was no surprise, that’s true, because the ONLY people who were allowed out of the country in those times were the ones associated with the “organs” (the KGB). It was a self-selected sample 
As for who believed this - surprisingly many people did. Not the “sophisticates” - the intelligentsia rarely held such views, and neither did the KGB apparatchiks who were familiar with the West. But the country held 240 million people, most of whom had absolutely no way of finding out anything that countered official relentless and all-pervasive propaganda. So I would say the majority of people in the Soviet Union in the 60s (less in 70s) did hold the views I described.
Back to LHO and his wife leaving USSR - I just talked to my dad, who lived in the country his first 40 years, and was in his 20s during that time. He says that LHO and his wife being allowed to leave was absolutely extraordinary, according to what he remembers. So it’s not just me
Oh, I “get” them well enough. Wasn’t the practice to use pseudo-psychiatry as a state tool to imprison native Soviets? I rather doubt it’s such an efficient well-oiled machine when dealing with foreign nationals who are actually mentally ill. Keeping Oswald means having to invest the time and effort to monitor him, for no benefit since the propaganda value of his defection was nil and he had no useful information or skills. Killing him turns a trivial nuisance into a potentially minor problem (perhaps handing the Americans the propaganda victory of painting the now-martyred Oswald as a Soviet victim, and of course the Soviets could never be 100% sure that this wasn’t an opportunity the Americans were waiting for, despite their otherwise indifferent attitude toward Oswald). Letting him leave, though, makes him someone else’s problem.
In any case, even various native Soviets have managed to legally emigrate at various times, so painting the entire country as some kind of giant roach motel isn’t convincing.
Meh, sure… and I guess somebody in the USSR eventually got in trouble for having allowed it, not for letting Oswald “escape”, but for opening the USSR to potential embarrassment and accusations after Kennedy was killed. Even then, far more unusual things than this have occurred.
Do go on…
Well, that’s just it - nobody in the U.S. cared about him when he was alive. If the Soviets kill him, though, Oswald potentially becomes valuable to the Americans as a martyr. So they have this schmo of no particular personal value, keeping him is a nuisance, killing him is a problem… so dump him and let him be someone’s else’s headache. In hindsight, of course, they would have acted differently.
Wouldn’t we all.
I have this theory that the Cuban ex-pats took revenge on Kennedy for sitting back and doing nothing while their friends and relatives were dying on the beaches after Kennedy promised support. How exactly they managed to dupe Oswald to do their bidding, and exactly how much help they gave him, I don’t know.