Oswald's Tale (42 page)

Soon after, KGB agents made that visit to Horizon when they told everybody to keep their mouths shut about Oswald. By then, Pavel was already in Tbilisi, but he heard that shop people were called in one by one, and the Organs had private conversations with them about respecting silence.

Now, in Tbilisi, relations with his father were not warm. Pavel had gone down there in December of 1963, and he didn’t come back to Minsk until 1965. At first, he stayed in an apartment with his father while his mother went to a health resort. He was studying at Tbilisi University, and one day in the spring of 1964 he came home a little late and his father looked at him and said, “At your age, I was already flying an airplane.” Pavel said, “I understand . . .”

He left and went to live at a student hostel, where they found a bed for him. He and his father never spoke again. Not even when his parents came to Minsk. Didn’t speak.

Pavel’s father died eight years later of cancer. So Pavel felt twice as bad. He was serving then in the Army Reserve at a camp about a hundred kilometers from Minsk, and when he received this news that his father was on his deathbed, he asked if he could visit him, and his officer said, “Tomorrow morning we’ll consider your request.” But Pavel’s father died overnight. Then all these officers around him got to show their humanity. It was a weekend, and the officer in charge of their entire camp happened to be off fishing. To leave the camp, Pavel needed a special seal that only the officer in charge could provide, so they went out to where he was fishing and obtained his seal on the required papers. Pavel bought some flowers and went to his home, but his mother said, “It’s too late.”

Anatoly Shpanko would say that he never felt any sensation that anybody in KGB had invaded his privacy. He never had any experience that he was under surveillance, never.

Now, Anatoly is fifty-five, but he has never been interviewed by them. He would say that since his biography is clean, why would you report on him? Anatoly insisted that he did not know what had happened to Marina. He did not know her history. When told her husband’s name and that Oswald was alleged to have killed President Kennedy, only to be himself killed two days later, Anatoly replied, “Somebody kills somebody and then is killed in two days—it’s very dubious if he really did it. There is somebody unaccused who is guilty. It’s very negative to me.”

As he remembers, there was, in November 1963, no information in Minsk that this man Lee Harvey Oswald had lived in their city for two years. He never saw any stories in his local paper. Nobody talked about it. He didn’t know that was Marina’s husband, absolutely not. Maybe some people knew but kept silent. Today is when he learns. First time. Asked if it is a shock, he replies: “Approximately.”

Sasha came by one day to knock on the door of Ilya and Valya’s apartment. There was no answer. He came another time, and even knocked a third time, and then some neighbor opened a door across the hall and said, “They don’t live here anymore. They left this place.” These neighbors said to Sasha that nobody knew where they had gone.

Ilya suffered a lot from that assassination. It didn’t matter how many years he lived. All that had happened took life away from him. He suffered a lot because his life was in his career and now everything was in jeopardy and his situation took away some of his health. They didn’t fire him, but they didn’t promote him anymore. Ilya never talked much about the assassination except to say it was organized. Said that once. Killing Kennedy was organized. If they had used Alik, it was because he had been in the Soviet Union.

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?”