On the morning of Jan. 7, 1960, Lee Harvey Oswald boarded a train in Moscow heading west. That evening, he arrived in Minsk, in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. He had just a few things: a change of clothes, a diary, a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Idiot," which the KGB had given him for his 20th birthday. He was exuberant. In Minsk, he expected to build a new life and to escape his pastâ??his mother, Texas, the Marines. He had written a letter to his mother and his brother, Robert, telling them to forget him. "I do not wish to [ever] contact you again," he wrote. "I am beginning a new life, and I don't want any part of the old."
Oswald's Russian foray was a failure, of course. Two-and-a-half years after turning up in Minsk, he and his wife, Marina, and their baby, June, left the Soviet Union. He had hoped to join the revolution, but there was no revolution to join. Long before he arrived, it had been snuffed out by the Gulag, the purges, the war. It had been eclipsed by a new craving for stability and single-family apartments and television sets. He returned to the U.S. in June 1962 more alienated than he had ever been. Seventeen months later, he murdered John F. Kennedyâ??a national trauma whose 50th anniversary we mark next month.
Today, when we talk about Lee Harvey Oswald, he is usually portrayed as a cog in the detective story surrounding Kennedy's assassination. He is viewed not as a three-dimensional character in a Shakespearean tragedyâ??which he wasâ??but as an instrument whose actions were orchestrated by others: the mob, the CIA, Fidel Castro, the KGB. We seem mostly uninterested in the meaning of Oswald and much more concerned with the supposedly dark and clandestine forces behind him.
But a closer look at Oswald's lifeâ??his history, his personality, the relationships he forged, the fragmented political tracts he wroteâ??makes it abundantly clear that he was capable of killing the president all by himself. If we focus on his Soviet period, the most important chapter in his truncated, 24-year life, it is possible to piece together a more complete picture of Oswald.
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