Book Review: The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union, by Peter Savodnik (2012)

Cover of The Interloper, by Peter Savodnik, 2012. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963.

Reporter and author Peter Savodnik.

Last November 22nd was the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. John F. Kennedy is someone who has long occupied a rarified position in my own life. I was born 17 years after Kennedy’s assassination, but his legacy has always felt quite present to me. (It probably helped that I was a history nerd who was obsessed with U.S. presidents when I was young.) My position is by no means unique: millions of Americans of all ages have admired John F. Kennedy, both during his lifetime and since his death. Kennedy is a figure who has resonated deeply with my own family history. Both of my parents were raised in Democratic, Catholic households. John F. Kennedy was a revered figure for my grandparents. My Mom’s parents had a framed picture of JFK displayed in their living room.  

For my parents, who were born in 1941 and 1945, Kennedy represented hope and promise. My Mom met Kennedy on October 2, 1960. She and a friend ran after JFK’s limo during a motorcade in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the limo stopped and they shook hands with the Senator, then the Democratic nominee for President. My Dad never met JFK, but he wrote a moving essay about his sadness on November 22, 1963.  

This fall, I was reading an article about the new book by former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, who was part of President Kennedy’s security detail that fateful day in Dallas. In the article, Landis claimed that he stayed up until 5AM the night before the motorcade, but he wasn’t drunk. That seems unlikely to me, and it begs the follow up question, “So, does that mean you were high on cocaine, or were you with a woman?” Those would seem to me to be the 3 most likely reasons you’re still up at 5AM. But I digress. Reading that article didn’t make me want to read Landis’ book, but I decided I needed to read more about Lee Harvey Oswald. I pulled out my copy of Peter Savodnik’s 2012 book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union.  

Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October of 1959 and subsequently returned to the United States in June of 1962. Conspiracy theorists have made much of Oswald’s defection and return to the US, putting forth theories that he was programmed by the KGB to assassinate Kennedy, or that he was a CIA agent pretending to be programmed by the KGB. Savodnik easily dismisses much of the conspiracy theories, writing “perhaps the most compelling argument against the claim that Oswald was recruited by an intelligence agency so that he might wreak havoc in the United States is Oswald himself...he could hardly have been counted on to do or finish anything. That a professional, clandestine organization would rely on Oswald to pull off what would have been one of the most dangerous operations ever—the assassination of an American president—is absurd.” (p.33) Exactly.  

Savodnik focuses his book on Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, which is usually overlooked by historians. Oswald managed to stay in the Soviet Union because he attempted suicide when his request for Soviet citizenship was turned down. The KGB then made Oswald wait while they decided what to do with him. When Oswald still wanted to defect, they grudgingly let him in. The KGB had quickly ascertained that Oswald, despite his service in the US Marine Corps, had little to no intelligence value to them. Nevertheless, the KGB kept him under strict surveillance during his entire time in the Soviet Union.  

Oswald was a Marxist who fully expected the Soviet Union to be the glorious worker’s paradise that Vladimir Lenin had promised. As Savodnik writes, “He was unknowingly wading into a country that was not the place he expected it to be. He was an outsider still, but he did not know it.” (p.54) Oswald was shocked that the glorious worker’s revolution had been corrupted by Stalin, and he was disheartened by what he found in the Soviet Union. The Soviet government sent Oswald to Minsk, far away from the corridors of power, and where they thought he wouldn’t cause much trouble. Oswald was given a job at an electronics factory, and duly installed in an apartment.  

Savodnik tracked down Russians who knew Oswald, and what their impressions were of him. Many of Oswald’s co-workers and acquaintances were helpfully keeping the KGB informed about Oswald’s thoughts and habits. Oswald soon tired of life in Minsk in his bugged apartment, and by late 1961 he was actively attempting to return to the United States.  

Savodnik reminds the reader that Lee Harvey Oswald was a man who was searching for somewhere he belonged. This was a man who had moved almost every year of his life, a man who dropped out of high school in order to enlist in the Marines. When Oswald didn’t find a home in the Marines, he defected to the Soviet Union. When he didn’t find a home in the Soviet Union, he returned to the United States. With each jarring move of his young life, Oswald’s disaffection and alienation increased.  

By the time Oswald returned to the US in June of 1962, he had a Russian wife, Marina, and a daughter, June. Oswald’s wandering ways continued: from June of 1962 to November of 1963, he lived at 9 different addresses. “He was unable, as always, to build a life anywhere...It did not matter whether he was living in a Marine Corps barracks in Japan, an apartment in Minsk, or a boarding house in Dallas. The problem was Oswald.” (p.190)  

Eventually Oswald’s fury at his thwarted destiny exploded in violence. In April of 1963, Oswald attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker, who had become a darling of the far right because of his attempts to indoctrinate his troops against communism. (Walker subsequently resigned his Army commission in 1961, becoming the only US general to resign in the 20th century.) Oswald fired one bullet at Walker, who was sitting at his dining room table. The bullet hit the window frame, and Walker suffered only minor injuries on his arm. The crime remained unsolved until after Kennedy’s assassination.  

Chance and circumstance led Lee Harvey Oswald to apply for a job at the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald was hired in mid-October 1963. In the days before Kennedy’s trip to Texas, the route of his motorcade was published in several newspapers. The motorcade would pass through Dealey Plaza, which the Texas School Book Depository building overlooked. Chance and circumstance gave Lee Harvey Oswald the opportunity to assassinate the President.  

Could Oswald have even explained why he did it? I doubt it, and because it was such a senseless crime, of course no sense could be made of Oswald’s motive, whatever it might have been. Randomness scares people. That’s why conspiracies are appealing. If you believe in a conspiracy, then JFK’s death makes sense—it’s because Kennedy was going to withdraw troops from Vietnam, it’s because of Cuba, it’s because Kennedy wanted peace with the Russians, or whatever you might believe. We don’t want to think that John F. Kennedy died simply because a 24-year-old disaffected loner happened to be working at a building that happened to overlook the motorcade route. But I think that’s the more likely answer, rather than shadowy conspiracy theories.  

Book Review: "The Russians," by Hedrick Smith (1976)

Paperback cover of "The Russians," by Hedrick Smith, 1976.

Publicity photo of Hedrick Smith for "The Russians." Photo by Jill Krementz.

When Hedrick Smith’s book “The Russians” was published in 1976, it gave American readers a taste of what life was like inside the Soviet Union. In “The Russians” Smith paints a vivid portrait of the culture of the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev’s rule. Smith was the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times from 1971-74, and in 1974 he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his articles about life in the Soviet Union. I was lucky enough to intern for Hedrick Smith during college in the fall of 2001, as he was finishing up the excellent documentary “Rediscovering Dave Brubeck.” Smith’s most recent book is 2012’s “Who Stole the American Dream?” a very important book that I reviewed here.  

 “The Russians” is a large book, 680 pages in the original paperback edition, and Smith covers just about every imaginable aspect of Soviet society. I learned something new on every page of this book. I can’t accurately summarize all of the different parts of the book in this review, so I’ll focus on the sections that I enjoyed reading the most. 

While reading “The Russians” I was very struck by how completely the Soviet government controlled society and everyday life. Smith chronicled how the government censored the information that citizens had access to, which ranged from not informing citizens about wildfires raging only 15-20 miles outside of Moscow, to the heartbreaking story of a man whose daughter died in a plane crash, which he only learned of by going to the airport police-who only told him about the crash on the condition that he keep the news confidential. Because people had so little access through the state-run media to any kind of meaningful information, either about their own country or any others, the government was able to better control the population. This total control over information even extended to seemingly mundane things. For example, while Smith was in Moscow in 1973, the government published the first telephone directory in 15 years. Smith writes, “The problem with this phone book, as with so many desirable items in the Soviet Union, is that supply made not even the barest pretense of satisfying demand. For a city of eight million people, the printers published 50,000 phone books.” (p.472) 

I knew that Soviet citizens had very little political freedom, but I didn’t realize how many perks the elite members of the Communist Party enjoyed. Smith deftly exposes one of the many contradictions in Soviet society: that the supposedly classless society was actually just as stratified between the haves and have-nots as the West was, if not more so. Members of the elite were granted access to special stores where they could buy goods not available to other citizens. Elites also had opportunities to travel abroad, which meant that they had access to foreign goods, and work abroad was often paid in special “certificate rubles” which could be used in special stores and had more purchasing power than ordinary rubles. There was also little chance of upward mobility in the Soviet system-if you weren’t a Party member you didn’t have much of a chance of making a decent living. 

Political dissent in the Soviet Union was given very little chance to exist. As Smith shows, the temporary “thaw” in Soviet culture under Khrushchev in the 1950’s and 60’s was quickly replaced by the cold chilliness of the Brezhnev era. Under Brezhnev dissenters were rather quickly neutered by being sent to the labor camps of Siberia or exiled to the West. The methods of dealing with dissenters were not as cruel as they had been under Stalin, but the Soviet government was extremely effective at shutting down any dissenting points of view. 

Smith wrote about how it was not the KGB that most ordinary Soviet citizens feared. “For the quiet erosion of the spirit that takes place daily is caused more by the petty tyrants of Soviet life-the rigid little bureaucrats and the self-appointed busybodies who use infinite regulations and documents to harass, humble and hound the man in the street.” (p.352)

One of the most memorable parts of “The Russians” details Smith’s “interview” with the famed dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was forbidden for foreign journalists to meet with Solzhenitsyn, as the Soviet government was very angry about his anti-Communist novels that explored the terrors of the Stalin regime. Smith and Bob Kaiser of The Washington Post went to Solzhenitsyn’s apartment to interview him, but when they arrived they found that Solzhenitsyn had already written the interview, both question and answers, for them. Smith writes, “I was stunned. What an irony, I thought. This is the way it is done at Pravda and here is Solzhenitsyn, whose entire being reverberates with his furious battle against censorship, a man who in the great tradition of Pushkin and Dostoyevsky had dared to assert the writer’s independence, producing a prepackaged interview. How could he be so blind or so vain? I thought of walking out.” (p.562) But Kaiser convinced Smith to read the hefty 25-page “interview” that Solzhenitsyn had written, which proved difficult because Solzhenitsyn was such a Slavophile that he wrote in an archaic style of Russian that used only “pure” Russian words, and not words that were derived from other languages. Solzhenitsyn also insisted that both papers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, print all of his 7,500 word “interview,” which had lengthy sections defending his ancestors from slander that Pravda was printing at the time. Smith explained that not even the U.S. President was guaranteed that his every word would be published in newspapers. Eventually a compromise was reached with Solzhenitsyn, and he agreed to answer some questions. Solzhenitsyn was eventually exiled by the Soviet government in 1974, and he settled in Vermont, despite his dislike of the West and material culture. Oddly enough, when Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994, he briefly hosted a TV talk show. 

Although parts of “The Russians” are inevitably dated, Smith’s deep insights into Russia and the Russian character make the book still very relevant today. It’s a shame that it’s out of print, it really deserves to be re-issued and enjoy wider circulation. Hedrick Smith is a great writer, and he crafts many memorable sentences throughout “The Russians.” One of my favorite passages is his spot-on comments about Soviet architecture:

“The newer subdivisions are a forest of massive prefab apartment blocks, numbing in their monotony (and duplicated in cities all across the country), pockmarked and graying with the instant aging that afflicts all Soviet architecture. They are left naked without grass or shrubbery or shutters or flower boxes, like fleets of dowdy ocean liners gone aground on some barren shore and dwarfing their passengers with their inhuman scale.” (p.140) 

Smith also uses as an epigraph for one of his chapters a very apt quote, which still does a good job of summing up Russia in the 21^st century:

“Russians have gloried in the very thing foreigners criticized them for-blind and boundless devotion to the will of the monarch, even when in his most insane flights he trampled underfoot all the laws of justice and humanity.” Nikolai Karamzin, Russian historian, 1766-1826. (p.320)

If you’re interested in Soviet history, or in Russian culture, Hedrick Smith’s “The Russians” is an excellent book that I would highly recommend.