-Caveat Lector- ------- Forwarded message follows ------- To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Samuel Lightcap <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date sent: Fri, 30 May 2003 17:46:14 -0400 Subject: [fort] Oswald theories live on in Belarus
http://www.iht.com/articles/97437.html Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com Oswald theories live on in Belarus Steven Lee Myers/NYT NYT Monday, May 26, 2003 MINSK, Belarus The ornate apartment building at No. 2 Communist Street rises beside a wooded park along a wide bend in the Svisloch River. The balcony of Apartment 24, on the fourth floor, overlooks the trees and the water and, in the distance, the classically columned Ministry of Defense. It is a lovely spot, especially now, in spring, but one that bears no outward sign of its part in one of history’s most notorious crimes, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There is no plaque, after all, that announces, ‘‘Lee Harvey Oswald Lived Here.’’ For those whose historical curiosity — or conspiratorial bent — brings them to the capital of Belarus, the landmarks of Oswald’s strange life here from January 1960 to May 1962 remain, in some ways, remarkably unchanged four decades later. The sprawling factory where Oswald worked still produces radios and other electronics. It is still state-owned and, today like then, remains closed to visitors. The KGB — still called the KGB — continues to operate the club where Oswald liked to dance, and the club is still named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the father of the Soviet secret police. Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959, inspired by romantic notions of a workers’ paradise, only to become disillusioned later and return home, more than a year before Kennedy’s assassination in November 1962. The authorities — deeply suspicious and evidently unsure what to do with an obviously troubled young American — sent him to Minsk, a regional capital rebuilding itself in monumental Soviet style from the ruins of World War II. They gave him a job at the radio factory and the apartment on Communist Street and kept him under constant surveillance. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB in Moscow and here in Belarus opened their files to public scrutiny, most notably to Norman Mailer, who used much of the material in his biography, ‘‘Oswald’s Tale: An Ameri can Mystery,’’ published in 1995. In 1999, President Boris Yeltsin gave President Bill Clinton still more declassified documents. The files, most historians have agreed, support the Soviet Union’s claim at the time that it had no role in the assassination, but here as elsewhere conspiracy theories thrive, nurtured by distrust of authority and suspicions that other files remain untapped. ‘‘From what I found out, I think and I’m pretty sure what was written in the Warren Commission was just a cover-up of what really happened,’’ said Oleg Belousov, who helped make a documentary film based on interviews with those who knew and worked with Oswald during his 28 months in Minsk. It was not, he noted conspiratorially, shown on Belarussian television. Belousov, a bearded and bespectacled animator, has made a cottage industry out of Oswald’s past here. (As conspiracy theories go, he favors one that holds Oswald to have been an unwitting stooge of both the CIA and the KGB, probably set up by the FBI to take the fall.) The truth, he said, may yet be found here. ‘‘It’s absolutely clear that Minsk’s role in the whole affair has been underestimated,’’ he explained. It is certainly not advertised. There are no plaques, no exhibits, no Oswald tours by the state tourist agencies, Sputnik and Intourist, which have retained not only their Soviet names but also regained, under Lukashenko’s centralized economic policies, most of their monopolistic privileges. ‘‘No one asks,’’ said Svetlana Lubova, a youthful guide at Sputnik, when asked. Even so, Oswald’s presence lingers in the minds of those who knew him here and in the places he frequented. Stanislav Shushkevich, the first leader of independent Belarus, who was ousted in 1994 in a political struggle that brought Lukashenko to power, worked at the factory with Oswald, then called the Minsk Radio Factory. Shushkevich was assigned to teach him Russian. In an interview, he recalled Oswald as a handsome but hapless worker who devoted most of his time to socializing with factory workers. ‘‘The only secret was the reason he came over here,’’ he said. ‘‘We weren’t allowed to ask him about that.’’ Despite the veneer of a new era — there is a designer clothing store, for example, on the first floor of the apartment building on Communist Street — little about Minsk has changed, for better and worse. It leaves the mind free to imagine the environment that shaped the man who would kill Kennedy. Oswald’s apartment building once belonged to the radio factory, housing its workers. Across the street is a recreation of the wooden building in which the first meeting of what would become the Communist Party took place in 1898. Around the corner is the apartment building on Victory Square where the woman he married, Marina Prusakova, lived. Oswald’s apartment is small, with only one room, a kitchen and a bathroom. Eduard Sagyndykov, 67, lives there now. He bought it two years ago for $13,000. Only afterward did he learn its notoriety, a discovery that troubled him, but not for long. Visitors rarely come, but he jovially showed around this reporter. Many of the apartment’s fixtures — the iron bathtub, the ancient toilet — are those Oswald knew. The closet has a thin shelf hidden in the darkness near the top. Sagyndykov can only guess what Oswald kept there. The apartment’s plaster ceiling is patched, the door and window jams thick with paint, but otherwise, he said, ‘‘nothing has changed since then.’’ Sagyndykov said his son had suggested turning his apartment into a museum, but he considered it a joke. Who would come? Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune -- Samuel Lightcap [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------- End of forwarded message ------- -------------------------------------- ANOMALOUS IMAGES AND UFO FILES http://www.anomalous-images.com www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
