Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Soviet Defection and Marriage

After his Marine Corps discharge, Oswald spent only 3 days with his mother in Fort Worth before traveling to New Orleans, where he booked passage on the freighter SS Marion Lykes, sailing for Le Havre, France on September 20, 1959. He had planned his trip to the Soviet Union for months, applying to a Swiss college with false credentials in March 1959, obtaining a passport listing the USSR as a destination, and saving nearly $1,500 during his Marine service. He arrived in Moscow via train from Finland on October 16, 1959, and immediately applied for Soviet citizenship. After being ordered to leave the USSR by October 21, 1959, he slashed his wrists in an apparent suicide attempt, was hospitalized, and on October 31 formally announced his intention to renounce U.S. citizenship at the American Embassy, citing his Marxist beliefs. The Soviet Union did not grant him citizenship but allowed him to remain in Minsk on a year-to-year basis starting in January 1960, where he worked as an unskilled laborer at a radio factory. His permission to stay was extended in January 1961, and that February he wrote to the U.S. Embassy expressing a desire to return to the United States. In March 1961, he met 19-year-old Russian pharmacist Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova, and the two married on April 30, 1961. Over the following year, the Oswalds corresponded with U.S. and Soviet authorities to secure permission to leave the USSR, and visited the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in July 1961, where officials confirmed he had not lost his U.S. citizenship. Marina was granted permission to depart the Soviet Union on December 25, 1961.