My wife is a native Russian speaker. She spoke nothing but Russian for the first 53 years of her life. She is very well-educated. I asked her to assess the use of Russian in the Walker note (WC CE 1,
https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/pdf/WH16_CE_1.pdf).
I can attest that Russian is an extremely difficult language. I took some fairly intense courses when I met my wife and have now been exposed for 18 years. I remain very clumsy. I will put together a sentence of six Russian words that I know well, but my wife will giggle because the word endings are wrong and the sentence is simply not the way a Russian would convey the same idea.
My wife says the Russian in the Walker note is that of a second or third grader – i.e., a kid of about eight or nine. She says no Russian teenager (for example) would make the mistakes found in the note.
It’s not a matter (as is often said) of Oswald “speaking better than he writes.” The same mistakes would be found when speaking. The issue is not spelling or anything like that.
Apart from the Cyrillic alphabet, there is nothing particularly difficult about writing Russian. Word order within a Russian sentence is irrelevant. Every letter is pronounced, which means that I can make a good stab at pronouncing a complex word even if I have no idea what it means or at spelling a word if I know how it sounds.
Oswald’s Russian is flawed primarily in the word endings, which are constantly changing depending on tense and whether the words are male or female. Since the word car (“machina”) is female, my car (“mya machina”) requires my to also be female; if my car is the object rather than the subject, this becomes “myu machinu.” One year is “gawd,” two to four years are “gawda,” but five years or more are “lyet.” Anyway, it’s maddening.
Oswald makes numerous mistakes of this sort, which would likewise be made when speaking and which no one genuinely fluent in Russian would make. He also uses words that are technically “correct” but are not the words a Russian would use. Lastly, he sometimes spells out the English word in Russian characters because he does not know the Russian word.
No big deal – my wife says she can understand the Walker note, but in the same way she could understand a letter from a second or third grader.
This has been true of some of Oswald’s other writings I have had her review. They are not the writings of someone with an amazing and mysterious proficiency in Russian. They just aren’t. They are little better than I would do, and I like Oswald can muddle along when I visit Belarus and often receive compliments on my pronunciation. Thanks to my wife, I even know some quirky Russian sayings I wouldn’t be expected to know – like a Russian who’d only been in America a month saying, “Well, shut my mouth!” or “Eat my shorts, bozo.”
There is, of course, speculation that Ruth Paine actually wrote the Walker note. This seems to me like an impossible argument to make.
The history of the note is set forth in WC CE 1785, a memorandum dated 12-5-63 and written by SS agent Leon Gopadze.
https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh23/pdf/WH23_CE_1785.pdf.
On 12-2-63, Ruth Paine turned over the note and the book in which it had been found to the Irving Police Department, which in turn gave it to the Secret Service the same day. Gopadze observes that the note “was constructed in very poor Russian and many words were misspelled which were hard to understand.” He telephoned Marina, who denied knowledge of the note.
The next day, 12-3-63, SS agents Gopadze and Brody visited Marina. She explained that she had not wanted to talk about the note over the telephone but that it was written by Oswald in connection with his attempt to assassinate Walker on 4-10-63. She said the note and a post office key had been left for her on the dresser of their place on Neely Street. She confronted Oswald about it when he returned home from the attempt on Walker. She decided to keep the note as future leverage over him. Mr. and Mrs. James Martin, with whom Marina was living, were present when she made these statements.
On 12-5-63, Marina told the same story about the note to FBI agents Boguslov and Heitman. See WC CE 1784,
https://www.history-matters.com/archive/contents/wc/contents_wh23.htm.
On 2-3-64, Marina testified to the Warren Commission about the note. She told the exact same story she had told to the SS and FBI.
https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/testimony/oswald_m1.htm.
Also in 1964, Marina told the same story to author Priscilla Johnson, which is recounted in her 1977 book
Marina and Lee.
On 9-13-78, Marina testified to the HSCA about the note. Her testimony was consistent with what she had said previously, except that her recollection was not as strong and she wasn’t sure whether the note might have been left on a shelf or table.
David Lifton met Marina in 1981 in connection with the publication of
Best Evidence. He said that he spoke with her numerous times over more than a decade and that she recounted the same story about the Walker note to him. He had no doubt that Oswald had written it.
Lastly, James Cadigan, a handwriting expert for the FBI, identified the handwriting on the note as belonging to Oswald.
https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh7/html/WC_Vol7_0223a.htm.
Hence, I don’t believe there is any great mystery about the note or about Oswald’s proficiency in Russian. There seems no reasonable possibility that Ruth Paine wrote it. One mystery, I suppose, would be Peter Gregory's letter saying that Oswald had a "good knowledge of Russian" and was "capable of being an interpreter and possibly a translator." It's not exactly an enthusiastic recommendation, and I suppose if Gregory felt sorry for Oswald it wouldn't have been too much of a fib to say he had a good knowledge of Russian. Anyone who had hired Oswald as an interpreter or translator would have quickly learned the truth.
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