Why did Marina cut off contact with Ruth Paine so abruptly?

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Who cares? You're not about to start suggesting that Ruth Paine was involved in the assassination conspiracy, are you?

Marina's estrangement with Ruth seemed to start right after the assassination and not years later when she became a conspiracist. She was isolated, afraid, dependent on others and both Robert and Marguerite, who she had to lean on for support, disliked the Paines intensely. I think they told simply told her not to trust the Paines, to stay away from them, they were using the assassination for their own interests and not hers.

Marguerite said this about Ruth: "The proud and perfect Quaker…I keep saying she is a fraud and liar…I can hardly read this woman’s thoughts. She is evil, and selfish and the cause of it all. You ought to be horse-whipped."

Robert particularly didn't like Michael either. He thought Michael lied about not knowing about the rifle in the garage. And he wrote in his book "Lee" that Ruth and Marina's friendship "apparently contributed to Lee’s feeling of rejection and failure."

I think it was a personality and cultural clash as well. Whether the assassination happened or not they were not going to get along. They came from two different worlds. Lots of wheels turning here.

[Tom Graves]

Her estrangement seemed to me to start right after the assassination and not years later when she became a conspiracist. She was isolated, afraid, dependent on others and both Robert and Marguerite, who she had to lean on for support, disliked the Paines intensely. I think they told simply told her not to trust the Paines, to stay away from them, they were using the assassination for their own interests and not hers.

Marguerite said this about Ruth: "The proud and perfect Quaker…I keep saying she is a fraud and liar…I can hardly read this woman’s thoughts. She is evil, and selfish and the cause of it all. You ought to be horse-whipped."

Robert particularly didn't like Michael either. He thought Michael lied about not knowing about the rifle in the garage. And he wrote in his book, "Lee," that Ruth and Marina's friendship "apparently contributed to Lee’s feeling of rejection and failure."

I think it was a personality and cultural clash as well. Whether the assassination happened or not they were not going to get along. They came from two different worlds. Lots of wheels turning here.

Did Marguerite and Robert suspect that the Paines were KGB agents?

Come to think of it, wasn't Michael Paine's father a Trotskyist, and didn't CIA's Clare Edward Petty determine by reading some WW II VENONA decrypts that another important person in Oswald's life, George DeMohrenschildt, was very probably a long-term KGB "illegal"?

Interestingly, KGB Major Pyotr Deriabin, who defected to the U.S. in 1954, said that Marina had to be at least a low-level KGB informant to be allowed to marry her Handsome Prince Charming and leave The Worker's Paradise with him.

Hmm.

[Richard Smith]

My guess is that Marina resented the fact that she had to accept charity from Ruth Paine and disliked her for that reason.  Who knows what tensions might arise in a household with two women and their children.  As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.  Marina likely felt ashamed based on events and in the aftermath there was suspicion of what Paine might reveal fueled by Robert Oswald's paranoia about the Paines and competition for attention in the media.  Marina likely realized very quickly that there was money to be obtained from being the wife of the assassin with the inside story.  She did not want to share that with Ruth Paine.