On this day in 1961, Lee Harvey Oswald was granted an exit visa to the return to the United States after two years of living and working in Minsk, having defected in October of 1959. Oswald taught himself Russian and had saved up a sizeable portion of his Marine Corps salary after his court-martial and hardship discharge and booked passage to the United Kingdom via ship from New Orleans to Le Havre. Telling customs officials he intended to stay in Southhampton for a week before proceeding to a school in Switzerland.
Hiding his plans to reach the Soviet Union, Oswald flew to Helsinki the same day and took a train to Moscow, where granted a week’s permit to stay and assigned a guide by Intourist, the travel agency and tour operator purportedly run by the KGB. Immediately informing his escort that he wished to become a Soviet subject, Oswald was questioned by various officials as to his motivation whom all found his reasoning suspect and a bit incomprehensible and his application was denied with him being told he would need to leave upon the expiration of his visa. The night before he was due to depart, Oswald—distraught and desperate—gave himself a minor but convincingly bloody knick on the wrist in the hotel bathroom, prompting his Intourist minder to refer him to a psychiatric hospital for observation, overstaying his visa, insisting he wanted to remain in the Soviet Union. Later Oswald formerly declared his desire to renounce his American citizenship to an embassy official at the US mission to the Soviet Union, telling the interviewing consular agent he was earnest and would disclose to the Soviets details on the Marine Corps and his speciality as a radar operator, suggesting he had more intelligence secrets he could reveal.
The consular agent confiscated his passport but did not revoke Oswald’s citizenship. Hoping to be allowed to pursue his studies in Moscow, Oswald was a bit deflated to be sent to Minsk for a factory job producing consumer and space electronics. The future president of an independent Belarus, Stanislau Shushkevich, a coworker, was assigned to Oswald to help him improve his language skills. Despite government-subsidised housing and a generous supplement that afforded Oswald a conformable lifestyle, he eventually became disillusioned, reporting that the the work was drab and there were no little leisure activities and requested to be repatriated. Acquired dependents while Oswald was awaiting the decision and return of his passport were permitted to join him in Texas one year later.
synchronoptica
one year ago: a sign of solidarity with Trump’s failed assassination attempt (with synchronopticæ) plus going Nazi
fourteen years ago: the job market for recent graduates
Originally the doodle was a classroom exercise for school children of the late Edo era, following the turn of the century reform that reduced the syllabary down to forty eight characters from hundreds as a sort of mnemonic device for reenforcing valid glyphs out of the many retired ones, the characters traditionally sung as they were written. The nose, jaw and left cheek would be pronounced moji (文字 in katana) as in the above “picture writing.”
