Our Man in Minsk

Lee Harvey Oswald's Soviet World

I went to Minsk to find Lee Harvey Oswald. Not the man, of course. His world – his apartment, on 4 Communist Street; the television and radio factory where he was a metal-lathe operator; the Institute of Foreign Languages, where he met girls who spoke English and listened to jazz; the movie theater he sometimes went to; the streets, corners, alleys, the playground and parking lot behind his apartment house through which he’d trundle everyday on the ten-minute walk to work.

Before I arrived in Minsk, I imagined Oswald’s world like …