A Couple of Real Gems from the "Harvey and Lee" Website

[Jim Hargrove]

On 4/27/2017 at 7:57 AM, Thomas Graves said:

Jim,

Big deal.  Punctuation mistakes and spelling errors.  I see them practically every day on this forum!

You and Armstrong (and the guy in the ivory tower at Yale who, having lived in Russia for the first 37 years of his life, was an "expert on Slavic Languages" but obviously quite weak in English) are all incompetent compared to me when it comes to evaluating not only Lee Harvey Oswald's ability to speak and write English, but whether or not he first learned Hungarian, then Russian, and then, finally, "a little bit of English".

Nice try, though!

--  Tommy

Try to pay attention, Tommy....

When the Iron Curtain descended over Eastern Europe in 1944-1945, the little possibly Hungarian war orphan who later became known as "Lee Harvey Oswald" may soon have learned Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet in Hungary.   Stalinization required it after WWII!  The following is from the book OUTCAST, by Deke Rivers....  I reject the "worse than Hitler" reference.

 

 

[Chris Newton]

40 minutes ago, Jim Hargrove said:

When the Iron Curtain descended over Eastern Europe in 1944-1945, the little possibly Hungarian war orphan who later became known as "Lee Harvey Oswald" may soon have learned Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet in Hungary.   Stalinization required it after WWII!  The following is from the book OUTCAST, by Deke Rivers....  I reject the "worse than Hitler" reference.

Jim,

How long did that "directive" last? Do we know when it was phased out? I ask because my girlfriend, while I was stationed in Germany in 1983, was a recent escapee, (brought out in the trunk of a car), from communist Hungary. She spoke Hungarian, Russian and German fluently. She was the same age I was and therefore grew up and started her schooling in Hungary during the early 1960's.

PS Tommy has been suspended and hasn't returned yet. So he can't rsepond to you

[Jim Hargrove]

I’ve been trying to do a little research on that, Chris.  It’s hard to find specifics on the teaching of Russian in eastern bloc schools, but most sources I've checked say that, in general, de-Stalinization efforts began sometime after the dictator’s death in 1953, often dating it to 1956 (also the year of the Hungarian Revolution).  If this timeline is reasonably correct, a kid born around 1939 in Hungary would have been taught the Russian language for the majority of his elementary school years. He certainly would have become comfortable with the Cyrillic alphabet, which seems to be one of the significant obstacles to learning Russian.

The experience of your Hungarian girlfriend seems to indicate Russian was still taught well into the 1960s, no?  

Edited August 10, 2017 by Jim Hargrove

[Jim Hargrove]

From the June 15, 1990 L.A. Times

BUDAPEST, Hungary — When the minister of education announced last fall that the teaching of Russian was no longer compulsory in Hungarian schools, students celebrated by shredding their Russian textbooks.

"Russian was forced on us," student Krisztina Karoly, 20, told a reporter recently. "It will always be considered the language of oppression."

Read the full article HERE.

[Chris Newton]

6 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

The experience of your Hungarian girlfriend seems to indicate Russian was still taught well into the 1960s, no?  

I don't doubt that Russian was taught, (and required), in Eastern Bloc schools outside of the USSR. I don't think it was taught as the primary language or that the curriculum was exclusive of any other languages, which is what I gathered you were suggesting.

[Jim Hargrove]

Rivers may have overstated the case a little in Outcast, but it is clear that Stalin at the end of WWII mandated extensive formal education in the Russian language in all schools in eastern bloc nations, including Hungary.  The locals clearly hated it.  I’ve heard from one person who was in Hungary in the early 1990s (after the Berlin Wall came down) who personally saw Hungarian construction workers chipping Russian alphabet letters from public monuments and structures.

The significance of this is that, if the Russian-speaking Oswald did have parents from Hungary, as declared in an anonymous phone call to Mrs. Jack Tippit, it would explain how he was so fluent in Russian throughout his short life.  He learned it in elementary school.

[David Andrews]

21 hours ago, Chris Newton said:

 

Delete, please - posted incorrectly.

Edited August 11, 2017 by David Andrews

[Mathias Baumann]

17 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Rivers may have overstated the case a little in Outcast, but it is clear that Stalin at the end of WWII mandated extensive formal education in the Russian language in all schools in eastern bloc nations, including Hungary.  The locals clearly hated it.  I’ve heard from one person who was in Hungary in the early 1990s (after the Berlin Wall came down) who personally saw Hungarian construction workers chipping Russian alphabet letters from public monuments and structures.

The significance of this is that, if the Russian-speaking Oswald did have parents from Hungary, as declared in an anonymous phone call to Mrs. Jack Tippit, it would explain how he was so fluent in Russian throughout his short life.  He learned it in elementary school.

Jim,

some thoughts on this:

1) Setting up a high-class language program from scratch takes many years. Curricula need to be developed, teachers need to be trained ,school books need to be written etc. I highly doubt that elementary school Russian language class in Hungary was very effective shortly after the war. Although English was introduced in German elementary schools about 15 years ago quality still varies greatly from place to place, for instance. In many schools it consists of singing English songs two or three times a week.

2) I don't think that the cyrillic letters are the greatest hurdle in learning Russian. Hungary belongs to a completely different family of languages, it is much more closely related to Finnish than to Russian. So grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation vary greatly.

3) I don't think that the Russian alphabet would be taught alongside the Roman one in elementary school, especially since many letters look identical in both alphabets but stand for different sounds (CCCP = SSSR!) That would obviously be highly confusing to the students. The logical approach would be to teach the cyrillic letters not until the students possess a firm command of the Roman alphabet.

4) According to this paper Russian was not taught until the 5th grade and was not compulsory until 1950, which would prove right my point 3):

http://ludens.elte.hu/~deal/pages/novelty/htm2/vol91/lukacs.html

Quote

For 40 years (from 1950 to 1989) Russian was the compulsory first (and in many cases the only) foreign language in schools. The teaching of West European languages became possible after 1958 as a second foreign language, but unlike Russian, which was taught for 8 years (grades 5 to 12), West European languages were taught in 2 or 3 classes a week for 3-4 years only in upper secondary school.

At what age did Harvey leave Hungary according to your theory? How long could he have learned Russian if he started in grade 5?

 

Edited August 11, 2017 by Mathias Baumann

[Jim Hargrove]

Hi, Mathias,

Thank you for your thoughts and the link.  I’m having no end of difficulty finding detailed information about Russian instruction in the years immediately after WWII fighting subsided in Hungary, so your info is most appreciated.  A couple of my own thoughts….

From the article you cited: “For 40 years (from 1950 to 1989) Russian was the compulsory first (and in many cases the only) foreign language in schools.”  This hardly proves, however, that Russian wasn’t taught in other Hungarian schools at an earlier time.  In fact, in the abstract of an academic article I found is the following statement: “In the period between 1945 and 1989, the learning of Russian as a compulsory subject was introduced, teaching other languages was restricted, and Hungarian-Russian bilingual schools were launched.”

The ip address to this site is endless, but I’m trying to embed it HERE.

Worse yet, Journal Paedagogica Historica, International Journal of the History of Education, wants big bucks to download the actual article.  This is frustrating. I’m sure your other observations have real merit, but I’d like to find something historically definitive about this specific situation.  Thanks again, and please let me know if anything else occurs to you!

 

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Jim Hargrove writes:

<blockquote>the Cyrillic alphabet ... seems to be one of the significant obstacles to learning Russian.</blockquote>

On the contrary, getting to grips with the Cyrillic alphabet is a trivial matter. It takes at most a few hours to learn how to pronounce written words. The main complication of Russian is its heavy use of inflection: the way that parts, usually the endings, of the fundamental words of a sentence change to indicate a word's role in a sentence.

Anyone who has learned Latin will be familiar with this (all together now: amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant; mensa, mensa, mensam, mensae, mensae, mensa). Just like Latin nouns, Russian nouns come in three genders and several declensions, each of which has a separate set of endings. Just like Latin verbs, Russian verbs come in several conjugations, each of which has a separate set of endings. Then there are the pronouns, each of which ... You get the picture. There is a huge amount of fiddly stuff to memorise.

All of this makes a heavily inflected language such as Russian a real pain to learn, at least if you want to speak the language flawlessly. It's very easy for a non-native speaker to make mistakes. On the plus side, you can often make mistakes with case endings and the like and still be understood. It's similar to the use of the simple past tense in English: the basic rule is to add a voiced 'd' or unvoiced 't' sound as appropriate to the end of the verb (I moved, I asked, etc), but there are so many exceptions to this rule (I spoke, I ate, I went, I drove, etc), each of which needs to be memorised independently, that many non-native speakers of English often aren't able to use that tense. Instead, they use the present tense, with markers to indicate that they're talking about the past (I come here last year, I speak to him yesterday, etc).

Fluent speakers of English as a foreign language can frequently make grammatical mistakes like this, which an adult native speaker would almost never make, and still be understood. In reading, irregular verb forms cause fewer problems, since the context will very often indicate the meaning of an unfamiliar word. That's the level which the one and only, real-life Lee Harvey Oswald seems to have reached with Russian.

Jim writes:

<blockquote>The significance of this [the teaching of Russian in Hungarian schools] is that, if the Russian-speaking Oswald did have parents from Hungary, as declared in an anonymous phone call to Mrs. Jack Tippit, it would explain how he was so fluent in Russian throughout his short life. He learned it in elementary school.</blockquote>

But let's not forget that the hypothetical Hungarian refugee child, for whose existence not a single piece of documentary evidence has yet been produced, was already speaking perfect American English when he was conjured into life in New York at the age of 12. This boy, if he existed, must have been a native speaker of Hungarian who learned two foreign languages, Russian and English, both of which are entirely unrelated to Hungarian, to a very high level between the time he entered the Hungarian school system (at around the age of five, presumably) and when he was inducted into an imaginary CIA-sponsored 'Oswald project' no more than seven years later, having emigrated halfway across the world in the meantime. Does that sound even remotely plausible?

In fact, it's far worse than that. If the article Mathias cites is correct, our hypothetical Hungarian refugee child could not have even started learning Russian in Hungary until two years before he popped up in New York with the ability to speak perfect English. That fact alone refutes the purely speculative notion that the 12-year-old boy in New York was a Hungarian refugee who had arrived in the USA at some undetermined point in the late 1940s with a good command of Russian. It could not have happened.

Contrary to Jim's claim, the real-life, one and only Lee Harvey Oswald was not "fluent in Russian throughout his short life." Oswald began learning Russian in his teens. He appears to have become a fluent speaker before his defection, if Rosaleen Quinn is to be believed. But fluency is not at all the same thing as the ability to speak a language like a native. Even after his return to the USA, having spent nearly three years surrounded by native speakers of Russian, his command of Russian was noticeably worse than that of a native speaker, but entirely consistent with that of an American who had spent only a few years learning the language. Marina Oswald "constantly" (in the words of George de Mohrenschildt) corrected his errors. These errors appear to have been grammatical errors; Ruth Paine, who on this occasion had no reason not to tell the truth, pointed out that "His Russian was poor. His vocabulary was large, his grammar never was good."

If you are wondering why there is not a single piece of documentary evidence for the existence of Jim's hypothetical Russian-speaking Hungarian refugee child who was co-opted into a preposterous doppelgänger project at the age of 12, the reason is obvious: the child did not exist. He is a figment of the imagination. Everything we know about Oswald's ability to speak English, Russian and Hungarian is consistent with the mundane, common-sense interpretation that he was a native speaker of English who learned Russian in his teens, who improved his knowledge of Russian in his early twenties while living in the Soviet Union, and who never learned a word of Hungarian.

Sources
- Rosaleen Quinn: Commission Exhibit 2015, p.8: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1140#relPageId=448
- Marina Oswald: According to George de Mohrenschildt, "Marina had a bad habit of constantly correcting Lee when he was speaking Russian": http://22november1963.org.uk/george-de-mohrenschildt-i-am-a-patsy-chapter10
- Ruth Paine: Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol.3, p.130: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=39#relPageId=138

[Jim Hargrove]

Here is a transcript of an FBI document, an internal teletype from 11/30/63, withheld from public view for three decades, providing evidence that Mr. Bojczuk claims doesn’t exist.  In a phone call heard by two people, an anonymous caller claims that she knew “Lee Harvey Oswald’s” father and uncle and that they were Hungarians and communists living near 77th St. and Second Ave. in New York City (emphasis added): 

URGENT 11-30-63 7-37 PM EST MB
TO DIRECTOR, AND SACS DALLAS AND NEW YORK
FROM SAC, NEW HAVEN /100-18158/
NEW YORK VIA WASHINGTON
LEE HARVEY OSWALD, IS - R
ON NOV. THIRTY INSTANT, JACK D. TIPPIT, SELF EMPLOYED
CARTOONIST FOR NATIONAL MAGAZINES AND WIFE, ONE SIX FOUR
NEW TOWN TURNPIKE, WESTPORT, CONN., ADVISED AS FOLLOWS. AT
APPROXIMATELY ELEVEN THIRTY AM ON INSTANT DATE MRS. TIPPIT
RECEIVED A TELEPHONE CALL FROM UNKNOWN WOMAN WHO ASKED IF
MR. TIPPIT WAS A POLICEMAN AND IF HE WAS RELATED TO THE POLICE-
MAN TIPPIT WHO WAS SHOT IN DALLAS. MRS. TIPPIT REPLIED HER
HUSBAND WAS NOT A POLICEMAN, WAS DISTANTLY RELATED TO OFFICER
TIPPIT AND ASKED IDENTITY OF CALLER. ON ANOTHER EXTENSION
JACK TIPPIT LISTENED TO BALANCE OF PHONE CALL. THE WOMAN SAID
SHE COULD NOT GIVE HER NAME AS SHE WAS AFRAID OF BEING KILLED,
THAT SHE WAS FROM NEW YORK AND HAD TO COME "HERE" TO MAKE THE
CALL SO THAT SHE COULD NOT BE TRACED AS SHE WAS IN FEAR OF HER
END PAGE ONE

PAGE TWO:

LIFE. THE WOMAN REQUESTED THAT NOTHING BE SAID TO THE PRESS
ABOUT A WOMAN CALLING AS THEY WOULD KNOW HER IDENTITY AND SHE
WOULD BE KILLED.
THE WOMAN SAID SHE KNEW OSWALD-S FATHER AND UNCLE WHO
WERE HUNGARIANS AND COMMUNISTS. THE WOMAN CONTINUED THAT
OSWALD-S FATHER AND UNCLE HAD LIVED AT SEVENTY SEVENTH AND SECOND
AVENUE, YORKVILLE, NYC, THAT WHILE LIVING THERE BOTH WERE
UNEMPLOYED, GOT THEIR MONEY FROM COMMUNISTS AND SPENT ALL THERE
TIME IN COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES.
THE WOMAN THEN BEGAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY, DISJOINTEDLY,
AND NERVOUSLY. SHE STATED SHE HAD TWO NAMES TO GIVE AND
MENTIONED THE NAME EMILE KARDOS AND SAID SOMETHING ABOUT A
BROTHER IN LAW. WHEN MRS. TIPPIT TRIED TO FIND OUT WHOSE
BROTHER IN LAW THE WOMAN KEPT REPEATING THE WORD BROTHER IN LAW.
THE WOMAN STATED KARDOS IS HEAD OF THE COMMUNISTS AND THAT THIS
GROUP IN NEW YORK NOW HAS CHARTS AND MAPS. THE WOMAN SAID
SOMETHING ABOUT WEINSTOCK THE EDITOR OF QUOTE WOMAN-S WORLD
UNQUOTE BUT DID NOT GIVE FURTHER DETAILS.. THE WOMAN SAID THE
END PAGE TWO

PAGE THREE:

GROUP IN NEW YORK PLANS TO TAKE OVER THE GOVERNMENT, THAT OF
COURSE THEY WOULD DENY THIS BUT SHE KNEW IT TO BE TRUE.
SHE THEN HUNG UP ABRUPTLY. THE WOMAN NEVER GAVE ANY REASON
FOR HER CALL WHICH SOUNDED LOCAL. MRS. TIPPIT THOUGHT THE
WOMAN HAD AN AUSTRIAN OR GERMAN ACCENT WHILE MR. TIPPIT
BELIEVED IT WAS SPANISH. BOTH FELT THE WOMAN SOUNDED LIKE
A MATURE ADULT AND DID NOT HAVE A YOUTHFUL VOICE.
MR. TIPPIT EXPLAINED WOMAN MAY HAVE OBTAINED HIS IDENTITY
FROM AN ARTICLE ON PAGE ONE OF NORWALK, CONN. QUOTE HOUR
UNQUOTE FOR NOVEMBER TWENTYFIVE LAST, WHICH STATED THAT WE MAY
BE A DISTANT RELATIVE OF THE DALLAS POLICEMAN. TIPPIT SAID
ARTICLE RESULTED FROM TELEPHONE CALL FROM REPORTER WHO WAS
CHECKING ALL TIPPITS IN LOCAL TELEPHONE DIRECTORIES.
BUREAU REQUESTED TO COORDINATE ABOVE WITH ANY OTHER
INFORMATION TO DETERMINE IF PERTINENT AS NEW HAVEN HAS NO
KNOWLEDGE OF THE RESIDENCE AND ASSOCIATES OF OSWALD-S FATHER
AND UNCLE.

END AND ACK PLS
7-45 PM OK FBI WA LLD FOR RELAY
6-47 PM CST OK FBI DL FL
TU PLSDISC M
CC-MR_ROSEN

See actual document here.

Neither John Armstrong nor I has ever presented the Hungarian roots of the Russian-speaking Oswald as anything other than a possibility.  Hearsay evidence based on an anonymous phone call can hardly rise to the level of proof, but the call was overheard by two people, and provided a rather precise location for “Oswald’s” alleged father (at the intersection of 77th St. and Second Ave. in the Yorkville area of NYC).  The teletype ends with this sentence: “BUREAU REQUESTED TO COORDINATE ABOVE WITH ANY OTHER INFORMATION TO DETERMINE IF PERTINENT AS NEW HAVEN HAS NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE RESIDENCE AND ASSOCIATES OF OSWALD-S FATHER
AND UNCLE.” There is no evidence the FBI even bothered to look into the assertion of a Yorkville father and uncle of “Oswald.”

While stationed less than a year in the USMC in California, “Lee Harvey Oswald” suddenly, we’re told, taught himself to read, write, and speak Russian by reading Russian print literature and using an English-Russian dictionary.  

 

Here’s an image of a Russian-language newspaper printed in San Francisco.  How long do you think it would take you to learn Russian by reading this and consulting a print dictionary, such as those available in the late 1950s?

 

Mr. Bojczuk writes that Oswald:  “was already speaking perfect American English when he was conjured into life in New York at the age of 12.”  If anyone who happens to read this has an ear for regional dialects, please listen to any existing audio recording of the Russian-speaking “Lee Harvey Oswald.”  Does that sound to you like the voice of an American teen-ager raised primarily in New Orleans and Texas?

I'd like to hear Mr. Bojczuk's theory about how "Lee Harvey Oswald" learned to read, write, and speak Russian.

[Sandy Larsen]

4 hours ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

....getting to grips with the Cyrillic alphabet is a trivial matter. It takes at most a few hours to learn how to pronounce written words.

Anybody who has learned a language that uses a completely different alphabet will know that this statement is nonsense.

To anybody who buys what Jeremy is saying, I suggest you do just what he said. Spend just a "few hours" ("at most!") teaching yourself to read Russian, or any other language using an unfamiliar alphabet. Then let's see if you can read in that language. And don't forget... if you are reading at a snail's pace, you will be learning the language at even a slower pace. Much slower.

When I learned to speak Farsi, all our reading material was transliterated to the English alphabet. Because our instructors knew how slow going it would be if we had to learn both the alphabet and the language simultaneously. For example, we learned by reading "salaam aleykum" instead of سلام عليكم .

It wasn't till we could speak somewhat fluently with a native speaker that we spent considerable time learning to read and write with Arabic characters. Even after living a year and a half in Iran, it was still difficult for me to read and write the language.

BTW, if it's as easy as Jeremy makes it out to be, why do our kids need to take an English class nearly every semester from K to 12?

 

[Sandy Larsen]

It is well known that kids learn languages more quickly than adults do. So how many years of learning would it take for a kid to read , say, "A Tale of Two Cities?" What grade level would that be?

Judging by Lee Harvey Oswald's accomplishment, a 1st grader should be able to read it given that the child will learn faster than the adult. (Not that the child will be mature enough to appreciate it.)

Yeah, there's absolutely nothin' to learning a new language.

 

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Jim Hargrove writes:

<blockquote>While stationed less than a year in the USMC in California, "Lee Harvey Oswald" suddenly, we're told, taught himself to read, write, and speak Russian</blockquote>

Why "suddenly"? Is there any evidence that Oswald's acquisition of Russian was not gradual, just as other people's acquisition of a foreign language is gradual? What superhuman level of competence does Jim think Oswald reached after "less than a year in the USMC in California"? Obviously something so far out of the ordinary that an absurd doppelgänger project becomes a credible explanation.

<blockquote>I'd like to hear Mr. Bojczuk's theory about how "Lee Harvey Oswald" learned to read, write, and speak Russian.</blockquote>

'Theory' would be too grand a word. There's no reason to doubt that Oswald learned Russian in the same way that any other sufficiently motivated person would learn a foreign language. You get hold of some suitable learning materials, then you get your head down and put in some effort.

There is nothing magical about Oswald's knowledge of Russian. As I wrote earlier, everything we know about Oswald's ability to speak Russian is consistent with the common-sense interpretation that he was a native speaker of English who began learning Russian in his teens and who improved his knowledge of Russian in his early twenties while living in the Soviet Union.

Mathias Baumann writes:

<blockquote>At what age did Harvey leave Hungary according to your theory? How long could he have learned Russian if he started in grade 5?</blockquote>

Jim is wise to ignore Mathias's perceptive questions, which have effectively put an end to the far-fetched Hungarian refugee hypothesis. I'll have a go instead. If the hypothetical Hungarian refugee child began learning Russian in grade 5, he had just two years in which:
- (a) to acquire a high level of competence in Russian, a language completely unrelated to his native Hungarian;
- (b) to leave Hungary and emigrate to the United States, without generating any official documentary record of his arrival; and
- (c) to acquire a native speaker's level of competence in English, another language completely unrelated to his native Hungarian.

The whole idea is ridiculous. The 12-year-old boy in New York was not a Hungarian refugee who already spoke excellent Russian, but an American who would not begin to learn Russian for several years.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Sandy Larsen thinks that my statement ("getting to grips with the Cyrillic alphabet is a trivial matter. It takes at most a few hours to learn how to pronounce written words.") is "nonsense". He writes:

<blockquote>Spend just a "few hours" ("at most!") teaching yourself to read Russian, or any other language using an unfamiliar alphabet. Then let's see if you can read in that language.</blockquote>

Sandy may have misunderstood what I wrote. It's the ability to relate letters to sounds that takes only a few hours to learn. Once you've got to grips with the alphabet, you can start to learn the language itself.

Sandy's misunderstanding may have come about because of the difficulty he had with learning the Persian alphabet. To someone brought up with the Roman alphabet, Cyrillic is far, far easier to learn than the Persian alphabet that caused Sandy problems. A few hours is really all you need!