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HELSINKI by train Oct 15 - 16, 1959


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There are no stamps in the 1959 passport book for MOSCOW since Oswald entered Russia at Vyborg via Vainikkala...

Vyborg has a USSR Embassy which stamps the passport OCTOBER 15, 1959.  It is a 1 hour train ride from HELSINKI to VYBORG.

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But it's only a 7 hour ride from Vyborg to Moscow...

He arrives in Moscow on Oct 16th according to the completely discredited "diary"... by train and he meets Rimma from Intourist...

What I am having trouble reconciling is the passing of a day for a total 8 hour train trip....  It's still, or already Oct 15th in Vyborg...

Why does it take a full day to travel 7 hours?  There is no indication he took the night train...

250816984_Oct15-16foran8hourtrip-whydifferentdays.jpg.232a7c54202f5645a2171079bd18597c.jpg

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David:

When did Oswald first contact Intourist?

It must have been through Golub right?

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She supposedly was there at the train station...

Since the diary is the source for this...(are there Intourist reports?) its very hard to say....

Golub is Helsinki Soviet Ambassador? Embassy 

Edited by David Josephs
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Yes.  

What I am trying to determine is if Golub contacted Intourist when Oswald got there, then who paid for the Torni Hotel?

I mean I have never come across anything which says that Oswald contacted Golub or Intourist prior to his arrival in Helsinki.  Have you?

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the "evidence" we rely upon here Jim is strictly the Passport stamps....

943212567_hELSINKISTAMPON1959PASSPORTPAGE1.jpg.c9b3f63d43d750cf061acbbdbbfc0148.jpg

I have yet to see the TORNI hotel register... the claim is he checks in at 2400 on Oct 10...  That in itself is strange...  24:00 Oct 10  = 00:00 Oct 11....

He then checks out on the 11th and finds a cheaper hotel....  Shades of Mexico City are starting to creep into my thinking here Jim...

When a stamp and a signed book are the items of KEY evidence... we have an exact repeat of Mexico.

So sadly we need to ask whether any of this evidence can be corroborated...  those couple of days  and this trip has never been a focus of my time, until now. 

Let me do some digging....

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Thanks David.  

And BTW, that cheaper hotel you refer to, the Klaus Kurki, was a 4.5 star hotel while the Torni was a five star.

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So he saved a few bucks?  lol

Jim... the evidence for KLAUS KURKI.... signed register?

http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/moscow1.htm   is this reliable?  Peter Wronski

Lee Harvey Oswald, age nineteen, arrived in Moscow on the morning of Friday, October 16, 1959 by train from Helsinki. He would have disembarked at the Leningradsky train station at Komsomolskaya Square which is located in the north-east quadrant of a ring road that encircles the center of Moscow. (The US embassy is located at the west compass point of the ring road.) He was met by an unidentified Intourist representative and driven to the Hotel Berlin, which at one time, had been called the Savoy. (Today it has reverted to the name Savoy.) The Hotel Berlin is located in the Kuznetsky Most area, overshadowed by two enormous buildings:  Detsky Mir ("Children's World"), a huge department store with a large selection of children's products on the main floor, and across the street, the Lubyianka complex -- the KGB Headquarters and former NKVD prison.
 

He was met in the hotel lobby by Rimma Semenova Shirakova, age twenty-two, a graduate in English and Arabic from the Moscow Foreign Languages Institute and an Intourist guide. She was assigned to him as his personal guide, a privilege of Deluxe class tourists. That morning, Oswald and Shirakova toured Moscow in an automobile, stopping occasionally at various points of interest. In 1993, Rimma recalled that Oswald was mostly silent and did not interrupt her tour talk. In general, she found him polite and nice. They returned to the hotel at noon so that Oswald could have his lunch. A tour of the Kremlin was scheduled for the afternoon.
   

When Oswald returned from lunch, he told Rimma that he did not want to go on a tour but that he wanted to talk. Rimma says they went outside and sat on a bench as it was a warm day. (Probably at Revolutionary Square, the nearest location to the hotel where there are benches.)

In Rimma's account as described by Norman Mailer in Oswald's Tale (pp.44-45) (he only paraphrases her), Oswald told her did not want to return to the US--there was no sense to it. His mother had remarried and was no longer interested in him. Nobody was interested in him. When he served as a Marine in the Far East he had seen much suffering and the US had fomented unjust wars in which he did not want to take part. She had the impression that he had seen combat. He had read that the Soviet people lived good, useful, and very peaceful lives and he had come here to see this for himself. Now he wanted to stay, he repeated. This was a proper country for his political views.

Rimma gives Oswald the nickname Alek  because Lee sounds too Chinese and confuses the Russians.  Oswald will adopt this name for the remainder of his stay in Russia.

By the end of that day, a letter requesting asylum and citizenship had been written, signed, sealed and delivered to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.  A copy of the letter was included in the 80 pages of Soviet documents released in 1999 to the USA by the Russian Federation

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Seems there was a variety of ways for him to have gotten to Helsinki

All the WCR ever spoke of were "DIRECT FLIGHTS" as if there was no other way...

Kinda changes the significance of the University of TURKU in this journey

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Edited by David Josephs
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So the CIA says he was at the two hotels.

And we know Golub arranged his visa into Russia.

But then who paid for the stays at the two hotels?

Did the WC just assume that he did?  If that is so, then they knew nothing about the stature of the two hotels.

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17 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

So the CIA says he was at the two hotels.

And we know Golub arranged his visa into Russia.

But then who paid for the stays at the two hotels?

Did the WC just assume that he did?  If that is so, then they knew nothing about the stature of the two hotels.

Exactly... That site above says she met him at the hotel, after arriving in the morning in Moscow....

I just looked it up and created a map, but not available now.... Its a walk from the train station to Torni then to Kurki....

The details of payment and such Seems relegated to "reliable sources" as none of the diff copies of evidence say or show real evidence.... Un-footnoted chronology in story form.

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David:

 

My reading of Wronski says she met him once he got to Russia by train, not in Helsinki.

Please reread if you think I am wrong.

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I wrote Moscow... at the hotel versus the train station

"He was met in the hotel lobby by Rimma Semenova Shirakova, age twenty-two, a graduate in English and Arabic from the Moscow Foreign Languages Institute and an Intourist guide"  

from the link in my post above....

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Ok, then.  It has to be Golub arranging for that from Helsinki.

So again, was Golub in the habit of paying for five star hotels for anyone who wanted to go to Russia through him?

 

 

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