The Minsk Radio Factory Photos

[Steve Thomas]

Read Oswald's speech to the Jesuit college in Alabama in July, 1963.

Steve Thomas

[Michael Crane]

15 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

BTW, my dad had that exact same camera. Teeny-weeny little film. Absolutely a beautiful instrument. 

ONI probably provided Oswald the spy camera to take pictures of value in the USSR.

Edited June 23, 2023 by Michael Crane

[Benjamin Cole]

10 minutes ago, Michael Crane said:

ONI probably provided Oswald the spy camera to take pictures of value in the USSR.

I wonder. Remember, LHO could likely be searched at any time, or his apartment while he was at work.

Even with a small camera, one has to point, focus, stand still and shoot. 

Who knows? If I was sending a false defector behind the Iron Curtain, I would not make him carry a spy camera. A bit of a tip-off, no? 

But maybe ONI considered LHO expendable. 

 

[Michael Crane]

59 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

I wonder. Remember, LHO could likely be searched at any time, or his apartment while he was at work.

Even with a small camera, one has to point, focus, stand still and shoot. 

Who knows? If I was sending a false defector behind the Iron Curtain, I would not make him carry a spy camera. A bit of a tip-off, no? 

But maybe ONI considered LHO expendable. 

 

Yes,it was off topic,but it was my way of telling the OP that Oswald took pictures.

[Lawrence Schnapf]

I believe LHO used "photography" as his occupation when he applied for his Mexican visa.  

[Larry Hancock]

Oswald began using photography and related skills after being let go from Taggerts in Dallas, he tried for another similar job with another company there but didn't get it, he used it on his resume and in looking for jobs with the placement office in New Orleans but of course he always need a job ASAP and ended up in menial work.  He had taken photographs pretty extensively in the Marines, acquired one or more cameras and made lots of photographs in Russia.  Photography was probably the highest skill/experience he could claim in looking for work in 1963,

[Gerry Down]

On 6/22/2023 at 6:11 AM, Greg Doudna said:

Michael Paine said Oswald advocated violent overthrow of the US, but that does not seem confirmed in anything written by Oswald. And was Michael Paine's account corroborated by anyone else who knew Oswald? Not by de Mohrenschildt, not by Titovets, to my knowledge--and not in his writings. 

I wonder if Oswald was vocal about violence when talking to Michael Paine because at that time Oswald was trying to drive a wedge between Ruth and Marina and so LHO might have been hoping Michael would tell this to Ruth and turn her off the Oswalds. Apparently Oswald also showed Michael the picture of him holding a rifle. Seems like LHO was trying to advertise himself as a lunatic to the Michael Paine in the hope of causing a rift between Ruth and Marina. 

On 6/22/2023 at 2:15 PM, Larry Hancock said:

Oswald had an abiding interest in social political structures and had come to believe  that both the Capitalist and Communist systems were "rigged" against the common man and kept individuals essentially abandoned individuals like his mother and himself and depressed economic levels with no way up and no political voice. He had expected better in Russia but found it rigged too - Titovits writes about that.

I wonder if this is the true reason LHO collected so much detail about the Minsk radio factory. LHO might have planned on coming back to the U.S. and issuing a "manifesto" of sorts in which he declared that both the U.S. and USSR systems of government didn't work and then provide a solution to this - his "Athenian System". And that this manefesto was going to take book form which is what Oswald apparently set about doing upon immediately arriving back in the U.S. in June 1962. And so the material about the Minsk factory was filler material for this book. Apparently Oswald wrote alot of the details on the Minsk factory on scraps of paper and then smuggled them out of the USSR. I cant remember if he typed up a few pages in Russia or not, but it wasn't very much. 

You mentioned these 4 items:

• The Collective Life of a Russian Worker – WC Exhibit 92,   pg 287-336 Vol 16,
• On Communism and Capitalism – WC Exhibit 25, pg 106-122 Vol 16
• The Communist Party of the United States – WC pg 422-430 Vol 16
• The Athenian System  / Outline and Principles pg 431-434 WC Exhibit 98 Vol 16

A few months back you were studying these items in detail. Did you compile that research into a paper or essay or anything so that people could study your analysis of these items? In particular i'm interested in the timeline of when Oswald wrote each of these works. Oswald had begun to get some of his material typed up in June 1962 by Miss Bates but only a very small amount. Then Oswald began attending a typing class at Croziers in Jan 1963. I'm guessing he typed up most of his essays as a result of this typing class. Maybe Oswald didn't need a typing class, but he just went to the typing class so that he would have access to a typewriter in order to type up some of these essays to show to GDM. 

The reason i'm interested in seeing a timeline of the writing of these essays is in order to gauge what Mrs Bates saw, what GDM was shown, what GDM gave possible instruction on (he said the first bunch of writings LHO showed him were dull) and ultimately what ended up in J. Walton Moores hands. 

Edited June 23, 2023 by Gerry Down

[Larry Hancock]

Gerry,  I think Oswald collected a lot of information including detailed information on the factory because he wanted to write about how the Soviet system worked, we know that he was very disappointed when he did come back that the media did not contact him and interview him about life there (which does seem sort of stupid on their part because he was fully prepared to dump on the Soviet system, not Russia but problems with the system, it would have made some great interviews).  As a matter of fact we find that spelled out at length in his diary and in the manuscript.  And yes I am writing an extended restudy of Oswald...not sure what I will do with it other than satisfy myself at this point.

On your question, the "manuscript" was constructed from pieces of his diary and notes he had brought back (smuggled) and was done almost immediately after his arrival home....so that gives us his first and best feelings about Russia and Soviet communism.  He had been very disappointed over the Soviet factory system, the class structure in management and other aspects of it that he considered far from the socialist model. At one point Oswald even went "on strike" in the factory - something that really created a problem for his managers.

The other writing, as far as I can tell, including the typed pieces, was done sometime in the January - March time frame when he had a stable job and time to himself in the evenings to get his thoughts down.   That's when he did the essays, which were fueled by several of the rather sophisticated publications he was routinely reading:

The Nation, The Militant (obtained by subscription from the Socialist Workers Party), The Worker (obtained by subscription from the Communist Party of the United States of America), The New Republic (an American progressive magazine with commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts), The Nation  (a  biweekly American liberal magazine that covered political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis),as well as The Road to Socialism and Hands Off Cuba.

That is my best guess on the timing of his writing at present...  

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Larry Hancock said:

Gerry,  I think Oswald collected a lot of information including detailed information on the factory because he wanted to write about how the Soviet system worked, we know that he was very disappointed when he did come back that the media did not contact him and interview him about life there (which does seem sort of stupid on their part because he was fully prepared to dump on the Soviet system, not Russia but problems with the system, it would have made some great interviews).  As a matter of fact we find that spelled out at length in his diary and in the manuscript.  And yes I am writing an extended restudy of Oswald...not sure what I will do with it other than satisfy myself at this point.

On your question, the "manuscript" was constructed from pieces of his diary and notes he had brought back (smuggled) and was done almost immediately after his arrival home....so that gives us his first and best feelings about Russia and Soviet communism.  He had been very disappointed over the Soviet factory system, the class structure in management and other aspects of it that he considered far from the socialist model. At one point Oswald even went "on strike" in the factory - something that really created a problem for his managers.

The other writing, as far as I can tell, including the typed pieces, was done sometime in the January - March time frame when he had a stable job and time to himself in the evenings to get his thoughts down.   That's when he did the essays, which were fueled by several of the rather sophisticated publications he was routinely reading:

The Nation, The Militant (obtained by subscription from the Socialist Workers Party), The Worker (obtained by subscription from the Communist Party of the United States of America), The New Republic (an American progressive magazine with commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts), The Nation  (a  biweekly American liberal magazine that covered political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis),as well as The Road to Socialism and Hands Off Cuba.

That is my best guess on the timing of his writing at present...  

LH-

Well, I would certainly read your study of LHO, so I hope you publish it in EF-JFKA if not to a larger audience. 

Pure speculation time: Yes, the plan was for LHO to return to the US after his defection, and with the publication of an edited and improved version of The Collective Life of a Russian Worker begin a media tour in which he told the truth about the dreary Soviet system. 

But maybe LHO was regarded as too quirky for the assignment, or LHO insisted he would also speak poorly of capitalism, so the media tour was scotched. 

Or, whoever was planning LHO's "coming out" tour left the CIA, and no one else picked up the ball. If you have worked in a large organization, you know how some programs have "sponsors" and when the sponsor departs the program may die. 

This left LHO in the lurch, and hence his string of so-so jobs.