An Amazon search for books about Lee Harvey Oswald unearths endless reading that would last several lifetimes for all but the very bookish. It's mere speculation, but seemingly never has someone so unimportant and - in a sense - unknown in life achieved such literary notoriety in death.
While most focus on a question that just won't die (did he or didn't he kill Kennedy, and if he did, was he the lone gunman?), far fewer address Oswald's time in the Soviet Union. That's what's so interesting about Peter Savodnik's 2013 book The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union. Most interesting for this reader were the various economic anecdotes that Savodnik unearthed in his extensive research of Oswald's rather staged (by the KGB) life in Minsk. And it's the economic story of his time in the U.S.S.R. that will mostly be covered here.
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