Oswald spoke Russian so well, that his wife , who did not know he was an American when she met him the first time, thought that Oswald was a from a Baltic state .
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[March, 1961] Oswald attended a trade union dance with a friend, Erik Titovyets, at the Palace of Culture for Professional Workers in Minsk. The dance followed a lecture by a Russian woman who had recently returned from a trip to the United States.Page 703Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova arrived too late to hear the lecture but was at the dance. Oswald noticed her and asked Yuriy Merezhinskiy, the son of the lecturer and a friend of both Oswald and Marina, to introduce him to her.
Oswald asked her to dance. According to the diary, they liked each other immediately and he obtained her telephone number before she left.
Marina testified that she told Oswald that she might see him at another dance, but did not give him her telephone number. Oswald was smitten.
Marina was 18 when she arrived in Minsk. She had boyfriends in Leningrad but was not interested in marriage. In October 1960 she started work in the drug section of the Third Clinical Hospital where she earned about 450 rubles per month; at about the same time she became a member of the local Komsomol, the Communist youth organization.Her friends were mostly students, whose social life consisted of meeting in cafes to sip coffee, read newspapers, gossip, and carry on discussions. The group of friends "ran together," and Marina did not attach herself to a particular boyfriend.
She enjoyed this life, which she had been leading for about 7 months when she met Oswald at the dance at the Palace of Culture in March 1961.
When Marina met Oswald, she thought he was from one of the Russian-speaking Baltic countries because he spoke with an accent; later that same evening she learned that he was an American.
She met him again at another dance a week later. They danced together most of the evening, at the end of which he walked home with her. They arranged to meet again the following week.
Before the scheduled time, Oswald called to say that he was in the hospital and that Marina should visit him there. Medical records furnished to the Commission by the Russian Government show that Oswald was admitted to the Clinical Hospital - Ear, Nose, and Throat Division, on Thursday, March 30, 1961.
Marina visited him often, taking advantage of her uniform to visit him outside regular visiting hours, which were only on Sunday. On Easter Sunday, the first Sunday after his admission to the hospital, she brought him an Easter egg. On a subsequent visit, he asked her to be his fiancee, and she agreed to consider it. He left the hospital on April 11.