Lee Harvey Oswald's Apartment

The Minsk flat where JFK's assassin lived for three years after defecting to the Soviet Union

The apartment building at Kommunisticheskaya 4 is where Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated President John F. Kennedy, lived from 1960 to 1962 after defecting from the United States to the Soviet Union. He was given a studio apartment here by the KGB, which monitored his activities closely throughout his stay.

Oswald's time in Minsk was unexpectedly ordinary: he worked at the Gorizont radio and electronics factory, socialised with other young workers, married a local woman named Marina Prusakova, and by most accounts enjoyed his early years in the Soviet Union before growing homesick and disillusioned. The flat is privately occupied and not a public museum, but the building exterior is a significant piece of Cold War history.

The building is about a fifteen-minute walk from October Square in the city centre. A small commemorative plaque marks it. Visitors who are interested in the Kennedy assassination find it a strangely mundane pilgrimage site, which is in some ways more interesting than a formal museum would be.

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Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959, aged 19. Soviet authorities, unsure whether he was a genuine defector or a spy, settled him in Minsk — far from sensitive military installations but comfortable enough to keep him content. He worked at a radio factory, met and married a Belarusian woman named Marina, and lived a fairly ordinary Soviet life before growing disillusioned and returning to the United States in 1962. Less than two years later he assassinated President Kennedy.