Lee Harvey Oswald Called US Workers Slaves in Letter Hidden for 36 Years
By Theo Marchetti ·
Warren Commission staff missed a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald for 36 years, until Boris Yeltsin handed 20 documents from KGB file #31451 to President Bill Clinton.
The US National Archives holds a collection titled the Personal Papers of Priscilla Johnson McMillan. According to the file's catalogue entry, the series comprises a wide array of journalist's tools—correspondence, email messages, lists, memoranda, and newspaper clippings—all revolving around the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It is not a government dossier, but the accumulated research of a reporter and author who spent years tracing the movements of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Moscow, 1959
Public record establishes Priscilla Johnson McMillan as a journalist and historian, and the archival description notes that she interviewed Oswald while they were both in Moscow. This meeting took place four years before the events in Dallas, focusing on Oswald's decision to defect to the Soviet Union. The resulting research, which includes chapters from her book Marina and Lee, forms the bulk of the collection.
The scope-and-content description indicates that McMillan's files are not monolithic in their conclusions. While the collection includes a publication titled Oswald’s Closest Friend: The George De Mohrenschildt Story: 1,000 Points of Light—a work written in an attempt to prove Oswald’s innocence and highlight ties between federal officials and an alleged CIA agent—McMillan’s own documented view differed. The catalogue entry records "The Oswald Evidence," in which McMillan stated her belief that "the Warren Commission had gotten it right that Oswald killed the president and had acted alone."
However, she did not believe the official record was complete. In that same evidence, she noted that "crucial witnesses were not interviewed who knew him well."
"Decadent Capitalist Society"
One specific document highlighted in the archival description is a letter Oswald wrote to the "Supreme Soviet" from his hotel in Moscow. In the text, Oswald wrote, "I want citizenship [in the Soviet Union] because, I am a communist and a worker, I have lived in a decadent capitalist society where the workers are slaves."
The catalogue entry points out a significant gap in the official history: this letter was not included in the Warren Commission Report. The absence of such a document from the primary investigation into the assassination suggests a failure of discovery or a deliberate omission by the commission's staff.
File #31451
The trail of the Moscow letter extends decades beyond the 1963 investigation. The archival description notes that Boris Yeltsin reportedly handed this letter to President Bill Clinton in 1999. This transfer was not an isolated gesture; it was accompanied by 19 other documents relating to the JFK assassination, all sourced from the Kremlin’s KGB file #31451 on Oswald.
This detail moves the narrative from a journalist's notes to the highest levels of international diplomacy. The existence of a specific KGB file number suggests a formalized Soviet record of Oswald's time in the USSR, a record that remained largely outside the reach of American investigators for thirty-six years.
Oleg Maksimovich Nechiporenko
Beyond the internal American debate, the collection reflects a Russian perspective on the assassination. The catalogue lists a Russian-language publication titled Oswald: The Path to the Death of the President (Освальд Путь к Уъииству Преэидента), written by Oleg Maksimovich Nechiporenko. The inclusion of this work, alongside English translations of other Russian records, indicates that McMillan’s research sought to bridge the gap between the Dallas evidence and the Moscow archives.
Other materials in the series are less focused on the forensics of the crime, including an English-language libretto of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's opera Pique Dame.
While the National Archives also maintains related series—such as CIA subject files deemed relevant by the Assassination Records Review Board and the research notes of Kim Herd—McMillan's papers offer a private window into the professional effort to reconcile the Warren Commission's findings with the missing pieces of Oswald's Soviet biography. The catalogue record leaves the contents of the 19 documents from KGB file #31451 as a point of reference, but does not provide the text of the documents themselves.