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Lee Harvey Oswald & The Soviet Union

PITTSBURGH (NewsRadio 1020 KDKA) - In 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald arrived in Moscow to seek refuge in Marxism. He was looking to transform himself into a "Homo sovieticus."

But soon after his arrival, Stalin died and the Bolshevik spirit of revolution went with him. In 1962, Oswald returned to the United States with a disillusioned image of himself as an antihero because he did not fit in.

Author of "The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union," Peter Savodnik joins Mike Pintek to talk about the life behind  a killer. He became more interested in why Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy, not the conspiracy theories.

Lee Harvey Oswald

Savodnik has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, BusinessWeek and The New Yorker to name a few. He has lived in Moscow and traveled through Russia, Belarus Ukraine, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Kazakhstan.

"You can construct any conspiracy theory you want just by isolating a few standpoints," said Savodnik. "The conspiracy theorists have no real interest in getting to the bottom of things. All they want to do is butcher a belief about how rotten America is or how the CIA is secretly choreographing our politics."

Lee Harvey Oswald

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