farm regions around Minsk about half a dozen times in the summer and fall. The hunters spent the night in small villages and often left their bag with the villagers; Oswald described the peasant life which he saw as crude and poor.593 Sometime in June, he met. Ella German, a worker at the factory, of whom he later said he "perhaps fell in love with her the first minute" he saw her.594 (See Commission Exhibit No. 2609, p. 271.)

At the same time, however, the first signs of disillusionment with his Russian life appeared. He noted in his diary that he felt "uneasy inside" after a friend took him aside at a party and advised him to return to the United States.595 Another entry compared life in Minsk with military life:

I have become habituatated to a small care which is where I dine in the evening. The food is generaly poor and always eactly the same, menue in any care, at any point in the city. The food is cheap and I don't really care about quiality after three years in the U.S.M.C.596

In an entry for August-September, he wrote that he was becoming "increasingly concious of just what sort of a sociaty" he lived in.597

He spent New Year's Day at the home of Ella German and her family. They ate and drank in a friendly atmosphere, and he was "drunk and happy" when he returned home. During the walk back to his apartment he decided to ask Ella to marry him. On the following night, after he had brought her home from the movies, he proposed on her doorstep. She rejected him, saying that she did not love him and that she was afraid to marry an American. She said that the Polish intervention in the 1920's had led to the arrest of all people in the Soviet Union of Polish origin and she feared that something similar might happen to Americans some day. Oswald was "too stunned to think," and concluded that she had gone out with him only because she was envied by the other girls for having an American as an escort.598 But in one of the entries in the diary he appears to have attributed her failure to love him to "a state of fear which was always in the Soviet Union." 599 His affection for Ella German apparently continued for some time; 600 he had his last formal date with her in February and remained on friendly terms with her as long as he was in Russia.601

After he returned to the United States, Oswald often commented on Russian life. He discussed the Soviet systems of public education and medical care.603 He observed to one acquaintance that everyone in Russia was trained to do something,604 and discussed with another the system of regular wage and salary increases.605 His most frequent criticisms concerned the contrast between the lives of ordinary workers and the lives of Communist Party members. He told an acquaintance in Dallas that the working class in the Soviet Union made just about enough to buy clothing and food and that only party members could afford luxuries.606 On another occasion, he remarked