I think that the initial appeal [for him] came through communism, or Marxism, with its very violent and bellicose language and its appeals to overturning established wisdoms or powers. And that certainly [played] into—or fueled or comported with—Oswald's anger and sense of dislocation.
And then, of course, it was only a very small half-step to get to the Soviet Union, to get to this place that kind of embodied all the kind of Marxist revolution [ideas] that he had been hearing about and reading about.
And what made this, of course, more alluring from Oswald's point of view was that no country represented the total refutation of America and of everything he came from as much as the Soviet Union [did].
. Oswald ended his military service the following year and arranged a trip to Moscow, where he informed Russian authorities that he wanted to move to the Soviet Union. After some debate by government operatives over Oswald's possible role as a spy, he was allowed to stay in the city of Minsk, where he was monitored closely by the KGB.