The most important change that takes place over the course of Oswald's two and a half years in Minsk is, from the very beginning, this sort of waning celebrity. The first six months or so, he's a celebrity. He's this oddity, he's "the American in Minsk." But over time, that begins to fade. People become accustomed to him, they no longer regard him as all that special or important. And as his novelty begins to fade, his interest in this place begins to fade. So that's the first thing.
The second thing is that the routine of Minsk would have been amazingly tedious and slow moving. Minsk is a very, very communist-[style city.] It was leveled during the war, and after the war it was re-made with a Stalinist vision. So the first thing that one notices in Minsk is the absence of stuff—the absence of clutter and all the kind of urban detritus that one finds in big cities in countries like the United States. What Minsk felt like was quiet, simple, pared down, and there was an absence of things to do and experience. So there was the tedium, the boredom.