Russia and Communism

In one of our prompts we wrote the for class, the question was about Lee’s stay in Soviet Russia. I wrote about how it was almost out of this world during the 1950s. He enjoys being out in the town as this exotic American and has interesting American ways that women find exotic. This is one example of his naivety and bloated sense of himself, which is something I want to further delve into.

Let’s start from Lee’s childhood. Growing up poor, Lee wasn’t the sharpest student in school. In fact he was dyslexic. He had a hard time reading simple English sentences, and he had an even harder time writing. Yet, when he first started spending more time at the library, he wanted to read books “that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him” (p. 33) .This spurred him into reading up on Marx’s The Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital. As Dellilo describes Lee,

“The books were struggles. He had to fight to make some elementary sense of what he read. But the books had come out of struggle. They had been struggles to write, struggles to live. It seems fitting to Lee that the texts were masses of dense theory, unyielding. The tougher the books, the more firmly he fixed a distance between himself and others” (p. 34)

These readings seemed to be the start of Lee being a Communist idealist. Lee wants to use the Defector Program to his advantage in order to serve as a spy defect. He gives up his American identity and secrets in order to defect to the Soviet Union and provide them any information to help them against the United States. For the Soviets, it is just too good to be true. While he wants to gain the attention of the Soviets, many of them, who seem to like Lee, are also skeptical of who he really is. Alek, the official who interrogates Lee about how passionate he is towards Communism, and about any details to the U-2 spy plane, begins to like Lee. At the end of the “In Moscow” chapter, Alek even gives him Soviet citizenship and work in Minsk so that he can become the Marxist he wants to be. While Alek does like him, at the end of the “In Moscow” chapter, “he [Alek] would recommend that surveillance be maintained, indefinitely, wherever the boy was sent” (p. 167). While Lee is driven by his fanaticism as a Communist, in reality, his life begins to go down the drain, even to the point where he cuts himself. After marrying Marina and having a child, he is forced to return to the US with her.

During his stay in Russia, Lee also kept journal entries of his time in Russia in what he calls “the Historic Diary”. Even as his words are jumbled, and his writing is nothing more than childish, Lee imagined that people would read his works, and would be moved by his struggles, much like he was when he read Marx’s works in the library. He wanted people to be “moved by his loneliness and disappointment” (p. 211).

Throughout much of Lee’s early adult years, it is fairly clear how his passions muddle his sense of reality and make him into such an irrational person. As seen in Russia, it takes him years for him to see how the Soviets really thought of him. It is this sort of unstable and impulsive behavior that will cause him to President Kennedy. Delillo does an excellent job in providing the backstory to this sort of behavior.