In a third-floor room at the Russian consulate, Oksana Stepanovna Kosenkina nervously snapped off the mid-afternoon news broadcast. She walked to one of the windows overlooking the courtyard below, and wrenched it open. She stood there a moment—a plump, distraught, middle-aged woman in a ruffled blue dress.
Then she jumped.
Her body hit a skein of telephone wires, caught for a second and plunged on, ripping the wires loose from the walls. She landed, groaning, on the cement courtyard, the wire still wrapped in a tangle around her legs. There was an instant of silence. Then the whole neighborhood was in an uproar.
Kidnap or Rescue? The Russian consulate is a five-story stone Manhattan town house (leased from the niece of the late John D. Rockefeller) on fashionable East 61st Street, across from the Hotel Pierre. Newsmen had been posted outside its grillwork door for five days—ever since Oksana Kosenkina had been brought there from an anti-Soviet refugee camp in New York by Consul General Jacob Lomakin (TIME, Aug. 16). Had she been kidnaped by the Reds? Or had she been rescued, as they insisted, from "White Russian bandits"?
By her leap to freedom, Oksana Kosenkina, a schoolteacher scheduled to be returned to Russia, gave her answer.
"Leave Me Alone." From the exclusive 28 Club next door to the consulate, a tan-uniformed employee rushed into the street, shouting: "There's a woman lying in the courtyard back there." Excited knots of spectators appeared out of nowhere. Newsmen and photographers pelted into the club building. Police guards on duty outside the consulate raced after them.
They reached an areaway, separated from the consulate by an iron fence, just as three Russians burst out of the consulate's back door. As police scrambled over the fence, they could hear the injured woman moaning in Russian: "Leave me alone, leave me alone." Despite her pleas, and the shouted orders of the cops, the Russians picked her up, lugged her back into the consulate, with the police right behind them.
Angrily, the Russians protested that their own doctor would take care of the woman, that they needed no outside help. Police summoned an ambulance anyway. There was another brief scuffle, when police seized a letter written by Mrs. Kosenkina to a friend in Moscow. (The letter was returned to consular officials.)
But a half hour later Mrs. Kosenkina was under police guard at Manhattan's Roosevelt Hospital. She had a broken leg and kneecap and internal injuries. She would be hospitalized for at least three months.
"Bird in a Cage." As soon as she was able to talk, Oksana Kosenkina knocked all the Soviet protests into a cocked hat.
She told police that she had been thinking of suicide ever since she had allowed the Russians to bring her back from her New York hideaway. That afternoon was the first chance she had found. Said she :"I was like a bird in a cage. I had to get out—I was struggling to get out."