From the archives: Immigrants and Information Warfare

[razorleaker]

After we talked to Denis Lavinksi about[growing up in the White Russian/Vlasovite-inspired Russian Orthodox community in California](https://yasha.substack.com/p/white-russians-in-california-immigrant?s=w), I remembered a short series that I did almost two years ago about a guy named Leonid Pylaev, a Soviet Red Army soldier who got captured during World War II and got sucked into the collaborationist Vlasovite emigre world, eventually going to work at a propaganda radio station in Germany covertly run by the CIA.

[Check it out if you haven’t already](https://yasha.substack.com/p/part-one-a-portrait-of-a-soviet-cia?s=w). I look at how emigre groups from the former Soviet Union were central in getting stations like Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe up and running.

—Yasha Levine

PS: Apparently the series I wrote got read by a bunch of people who used to work at Radio Liberty. After it came out, the widow of Oleg Tumanov — a[Soviet spy](https://www.labirint.ru/books/562080/)who apparently was sent in to penetrate Radio Liberty in Munich — got in touch with me on Facebook and, after accusing me of “libeling” Leonid Pylaev did a bit of libeling herself: She accused Pylaev of being a KGB plant. According to her, it is very likely that he never served in the Vlasov movement and she implied that he made up the whole story to penetrate the Russian emigre/exile community on behalf of his Soviet masters, I guess like her former husband. Not sure if she’s right or wrong, but it gives you a glimpse into the paranoid, spook-infested world of anti-communists in exile.

-Yasha Levine
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