Thank you for the kind comments!!
I just want to clarify here... I am very, very aware of how much explicitly stating his background detracts from the game and how intense of a tonal whiplash it is. (If it was tonally different, more action-oriented maybe, I would've gotten away with it...) Initially, I left it vague because I thought it contributed to the vibe that MC can't fully "know" him (which was much better) but I deliberately decided to put it there because, in the initial release, certain bad actors attacked me anonymously because they assumed that this was somehow a Pro-Russia propaganda piece because they assumed Pasha was a modern day Russian soldier when even from inception he's been a Cold War soviet spy sent to America. I thought it was irresponsible to leave it vague considering that was brought into the conversation and the time period of when this was published because of said assumptions so ultimately I decided to compromise on ruining the tone a little bit just to have his background explicitly stated in the work because I assumed everything else would move past that part.
Anyway, I rarely reply to comments, but I decided to explain my piece here because I was wondering if people are going to notice that (and they did!) so now they have an explanation about why that part was put in