While his scholarly works were published with his name spelled as Vladislav Krasnov, his social and political commentary appears under the name W. George Krasnow.
[2] During his US academic career, Vladislav Krasnov obtained a Master's degree in Slavic languages and a Ph.D. in Russian literature from University of Washington (1974).
In 1985, Vladislav Krasnov published a book[3] which, according to Peter Reddaway, became the first scholarly study of the phenomenon of "defection" from the Soviet Union.
The most important source for his work was the document he nicknamed "The KGB Wanted List": an internal KGB publication containing a list of some 600 defectors then at large, summarizing the information the Soviet authorities had on each person‘s background, circumstances of their defection, their then-current whereabouts and activities, as well as the information about any in absentia sentences they may have received.
The collected materials allowed Krasnov to conduct a detailed statistical analysis of the phenomenon of defection throughout the four post-World War II decades.