 After Chomiak's death in 1984, John-Paul Himka, a professor of history at the University of Alberta, who was Chomiak's son-in-law (and also Freeland's uncle by marriage), used Chomiak's records, including old issues of the journal, as the basis of several scholarly papers.However, Chomiak's background was not well known to the general public, and it was considered newsworthy when some Russian-affiliated websites publicized it at the time Freeland was appointed to the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs.Freeland and others have claimed that the circulation of news in 2017 regarding her grandfather's connection to Nazism was the result of a Russian disinformation campaign.