Yevgeny Miller
Yevgeny Miller | |
---|---|
Lieutenant-General | |
Battles/wars | World War I Russian Civil War |
Yevgeny-Ludvig Karlovich Miller (
Early life
Miller was a career officer born to a
Civil War
After the February Revolution of 1917, Miller opposed "democratization" of the Russian army and was arrested by his own soldiers after he ordered them to remove red armbands.
After the
Exile
In February 1920, General Miller with 800 refugees sailed from Archangelsk to
Between 1930 and 1937, Miller served as chairman of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), an organization of exiled former White Army officers and soldiers opposed to the Soviet Union. His niece Nathalie Sergueiew also fled to France and subsequently became an MI5 agent.[3] As the ROVS chairman, Miller was not an influential figure, as he did not belong to the dominant clan in the ROVS, namely former members of the White Army of South Russia, nor the former "Gallipoli campers".[4] During the Spanish Civil War, Miller expressed support for the Nationalists. The ROVS attempted to create its own Russian unit to join the Nationalists, which would be composed of at least 2,000 soldiers. However, the effect proved insignificant: only several dozen Russians agreed to join the Nationalists.[5]
Illegal rendition
On 22 September 1937, former Czarist officer NKVD agent and All-Military Union counter-intelligence chief Nikolai Skoblin led Miller to a Paris safe house, ostensibly to meet with two German Abwehr agents, who were in fact officers of the Soviet NKVD disguised as Germans. They drugged Miller, placed him in a steamer trunk and smuggled him aboard a Soviet ship in Le Havre.[6][7]
Miller had left behind a note to be opened in case he failed to return from the meeting. In it, he detailed his suspicions about Skoblin. French police launched a massive manhunt, but Skoblin fled to the Soviet embassy in Paris and eventually was smuggled to Barcelona, where the Second Spanish Republic refused to extradite him to France.[8] However, the French authorities arrested Skoblin's wife, Nadezhda Plevitskaya. A French court convicted her of kidnapping and sentenced her to 20 years in prison. Plevitskaya died in prison in 1940.[8][9]
The NKVD successfully smuggled Miller back to Moscow, where he was tortured and summarily shot nineteen months later on 11 May 1939, aged 71. NKVD agent Pavel Sudoplatov later claimed that "[Miller's] kidnapping was a cause célèbre. Eliminating him disrupted his organization of Tsarist officers and effectively prevented them from collaborating with the Germans against us."[10] Sudoplatov also claimed that Western accounts of NKVD agent Leonid Eitingon having played a role in the abduction of Miller are false.[11]
Copies of letters written by Miller while imprisoned in Moscow are in the Dmitri Volkogonov papers at the Library of Congress.[citation needed]
See also
- Mikhail Kvetsinsky, Miller's chief of staff
- North Russia Intervention
Notes and citations
- ^ A. Tarulis, American-Baltic relations, 1918-1922: the struggle over recognition, Catholic University of America Press, 1965, p. 190
- ^ V. Goldin, J. Long, Resistance and Retribution: The Life and Fate of General EK Miller. Revolutionary Russia, 1999.
- ^ Собачье сердце и двойной обман
- ^ ″Врангелов неоспорни ауторитет: Из тајних архива УДБЕ: РУСКА ЕМИГРАЦИЈА У ЈУГОСЛАВИЈИ 1918–1941.″ // Politika, 8 December 2017, p. 17.
- ISSN 0960-7773.
- ^ Sudoplatov 1994, pp. 38, 91.
- ^ ″Помирљивост према политичким партијама: Из тајних архива УДБЕ: РУСКА ЕМИГРАЦИЈА У ЈУГОСЛАВИЈИ 1918–1941.″ // Politika, 12 December 2017, p. 21.
- ^ a b Barmine, Alexander, One Who Survived, New York: G.P. Putnam (1945), pp. 232–233
- ISBN 1-903608-05-8
- ^ Sudoplatov 1994, p. 37.
- ^ Sudoplatov 1994, p. 36.
References
Books
- ISBN 0316773522.
- Barmine, Alexander, One Who Survived, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons (1945)
- Orlov, Alexander, The March of Time, St. Ermin's Press (2004), ISBN 1-903608-05-8
- Quinlivian, Peter (2006). Forgotten Valour: The Story of Arthur Sullivan VC. Sydney: New Holland. ISBN 978-1-74110-486-8.
External links