Evgenii (Eugene) Miller was born in Dinaburg (Daugavpils) to a noble Lutheran family. He graduated from the Nikolaev Cadet School in 1884 and the Nikolaev Cavalry School two years later. After the latter, he was selected for His Imperial Majesty’s Life Guards Hussar Regiment, which was quartered in Tsarskoe Selo. From 1889 to 1892, he studied at the Nikolaev Academy of the General Staff. In 1896, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, Miller served as a military attaché in Belgium and Holland before being transferred to Rome in 1901. After his diplomatic service, in 1907 Miller was appointed to command the 7th Belorussian Hussar Regiment and later the 7th Cavalry Division. In 1909, with the rank of major general, he became head of the Nikolaev Cavalry School. A year later, he was named the second quartermaster general of the Main Directorate of the General Staff, while by the end of 1912 Miller was in charge of the headquarters of the Moscow Military District.¹

At the start of World War I, Miller was the chief of staff of the 5th Army. In 1915, he was promoted to lieutenant general and starting in September 1916 commanded the 26th Army Corps as part of the so-called Special Army operating in Romania. On April 7, 1917, soldiers beat and arrested him for his order to remove the red bows from their uniforms, which had become a symbol of the February Revolution. After this incident, Miller was transferred to the reserves. Until August 1917, he represented the Stavka of the Supreme Commander (high command) in Italy. The October coup found Miller abroad. The general refused to recognize the Bolshevik government and a revolutionary tribunal convicted him in absentia.²

After the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Miller left Italy. In Paris, he organized the disbandment and transfer to Russia of the brigades of the Russian Imperial Army located in France and Macedonia. On November 2, 1918, the Provisional Government of the Northern Region centered in Arkhangelsk invited Miller to head up its military department, while back in May 1918 Admiral Alexander Kolchak had appointed Miller commander-in-chief of the Northern Region. On January 13, 1919, Miller arrived in Arkhangelsk and assumed the duties of governor general and later commander-in-chief of the Northern Front. After the departure of the British troops and the defeat of the White forces in the north of European Russia, Miller, along with the remnants of his army, set out for Norway and reached a camp near Trondheim in late February 1920.

In summer 1920, the general moved to Paris and became plenipotentiary of the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, General Pyotr Wrangel. Later in the same year, Miller became chief of staff of the army and an advisor to Wrangel. After the creation of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) in 1924, he was named head of Department I (responsible for France and Belgium), eventually rising to become an advisor to then-Chairman General Alexander Kutepov in 1928 and to lead the entire organization himself starting in January 1930. Under Miller, the ROVS began to collaborate with the German and Spanish right-wing movements. In 1936, through General Pavel Shatilov, Miller negotiated with Francisco Franco about the transfer of Russian units to Spain to help the Falangists.³ On September 22, 1937, NKVD agents, aided by General Nikolai Skoblin and his wife, the singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya⁴, kidnapped Miller in Paris.⁵ On May 11, 1939, he was shot in Lefortovo Prison according to the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR.⁶

Evgenii Ludwig Miller
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