John Miller

John Miller (28 November 1932 – 26 December 2020) was a British journalist and author whose career focused on the Soviet Union.

Early life Miller was born in London on 28 November 1932 to a Royal Air Force intelligence officer turned Financial Times staffer. He went to the Enfield Grammar School before two years of National Service in the Army, commencing in 1951, when he learned Russian and became a language clerk at MI10, responsible for intelligence on Soviet military hardware, in Whitehall.

Journalism Miller began his long career in journalism at the Norwich Mercury in Norwich, in 1953, and covered Wymondham and Brandon, in Suffolk.

Having moved to Reuters in London in 1958, he was sent to Moscow in 1960 at the height of the East-West Cold War, and among the big news stories he covered from Moscow were the Sino-Soviet split, the U-2 drama, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet space ventures, the involvement of British, American and Soviet intelligence agencies, and the Soviet dissident campaign. There his wife gave birth to the first set of British twins born in the USSR since the revolution and the family lived in a block of flats on Sadovo Samotechnaya, an enclave for foreigners. In the early 60s in Moscow, Miller met Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby of the notorious Cambridge Five spy ring, and even served as a pall-bearer at Burgess' funeral in 1963. He has also served as a Foreign Office national observer of elections in Russia, in 1993, 1995 and 1996, in Ukraine in 1994 and in Kazakhstan in 1996. is a personal story about the vanished world of the USSR. For more than 40 years the USSR. was the centre of John Miller's working life as a foreign correspondent. He went to the Soviet Union at the height of the East-West Cold War and some of the most prominent stories of the 20th century such as the Great Spy Game, the U-2 drama, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred while he was reporting there.

The book contains details of everyday life in the Soviet Union such as shortages, dealing with the KGB as well as with bedbugs and cockroaches, censorship, living in a Moscow flat with a rabbit called Floppy, drunkenness, dissidents and death.