Yevgeny Miller Yevgeny - Ludvig Karlovich Miller ( ) ( September 25 , 1867 , Daugavpils , Latvia – May 11 , 1939 , Moscow ) was a Russia n general and one of the leaders of the anti - communist White Army during and after Russian Civil War . Biography . Miller was a career officer born to a Baltic German nobility family in Dinaburg ( now Daugavpils , Latvia ) . After he graduated from the General Staff Academy he served with the Russian Imperial Guard . Between 1898 and 1907 he was a Russian military attaché in several European capitals such as Rome , The Hague and Brussels . During the First World War he headed the Moscow military district and the 5th Russian army , and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general . Civil War . After the February Revolution of 1917 General Miller opposed " democratization " of the Russian army and was arrested by his own soldiers after he ordered them to remove red arm bands . After the October Revolution Miller fled to Archangelsk and declared himself Governor - General of Northern Russia . In May 1919 Admiral Kolchak appointed him to be in charge of the White army in the region . In Archangelsk , Murmansk and Olonets his anti - Bolshevik army was supported by the Entente , mostly British forces . However , after an unsuccessful advance against the Red Army along the Northern Dvina in the summer of 1919 , British forces withdrew from the region and Miller ' s men faced the enemy alone . Exile and kidnapping . In February 1920 , General Miller was evacuated from Archangelsk for Norway . Later he moved to France and together with Grand Duke Nicholas and Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel continued anti - communist activism . Between 1930 and 1937 Miller was a chairman of the Russian All - Military Union . On September 22 , 1937 , NKVD informer and All - Military Union intelligence chief Nikolai Skoblin led General Miller to a Paris safe house , where he was to meet with two German Abwehr agents . The agents were not who they appeared to be . They 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 . However , Miller left behind a note to be opened if 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 . However , Skoblin ' s wife , Nadezhda Plevitskaya , was arrested , convicted and sentenced by a French court to 20 years in prison . The NKVD successfully smuggled General Miller back to Moscow , where he was tortured and summarily shot nineteen months later on May 11 , 1939 . According to NKVD General Pavel Sudoplatov , " His kidnapping was a cause celebre . Eliminating him disrupted his organization of Tsarist officers and effectively prevented them from collaborating with the Germans against us . " Copies of letters written by Miller while he was imprisoned in Moscow are in the Dimitri Volkogonov papers at the Library of Congress . In popular culture . The kidnapping was the subject of a book written by Anatoly Rybakov , " The Fear " . It was also the basis of the French film " Triple Agent " ( 2004 ) , directed by Éric Rohmer . In addition , the kidnapping of General Miller is also fictionalized in Nikita Mikhalkov ' s award - winning film Burnt by the Sun . In the film the character known as " Mitya " ( Oleg Menshikov ) is a former White Army officer turned NKVD agent . Posing as a pianist in Paris , Mitya is described as having delivered eight White Generals to the NKVD . All are described as having been kidnapped , returned to Moscow , and shot without trial . One of the Generals is given the name " Weiner . "