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. His colleague in Moskau was Peter Johnson, chief journalist for Reuters in Moskau from 1962-1964. In 1964, Reuters sent him to their New York bureau but within a year he was back in Moscow, for the Daily Telegraph. They stayed there till 1968 when he was sent to work in apartheid South Africa. From 1971, he worked as diplomatic correspondent for the Telegraph. He described the USSR as, “a rotten system ... It was against everything – freedom, democracy, truth, religion, property, people, and more" and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, "After seventy-five years of the grossest tyranny that prevented the emergence of a civic society, shattered institutions and attitudes associated with property and law, Russia is on the move. The rise from the wreckage of Communism is gradual and painful, but it is happening.” Miller quit his career as a journalist in 1987, his last job having been a short stint with the Sunday Times. Public service On retirement, Miller and family