His father was seventeen and his mother seven when they came to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1921 as part of the White émigrés led by Pyotr Wrangel.

During his time as a lecturer on Russian literature at the University of Zagreb in Zadar, Mihajlov visited the Soviet Union in April 1965, on a professor exchange program and published an essay describing his trip called Leto moskovsko (Summer of Moscow) in the Belgrade magazine Delo.

A few days later, after Josip Broz Tito had publicly accused him of Đilasism, the Yugoslav Government arrested Mihajlov on charges of "slandering a friendly state" and violating the press law by sending the manuscript of his banned article to an Italian publisher for which he was sentenced to nine months in prison.

[6] He was on the Editorial Board of Kontinent, an émigré dissident journal which focused on the politics of the Soviet Union and its satellites founded in 1974 by writer Vladimir Maximov.

He was also on the original Advisory Board of the non-profit educational organization Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, founded by author Lev Navrozov in 1979.