Book dossier

Britain confronts the Stalin revolution

by Gordon W. Morrell

In March 1933 the economic section of the Soviet secret police arrested six British engineers employed by the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company, provoking a confrontation that brought Anglo-Soviet relations to the brink of disaster. In this first full-length study of the Metro-Vickers show trial of 1933, Gordon Morrell uses some new and many underutilized Soviet and British sources to examine the political economic, social, legal and cultural dimensions of the only Stalinist political trial of the 1930s which directly engaged a foreign power. Morrell explores the roots of the crisis in Metro-Vickers' role in the electrification of the USSR and examines the political, economic and diplomatic relations between Britain and the Soviets which gave the crisis its international importance. In doing so he casts new light on the development of industrialization in the USSR and on the apparent role of the British Industrial Intelligence Centre during the early 1930s.