Britain Confronts the Stalin Revolution: Anglo-Soviet Relations and the Metro-Vickers Crisis

Hans B. Neumann is an assistant professor of history at Scarborough
College, University of Toronto.

This book examines in exhausting detail a relatively minor event that
almost led to the breaking off of diplomatic relations between Great
Britain and the Soviet Union in 1933: the arrest and trial, on charges
of espionage and sabotage, of six British engineers who had been sent by
the British Metro-Vickers Company to provide technical assistance for
the massive electrification scheme begun by Stalin as part of his forced
industrialization program for the Soviet Union. Archival material
recently made available suggests that there was more substance to the
charges than earlier scholarship has allowed. The strong academic bent
of this book makes it more suitable for scholars of the Stalin era than
for general readers.