History
Background
The expansion of electrical power generation was long regarded as one of the highest priorities by the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, embodied by"Thrown out of their groove, and scattered over the whole face of the USSR, these 'has-beens' have wormed their way into our plants and factories, into our government offices and trading organizations, into our railway and transport enterprises... What did they carry with them into these places? Of course, they carried with them a feeling of hatred towards the Soviet regime, a feeling of burning enmity towards the new forms of economy, life, and culture. "These gentlemen are no longer able to launch a frontal attack against the Soviet regime. They and their classes made such attacks several times, but they were routed and dispersed. Hence, the only thing left them is to do mischief and harm to the workers, to the collective farmers, to the Soviet regime, and to the Party. And they are doing as much mischief as they can, acting on the sly. They set fire to warehouses and wreck machinery. They organize sabotage. "As a result of fulfilling the five year plan we have succeeded in finally ejecting the last remnants of the hostile classes from their positions in production... But that is not enough. The task is to eject these 'has-beens' from our own enterprises and institutions and make them harmless for good and all."One of the chief parties in the Metro-Vickers affair which would follow was himself clear about a connection between such an official call to vigilance and the events which would follow, declaring in a 1934 memoir that "the OGPU were not slow in discovering and revealing the existence of numerous plots" in response to Stalin's "call for action," thereby "proving the words of the 'Dictator.'"
The arrests
On January 25, 1933, the OGPU "literally dragged" the secretary of six years for Metro-Vickers' Moscow chief, Allan Monkhouse, into a waiting motor car and drove her off to OGPU headquarters at Lubianka Square. Secretary Anna Kutusova returned, "exhausted and terrified," to Monkhouse's office at 10 am the next day, her fingers stained with ink from writing. "What had occurred, she would not and probably dared not say," Monkhouse later recalled, adding that he felt sure that threats had been used to cause her to henceforth "act as an agent of the OGPU" and assist in the effort to "frame up" a case against her employer and his associates. With the Soviet secret police clearly investigating the firm, Monkhouse left Moscow for England on February 6, 1933, for a three-week stay.Monkhouse, ''Moscow,'' pp. 274-275. The Soviet Union's trade representative in London, who had himself just arrived from Moscow, gave Monkhouse a firm assurance on February 10 that the OGPU investigation of Metro-Vickers had been discussed with the OGPU’s chiefs and that these high officials knew nothing of any action planned against the British firm. Monkhouse consequently returned to Moscow as planned. At 9:15 pm on March 11, 1933, Metro-Vickers officials L.C. Thornton and Monkhouse were conversing with two guests representing a large engineering firm following a dinner together. Suddenly eight OGPU officers burst into the room, instructing those present to remain seated. Some five hours of close investigation followed, headed by the deputy chief of the Economic Department of the OGPU, who presented Monkhouse with search and arrest warrants. Monkhouse later estimated that between 50 and 80 select OGPU officials were involved in the carefully planned raid. Monkhouse was allowed to take a bath before being taken away to GPU headquarters at the Lubianka, where he was kept in a comparatively comfortable single isolation cell.Monkhouse, ''Moscow,'' pg. 281. After a difficult night, Monkhouse was taken to the examination department and interrogated. Monkhouse asserted that no physical torture, hypnotism, or drugs were used on him but that the interrogation was conducted for many hours on end, running without interruption from breakfast time until 2 am. Monkhouse denied repeatedly that he was a British intelligence agent but later asserted that he had been overcome by exhaustion towards the end of the process and consented to write a statement. Monkhouse later recalled:"Towards late evening I began to get very tired.... Almost every phrase which he interrogatordictated I disputed, altered, and finally wrote in a form which I thought would satisfy him and yet not harm my employers’ high reputation. After midnight I felt that my nerve was going. I was dead tired after the previous night’s search and arrest, and a very long day’s intensive examination. I felt my tongue and mouth so dry that they gave me considerable discomfort. My lips twitched in a way they had never done before. It was a hard mental effort to resist writing exactly what he interrogatordictated and, in any case, before I left the room that night, I wrote one or two paragraphs which I greatly regret having consented to write. I can only attribute my weakness in having done so to the exhausted nervous and mental condition to which I had been reduced after a very long day’s examination by the OGPU, following a sleepless night."Monkhouse expressed a belief that the basic method of operation of the OGPU was to "trick" those being detained into signing written statements which could later be used against them at trial. After a second lengthy day of interrogation the interview was abruptly cut short and Monkhouse was released under orders not to leave the city, apparently at the behest of OGPU chief
"An investigation by the OGPU into a series of sudden and regularly recurring breakdowns which have lately occurred in big power stations (Moscow, Cheliabinsk, Zuevka, Zlatoust) has revealed that the breakdowns were the result of wrecking activity on the part of a group of criminal elements among state employees under the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, who made it their object to destroy the power stations of the USSR (acts of diversion) and put out of commission the State factories served by these power stations. In the work of this wrecking group there actively participated certain employees of the British firm, Metropolitan-Vickers..."
The trial
The decision to proceed to a formal public trial relating to the British employees of Metro-Vickers was made by the Central Executive Committee on March 30, 1933. The week-long trial commenced on April 12. According to the formal indictment read at the start of the trial, the defendants were part of a "wrecking group" which sought to damage state equipment "with the object of undermining the power of Soviet industry and weakening the Soviet state," as well as participating in the gathering of intelligence about the defense capabilities of the USSR.''Translation of the Official Verbatim Report,'' vol. 1, pg. 12. It was asserted that bribery and corruption of "certain employees of state power stations" had been carried out in connection with this secret mission. The indictment noted that a panel of 6 "expert engineers" had studied the matter in association with the office of the Procurator of the RSFSR and had concluded that in all the cases of breakdowns investigated there was either criminal negligence or deliberate wrecking on the part of a number of persons in the technical personnel serving these stations." As for the charges of espionage, the prosecution cited the pre-trial interrogation transcripts of V.A. Gussev, head of the Zlatoust Power Station from 1929, who admitted collecting military-related information as well as that of W.L. MacDonald, who in his own statement acknowledged telling Gussev that he "required information about ''the production of military supplies'' at the Zlatoust works, the state of power supply, etc." MacDonald's interrogation transcript, introduced as part of the indictment, additionally indicated that the instruction to collect such material on "the political and economic situation of the USSR" had come in the summer of 1929 from his boss, L.C. Thornton. In his damning pre-trial interrogation transcript, MacDonald also admitted attempting to sabotage military production at an attached metallurgical works by undermining electrical production at the Zlatoust power station and to have paid Gussev 2,000 or 2,500 rubles for his assistance. Soviet authorities were anxious to counter anticipated objections that the pre-trial statements by Gussev and MacDonald had been obtained under duress, with procuratorOutcome
No death sentences were handed out as a result of the April 1933 Metro-Vickers trial, with two of those indicted to stand trial not receiving punishment of any kind.J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, ''The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939.'' New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999; pg. 113. In the view of the most recent study of the affair, byLegacy
Contemporary historians of the Soviet Union regard the Metro-Vickers Affair as one of a series of show trials conducted by the All-Union Communist Party against engineers and technicians trained under the old regime — proceedings which included the 1928Footnotes
Further reading
* A.J. Cummings, ''The Moscow Trial.'' London: Victor Gollancz, 1933. * Jonathan Haslam, ''Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence.'' London: Oxford University Press, 2015. * Jonathan Haslam, ''The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933-39.'' New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984. * Allan Monkhouse, ''Moscow, 1911–1933.'' Boston, MA: Little Brown and Co., 1934. * Gordon W. Morrell, ''Britain Confronts the Stalin Revolution: Anglo-Soviet Relations and the Metro-Vickers Crisis.'' Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1995. * Gordon W. Morrell, "Redefining Intelligence and Intelligence-Gathering: The Industrial Intelligence Centre and the Metro-Vickers Affair, Moscow 1933," ''Intelligence and National Security,'' vol. 9, no. 3 (July 1994), pp. 520–533. * Richard Sorabji, ''Electrifying New Zealand, Russia and India: The Three Lives of Engineer Allan Monkhouse.'' London: Lulu, 2014. * Cameron D. Watt (ed.), "Metropolitan-Vickers Case," in ''British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print: Part II, Series A: The Soviet Union, 1917–1939: Volume 17, The Soviet Union, 1933–1939.'' Lanham, MD: University Publications of America, 1986; pp. 6–15. * ''The Case of N.P. Vitvitsky, V.A. Gussev, A.W. Gregpory, Y.I. Zivert, N.G. Zorin, M.D. Krasheninnikov, M.L. Kotlyarevsky, A.S. Kutuzova, J. Cushny, V.P. Lebedev, A.T. Lobanov, W.L. McDonald, A. Monkhouse, C. Nordwall, P.Y. Oleinik, L.A. Sukhoruchkin, L.C. Thornton, V.A. Soklov Charged with Wrecking Activities at Power Stations in the Soviet Union: Heard Before the Special Session of the Supreme Court of the USSR in Moscow, April 12–19, 1933: Translation of the Official Verbatim Report.'' In Three Volumes. Moscow: State Law Publishing House, 1933. {{DEFAULTSORT:Metro-Vickers Affair Events in Moscow Soviet show trials Political repression in the Soviet Union 1933 in case law 1933 in the Soviet Union Metropolitan-Vickers