The following weeks were lurid and electrical with developments in the Metro-Vickers case. The arrests caused a storm of patriotic anger in England, and other countries whose nationals were engaged on Soviet industrial projects were alarmed in varying degrees. All but one of the accused Britons were freed on bail -a privilege never granted to Soviet citizens. The British government demanded the immediate release of its citizens and, failing to receive satisfaction, placed a total embargo on trade with the U.S.S.R.... A batch of English newspapermen arrived especially to cover this story. The stage was set for one of the trials of the century...

Two of the six Englishmen tried in the Metropolitan-Vickers case wrote and signed elaborate confessions of espionage, sabotage, and bribery during their interrogation by the G.P.U., in which they involved many of their fellow-countrymen. One of them, W. H. MacDonald, adhered to his confession at the trial, and the other, Leslie Thornton, repudiated his effusion. Even the theory that they were guilty does not suffice to explain their confessions, since every consideration of self-interest and professional reputation, of loyalty to their friends and patriotism to their government, should have prompted them to deny the charges.

It was not as though they had been confronted with incontrovertible proofs of guilt and obliged to accept the inevitable. Not one tiny scrap of independent evidence to support their admissions was offered by the government, though all foreigners are under constant surveillance and a thorough search had been made of the Britishers' homes and offices. Had they insisted that they were innocent, it would have pitted their word against the word of their Soviet employees and associates, and the world's public opinion unquestionably would have been on their side.

Whatever it may have been that induced these men to tar themselves and their colleagues, it was not disclosed by the trial.

More than that: their confessions went beyond the claims of the prosecution. The Soviet court itself exonerated completely one of the defendants, A. W. Gregory, who was implicated in those confessions and at least one of the twenty-seven men listed by Thornton as spies was in the courtroom as a spectator. The failure of the G.P.U. to arrest him was at least an implied admission of his innocence. To this day, though all the Britishers are free and have small reason to protect the reputation of the G.P.U., no tenable explanation for those confessions has been forthcoming. Both MacDonald and Thornton, moreover, have remained in the employ of the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company despite the "betrayal," thus adding another element of mystery to the whole business.

I sat through every session of that trial and studied the published record of the proceedings afterwards. I read the book written by Allan Monkhouse, one of the chief defendants. But I am as much at sea as any casual newspaper customer. Only of this I feel sure: that the real story, the real compulsions, were located far behind the scenes. What transpired in the improvised courtroom at the former Nobles Club seemed to me little more than a shadow play on a screen. The tantalizing margin of mystery was as wide in this trial as in any that preceded it-perhaps wider, in view of the enormous support that these men had from their government.

MacDonald, it is true, remained in the hands of the G.P.U. practically incommunicado from the moment of his arrest. No Britisher was given access to him. During the trial, while the other five Britishers were free on bail between sessions and in constant touch with the British Embassy people, MacDonald was led off to his prison cell. A thin, nervous man of twenty-eight, with a close-cropped goatee and weak, pallid features, a cripple from boyhood, he made an unpleasant impression. Watching his twitching fingers and glazed eyes, we all felt that he was putty under the manipulating fingers of the Secret Police.

But Thornton had been released from prison eight days before the trial started. He was constantly with William Strang, the British charge d'affaires and with Anglo-American correspondents as eager as Mr. Strang to demonstrate that the whole case was a frame-up. However, though he sought to withdraw his fulsome confession and referred vaguely to "moral pressure," he failed to supply a wholly satisfactory reason for that document.

The conviction that grew in my mind at the time and has been deepened since then was that immense unseen forces were at work. The G.P.U. and the prosecution, I came to feel, had a club over the heads of some of the Britishers. British guilt was involved (whether of the British Intelligence Service or of individual Britishers, I dare not surmise), but that guilt referred to matters which were not even mentioned at the trial. If that theory has any validity, it was not the first time that men and governments have accepted responsibility for lesser crimes to conceal larger ones.

Another element in the complicated case to which the correspondents could only hint darkly is the possibility that several of the Englishmen were protecting people whom they loved. Most of them had lived in Russia the greater part of their lives and spoke the language fluently. Monkhouse had been in the country fairly continuously since 1911. Thornton's family, I believe, had been in business in Russia long before the revolution. The friendships and intimacies developed in many years may have enabled the G.P.U. to apply its practical technique of keeping victims in line by threats against people for whom they cared.

Before the trial started, the Press Department called me in and gave me "inside information" about the love life of Anna Kutusova, Russian secretary in the Metropolitan-Vickers office who was among the eleven Russian defendants, and of another woman who did not appear at the trial. Whether the same information was offered to other correspondents I do not know. The transparent purpose was to shock Puritan public opinion in England. I refused, of course, to send such rubbish. The likelihood that one or more of the Britishers were protecting the lives and the reputations of these women, and to that extent under official duress, is certainly not excluded.

As for the Russians who sat in the dock with the foreigners, they were true to the monotonous pattern drawn in former demonstration trials. With one or two negligible exceptions, they were panic-stricken, half-hysterical penitents collaborating with the G.P.U. and the prosecution. The contrast provided by several blunt and self-assured Britons made the belly-crawling of the Russian group that much uglier and more pathetic....

The dreary and repetitious confessions of the Russians provided the background for the trial. All of them watched for the flick of Prosecutor Vishinsky's whip and obeyed with the frightened alacrity of trained animals. In their "last words" they begged for their lives and promised to do penance in the tones and the words that had become a familiar refrain since the Shakhty trial.

The real interest centered around the Englishmen. There was the morning when Monkhouse stepped to the microphone and in a clear, precise voice charged that "this trial is a frame-up against Metropolitan-Vickers engineers based on evidence of terrorized prisoners." But he failed signally in the following days to substantiate that charge. There was the sensational moment when the pallid, limping MacDonald, as though awaking from a long trance, suddenly withdrew his confession. A short recess was called after this sensation, during which MacDonald was removed along with the Russians. When court resumed, Macdonald seemed to have relapsed into his stupor of hopelessness - again he attested the truth of the confession.

A fiery little Welshman, the red-headed Gregory, talked to the Soviet judges and the prosecutors as they had never been talked to before. He kept exploding with his sense of insulted innocence. But the state never really pressed its accusations against him. John Cushny, a tall, swarthy, stolid fellow, was firm and impressive in his denials. Nordwall, too, would not be shaken in his repudiation of all the charges...

All but one of the Russians were given prison sentences. Thornton and MacDonald received three- and two-year terms, respectively. Gregory was acquitted and the other three were condemned to expulsion from the country. To millions of Russians whose supreme dream was escape from the country, that "punishment" must have sounded slightly bizarre.

Dictatorship under an infallible leader calls for a system of scapegoats. Between the first and the last demonstration trials that I attended, the Shakhty case and the Metro-Vickers case, I saw that system shaped toward perfection. Pre-revolutionary engineers, professors, Mensheviks, foreign technicians had been condemned and punished to explain difficulties, but the difficulties were not thereby ended. Not even those among us who were most critical of the sacrificial rites would have guessed that the system would be refined further, to the point where by 1936-37 it was destroying revolutionary military heroes and the fathers of the Bolshevik revolution themselves.

That spring there occurred the sensational trial of the Metro-Vickers engineers, which caused more ink to flow abroad than anything which had happened in Russia since the case of the Roman Catholic priests ten years before. The six British engineers were accused of sabotaging the turbines and machinery provided by their own firm, which was ridiculous on the face of it, although the charge was supported by a mass of verbal testimony from their Russian fellow-accused, and of espionage for which no scrap of documentary evidence was produced, save a fantastic confession by one of them named Thornton, who had been born in Russia and appears to have yielded to panic. Nevertheless, the trial created an unpleasant impression upon all foreigners who attended it, irrespective of their nationality. The accused men defended themselves in a surprisingly lukewarm way considering the gravity of the charges.

Although they had a perfect right to insist on every word being translated into English, which would have given them time to think, and of making their replies in the same language, they allowed proceedings to be conducted in Russian. Still worse, the principal accused, Monkhouse, withdrew during the trial his initial statement to the British Ambassador, Sir Esmond Ovey (which he repeated the following day to the British and American newspaper men) that he had been subject to inquiry during forty of the forty-eight hours which followed his arrest. His avowal in court that instead of forty hours his examination might have been as much as fourteen out of forty-eight caused what might well be termed a "painful

sensation" to his foreign hearers. The prevailing impression in foreign circles in Moscow was that voiced to me by a prominent diplomat: "I don't believe they are guilty as charged although their defence was strangely supine at times". An equally prominent Bolshevik put it differently, "Well," he said in my hearing before the trial was ended, "they may be guilty or they may be innocent, but all I can say is that if those two, Thornton and McDonald, were Communists on trial before an English court they would be kicked out of the Party for cowardice when they came back to Russia, whether they were acquitted or not."

In a trial in Moscow in April 1933, engineers "of the old school" were accused of espionage and sabotage on behalf of Great Britain. This "Metro-Vickers" trial was the latest in a series of open proceedings against engineers and technicians of the old regime that included the Shakhty trial of 1928, and the trial of the Industrial Party in 1930.... Several of the defendants were released on bail before the trial. No death sentences were handed out, and two of the defendants received no punishment at all.

The trial of the Metro-Vickers engineers and their Russian colleagues in January 1933 revealed (though only in some of the defendants) not only cases of mild bribery and the systematic collection of information coming within the legal definition of espionage, but also a negligence that was hardly to be distinguished from sabotage, which was visited by the court with sentences of discriminating moderation. There promptly followed a renewed campaign of incitement by the emigres of Prague and Paris, with which was apparently connected the illegal and secret entry into the USSR, across its western land frontier during 1934, of more than 100 emissaries, bearing arms (and some of them bombs), nearly all of whom were, without publicity, promptly arrested, and held for interrogation. It will be recalled that it was during this period that Hitler was proclaiming his intention of annexing the Ukraine, and of securing forced concessions of much-needed minerals from the Urals - a threat which, it might be argued, implied that he was aware of there being allies within the USSR who would help him to overcome Stalin's government, just as he later became aware of confederates in Spain among the army officers bent on overthrowing the Republic Government, and installing a Fascist regime in alliance with the Fascist Powers.

In connection with these "systematic breakdowns" proceedings were instituted against the Russian engineer Gussev, chief of the Zlatoust Electric Power Station. Gussev, whose personality at the trial deeply interested me, seems to have given himself away as promptly as he gave away the English installation engineer MacDonald....

The confessions of the 12 Russians were full and exhaustive; only in one instance did a Russian make a faltering suggestion that he was not guilty on all counts, and his attempt to "belittle" his participation in crime was quickly disposed of by his interrogators.

Of the British citizens, MacDonald made a full, complete and very damaging confession implicating his superiors and immediate colleagues. Thornton , while denying sabotage, made certain admissions, none of them so serious as those in a document which was not published in the indictment but was reserved for the trial. Monkhouse admitted receiving information that "might be interesting to the firm," the writing off of money given by Thornton to Dolgov, and machinery defects which caused breakdowns in the power stations. Nordwall admitted "anti-Soviet conversations" with Lobanov but denied everything else. Cushny admitted virtually nothing. As for Gregory, there was no indication even that he was questioned.

Apart from the testimony of two employees at Zlatoust as to the nature of the damage done and the instructions given by Gussev, the only independent witnesses were Ryabova, MacDonald's elderly housekeeper, who conveyed letters from Gussev to MacDonald; Yemelyanov, who said he heard Cushny speak of the necessity of damaging the Red Power Station in order to stop the development of the oilfields; and Dolgov, head of the control department of Electro-Import (and, I strongly suspect, a GPU spy), who received 3000 rubles from Thornton and handed them over at once to the GPU...

From this standpoint the indictment, both in form and substance, should be an inspiration to the earnest student of the records of police transactions. In the completeness of its presentation, in the dovetailing one into another of all the parts of the case, in the intelligent detailed exactitude with which most of the accused persons incriminate themselves and give away others, in the skill with which at just the right moment one prisoner is confronted with the testimony or person of another prisoner and so induced to confess and corroborate, it is something of a masterpiece. There is not a police organization in the world which would not regard the final result with admiring envy as an almost perfect artistic achievement or would not be glad to discover the secret of the GPU's technique and in practice imitate the method....

One of the most frequent questions asked me on my return to England was whether during the trial or afterwards I had been molested because of my nationality, or threatened or treated with harshness and discourtesy. My answer is that I never once met with a sullen look or an insulting or unkind word. In Moscow no such passions were aroused as in London , where the sudden display of frenzied emotion startled the whole world. Even at the height of the trial, when feeling against Mr. Thornton in particular was strong and strongly expressed - inside and outside the Court, and the street, in the hotel, in tramcars and in official quarters - there was not the slightest change in this friendly attitude.... My experience was that of other Englishmen in Moscow who compared notes with me and were as surprised as I was that we were called upon to suffer no reprisals even in the mildest form. The "law" as to foreigners is in fact faithfully observed. I know of no country in the world in which individual foreigners, to whatever nationality they may belong, can be so assured of being treated with affability and good manners.