‘Public opinion in England is seriously roused’: popular attitudes and national stereotypes during the Metropolitan-Vickers crisis of 1933

When six British engineers working in the Soviet Union, along with several local contractors, were arrested, interrogated and tried for the crimes of sabotage, bribery and espionage in March 1933, British people reacted indignantly against the Soviet ‘other’, defending their own sense of the national persona against the seemingly alien ideology of Bolshevik rule. The Metropolitan-Vickers crisis was therefore charged with symbolic importance. The case created an opportunity to override self-doubt and revivify historical grandeur in the diplomatic arena, thereby suppressing a widespread sense of uncertainty about Britain’s place in the world, not least over its economic performance, political model and continued imperial hegemony. Newspapers and periodicals facilitate consideration of the popular mood, revealing how idealised versions of the British character—often in competition contingent on one’s opinion about Britain’s global role—were projected onto the engineers and their relatives in Britain. Equally, the case was used to reaffirm competing arguments about the Soviet experiment: the backwardness of Communism versus emotional investment in its objectives irrespective of practical reality. When Soviet figures were denounced as ‘Oriental’ or ‘Asiatic’, this offered an obvious contrast with the grandiosity of constructed British identities, providing a comforting act of national reassurance. This article opens a new historiographical angle on the politics of the crisis, as well as on the broader tenor of Anglo-Soviet relations in the inter-war period.