Collection Guide
Collection Title:
Collection Number:
Get Items:
Register of the Melita Norwood papers
circa 1902-2003
2010C5
No online items
View entire collection guide
Search this collection
Table of contents
Title: Melita Norwood papers
Date (inclusive): circa 1902-2003
Creator:
Norwood, Melita, 1912-2005.
Collection Number: 2010C5
Repository:
Hoover Institution Archives
Stanford, California 94305-6010
Collection Size:
2 manuscript boxes
(0.8 linear feet)
Abstract: Letters, notes, interview summaries, biographical and genealogical data, personal documents, printed matter, and photographs
related to Soviet nuclear research espionage in Great Britain, the communist movement in Great Britain, and family affairs.
Includes papers of Hilary Norwood, husband of Melita Norwood.
The collection is open for research.
The Hoover Institution Archives only allows access to
copies of audiovisual items. To listen to sound recordings or to view videos or films during your visit, please contact the Archives
at least two working days before your arrival. We will then advise you of the accessibility of the material you wish to see
or hear. Please note that not all audiovisual material is immediately accessible.
For copyright status, please contact the Hoover Institution Archives.
[Identification of item], Melita Norwood papers, [Box no.], Hoover Institution Archives
Materials were acquired by the Hoover Institution Archives in 2010.
Materials may have been added to the collection since this finding aid was prepared. To determine if this has occurred, find
the collection in Stanford University's online catalog at
http://searchworks.stanford.edu/ . Materials have been added to the collection if the number of boxes listed in the online catalog is larger than the number
of boxes listed in this finding aid.
Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State microfilm, Hoover Institution Archives
David J. Dallin miscellaneous papers, Hoover Institution Archives
Pavel Sudoplatov interviews, Hoover Institution Archives
Melita Norwood was a Soviet spy in England for nearly forty years; her role in delivering documents concerning atomic projects
was especially important during the cold war years.
Originally a labor organizer and later secretary to the director of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, her
assistance is believed to have hastened the Soviet Union's entry into the nuclear club by at least five years. Although identified
as an agent in 1999, Norwood was never prosecuted by the British government. She died in 2005.
Norwood was born and raised among revolutionary émigrés from tsarist Russia, where she acquired the leftist leanings that
brought her and her husband, educator Hilary Norwood, into the Independent Labour Party and the British Communist Party in
the 1930s. She was recruited as a spy by the NKVD in 1934. For some four decades, Melita Norwood (likely with the knowledge
and assistance of her husband) passed secret information on Britain's atomic project to the Soviets.
Norwood was the subject of a biography by historian David Burke entitled
The Spy Who Came in from the Co-op (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2008).
The collection contains materials dating back to the early twentieth century, including photographs of Russian political émigrés
in England and the Tolstoyan commune (Tuckton House) founded by those émigrés. Also included are family papers, notes on interviews
with Melita Norwood conducted by David Burke, notebooks describing the Norwoods' travels to the USSR, papers of Hilary Norwood,
and correspondence with various scholars, family, and friends.
Although the collection contains no espionage-related documents, many of the papers will cause researchers to ponder whether
and how organizations such as the British-Soviet Friendship Society and the British Society of Russian Philately, under the
auspices of which Hilary traveled to the USSR, might have been covers or conduits for espionage and to what extent the Labour
Party was infiltrated by Soviet operatives.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Norwood, Hilary, 1910-1985.
Communism--Great Britain.
Espionage, Russian--Great Britain.