One of the most notorious pro-Communist films has been taken out of mothballs and will be shown on Turner Classic Movies on February 16 and 17.
Mission To Moscow, produced at the high tide of Stalinist influence in Hollywood, 1943, took the then and now astonishing thesis that Stalin’s Purge Trials were justified. An adaptation of useful idiot Joseph Davies, who attended the trials and endorsed them (“there are no fifth columnists in the Soviet Union–Stalin shot them”), the film was, in the words of largely sympathetic reviewer James Agee, “the most pro-Stalinist film ever to come ouf of a major studio.”
Watched in its entirety, the film is less a time capsule document recalling Grand Alliance days and more in sync with the party line presentation of today’s political culture. Like those on the left today who trot out Republicans for Obama, or religious figures against the War On Terror, the backdrop of Mission to Moscow is deniability. No one associated with its production wants to leave a Stalinist trail. Ambassador Joseph Davies attended the trials and advertised his capitalist/business background before endorsing the trails in a manner that would make Pravda proud. Howard Koch, the screenwriter attached to adapting it, portrayed himself as merely a New Dealer liberal seeking to help the war effort (a description amplified by Victor Navasky); the reality was that he was a sincere fellow traveler who described American Stalinists as “saints.” Attached as a technical advisor, Jay Leyda characterized himself as a sincere liberal but was, in fact, an ardent Stalinist who was being monitored by American intelligence at the time.
In choosing Lincolnesque actor Walter Huston to play Davies, the filmmakers anticipated the Oliver Stone motivation for casting: pick the cosmetically typical American, highlight his conservative, Establishment background, have him disillusioned and then voice subversive statements.
Five minutes into viewing the film, one can understand all the efforts at ideological deniability. Mission to Moscow endorses every claim of the Purge Trials. The Trotsky-Hitler-Hirihito conspiracy is alive and well, and is a lurking presence beside all the smiling peasants and earnest government officials. In the beginning of the film, it is without form, merely present in the suggestive tones of a Nazi officer speaking with Davies. But thanks to dogged, but reasonable efforts of Prosecutor Vyshinsky, the conspiracy is admitted by goateed Old Bolsheviks.
Old Leftists who never got over McDonald in Red Square will no doubt get a nostalgic jolt out of this film’s release; to the rest of us, however, viewing this fantasy world of the Old Left backed by a major studio is eerie. Leyda and Koch’s attempts to bridge the cultural gap between the Soviets and Americans by Americanizing the former produces a nightmare effect, as if Our Town put Bernard Baruch on trial for conspiring with Dwight MacDonald to put Herbert Hoover back into power.
Hanoi Jane’s husband showing a pro-Stalin film.
Hands up everyone who’s surprised at this.
The Soviets were our allies in WW II, a war in which everything was at stake. Stalin is in fact the one who largely destroyed the German army. America sent the Soviets staggering amounts of raw material and things like trucks. It wouldn’t be fair to depict American aid in a vacuum of trying to keep Stalin in power and that aid was a far more direct expression than a film. The Soviets and Americans turned on each other even before the last shots of the war were fired and there is no question of anyone actually seeing Stalin as a friend or a good thing, even in 1943. Stalin was killing Germans and that’s really all the Americans cared about.
So?
You think it was a good thing to cover up and deny Stalin’s crimes just for the sake of a temporary alliance?
No, I think it would’ve been better to have painted “Down With Stalin” on the sides of the trucks we sent when in the midst of a battle for survival. At one point the Allies were taking 10,000 casualties per day world wide, not a time for niceties or congressional investigations on the rightness of allying with the Soviets. Please read my posts before replying to them because you replied to something in your head, not mine.
Well said. The temptation to look back on the past as it OUGHT to have been rather than as it was is a great one, but we need to keep things in perspective. Unholy alliances were necessary in the fight to stop Hitler. Russia lost, I think, 20 million citizens during that war. A staggering number… which in no way detracts from Soviet tyranny or the fact that Stalin remains one of the biggest mass-murderers in world history.
We just didn’t know it at the time.
Walter Duranty would like to have a word with you – http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/791vwuaz.asp
Oh god not Duranty again; the most famous nobody nobody cares about once again dragged out for profit like an addicted prostitute as if the name itself is a piece of the true cross. Good thing you guys weren’t in charge in WW II, the Germans may have turned the tide in the East since the whole thing hung by a hair in 1943. This might have enabled the Germans to polish off even more people in concentration camps and devoted more divisions to France. Shame on us for those convoys to Archangel and Murmansk. Useful idiots all. Merchant Marines died for Stalin I guess. I recommend Alexander Werth in place of the internet nobody Duranty, mostly famous for being famous, like “Ender’s Game” but without a trace of actual historical context and proportion.
Try and put yourself back to a time when the war was not won and no one knew what the hell was going on other than mass destruction. It’s always easy to look back and say, well or course we won or of course this guy was wrong. Were the Nazis close to an A-Bomb, what were their man power reserves, what’s the cheapest way to draw off German strength at sea and land given we’re not fully mobilized or experienced. Add 1,000 more things and then tell me about an idiot like Duranty. Read about the Yalta Conference – you think we thought Stalin was our buddy?
The Soviets were fully engaged for 3 entire years before Normandy – the Soviets were the reason we even had a chance at Normandy. Allied bombing campaigns and Soviet actions made sure we faced divisions with no air cover, a huge piece of the German tactical machine. The Battle of the Bulge was planned around no air cover, using cloud cover to take away ours. It was a half measure – what would’ve happened with German air groups. Again, that battle was a near thing.
I was with you on your previous posts (“Soviets were our allies in WWII…” )
But your bizarre weariness over the mere mention of Duranty steps over the line. During WWII, everybody “knew what the hell was going on…” Most of all, a one-legged monster from Liverpool named Walter Duranty.
In the Ukraine, people were being starved by the Russians. Police and Soviet-trained Party Operatives entered peasants’ homes and stripped them of food. Domestic animals were “confiscated.” Crops were stolen. Many Ukrainians were reduced to cannibalism.
Look it up. Look at the photos of starving children with skull-faces and swollen bellies. Vile, disgusting. A crime against humanity, largely unknown today. And Walter Duranty worked overtime to conceal and deny it on behalf of his Soviet sponsors.
You should be genuinely, truly be ashamed of yourself. Don’t bother with another long-winded reply, your thoughts are on this subject are confused and inhuman.
Your post doesn’t even make any sense: no one I know denies Stalin’s crimes nor do I. What I deny and am weary of is this internet/useful idiot/Duranty nonsense that denies Duranty’s actual influence in history which is to say virtually none. If Duranty had never lived what would’ve changed? Nothing. Where was the supposedly Soviet-knowledgeable Duranty when it really mattered, from ’39 to ’45? Who called, who acknowledged him? Tintin was more frickin’ accurate and influential than Duranty. Duranty was nobody then, why is he a somebody now? Duranty would be deservedly forgotten if blogs didn’t keep bringing him up.
I’ll be interest to see what sort of context (if any) Turner Classic Movies puts on the film, given that it’s infamous history is widely known. Looking at the TCM schedule for tonight, the film is paired with “Fiddler on the Roof”, “Dr. Zhivago” and “Comrade X” — the first film is pretty much outside the context of 20th Century Soviet propaganda, but the other two films are definitely anti-Soviet and deal with the same Stalinist time period as “Mission to Moscow”.
(Of course, since the movie’s being shown at 4:15 in the morning Eastern time, there may be no context at all, since they usually put Robert Osborn’s commentaries to bed for the night for any TCM movie that starts after 3 a.m. But the two films before that should get some sort of introduction.)
I saw this movie decades ago. It is a terribly boring whitewash of a regime that slaughtered tens of millions of its own people. No one should waste the time to view it.
It’s not the first time it’s aired on a Turner station – I saw it a couple of times in the 90′s on (if I remember) TNT. Best quote is Davies telling Stalin that history will remember him “as a great builder for the benefit of mankind.” Second best is Davies stumping the country for Stalin, and answering a question about “poor little Finland!” – if I remember, his explanation is that the Soviets needed land to defend themselves against the Germans, and offered the Finns “twice as much” land in compensation, “but Hitler’s friend Manneheim refused, and the Red Army moved in.”
Best party-line position taken by the film: that the Nazi-Soviet pact was, in fact, a cunning plan by the Soviets to “buy time” before joining the fight against the Nazis. Oh, and it was really the Americans’ fault because if we’d just joined the Soviets in an anti-German alliance much earlier, why then, it wouldn’t have happened.
Don’t miss the part at the beginning, where the real Joe Davies appears to tell you the whole thing is true.
P.S. – err. Mannerheim.
– grabbed the other half of Poland, why didn’t the allies declare war on both Germany and the U.S.S.R.?
Guess I shouldn’t mention “Song of Russia” or “The North Star”…
Probably not (I’ve read that those three are the only out-and-out party-line films Hollywood put out, but I don’t know much about the other two). Of the three, this is the most interesting, because it’s based on a book by our actual ambassador to the USSR, and (inadvertently) explains a lot about how Roosevelt viewed the Soviets.
My grandfather fled a Stalin Death sentence before the Soviet takeover of Latvia. The stories my aunt and 2 uncles I have been told from that point they left Smiltene Latvia are years of brutality horror being trapped between two evil men. Slave labor brutality mass death starvation were the words that defined my elder aunt and uncles lives on the Stipnieks side The story of WWII between Hitler and Stalin is little told and is totally horrifying. Stalin is the face of evil in its most pure form. Pity that story is not TOLD!
It has been told. I recently read a book about Stalin and Hitler’s reigns of terror over the peoples of Eastern Europe during the 30′s and 40′s. Fourteen million noncombatants were killed by those two regimes during that time. The book is called THE BLOODLANDS.
In my mind there’s only one true Mission to Moscow film, and that’s Police Academy: Mission to Moscow.
Now, THATS a classic!
FYI, it is not a premiere on TCM. I watched it years ago on TCM as a junkie of the channel. Should be noted that Robert Osborne properly frames the film as well. Also, you neglected to mention the grandfatherly portrayal of Stalin