When the U.S. made Communist propaganda
It was movie night at the Kremlin. The date was May 23, 1943. The Red Army had defeated the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad only three months earlier. To celebrate the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States, Joseph Stalin had decided to throw a banquet. Despite wartime rationing, there was no shortage of delicious courses. Vodka flowed freely, according to historian Todd Bennett.
After dinner, Stalin led the guests to his private movie theater. Joseph E. Davies, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R. and an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, sat next to Stalin. Then the lights went down and “Mission to Moscow” started.
The movie was pure Stalinist propaganda. It portrayed the dictator as a benevolent leader and the Soviet Union as a fraternal society free of repression. It presented the Moscow show trials, during which Stalin’s rivals had been framed, as fair hearings. And it charged Leon Trotsky — the Jewish Bolshevik murdered on Stalin’s orders in 1940 — with having been a Nazi agent.
But “Mission to Moscow” hadn’t been made by the Kremlin-controlled studios or vetted by Stalin’s censors. It came from a Hollywood studio, Warner Bros. Pictures, and was approved by censors from the U.S. government.
“Mission to Moscow” was part of a wave of movies made between 1942 and 1945 that lauded the Soviet regime. They included RKO’s “The North Star,” about Ukrainians repelling Nazi invaders; United Artists’ “Three Russian Girls,” about a Russian nurse’s romance with an American soldier; and Columbia’s “CounterAttack,” about Red Army soldiers squaring off against the Wehrmacht.
“Mission to Moscow” was directed by Michael Curtiz, hot off helming “Casablanca,” but it was Davies’s brainchild. Based on his memoir, it dramatized his stint before the war at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Walter Huston played Davies. In the film’s prologue, the real Davies assured viewers they were about to get an “honest” primer on the Soviet Union.
Stalin liked it
Stalin approved. He was “very generous” in his “praise of the picture,” Davies wrote in a letter the next day. Soon after, “Mission to Moscow” opened across the U.S.S.R.
It had come out stateside to great fanfare in April 1943, according to historians Ronald and Allis Radosh. The marketing budget was $500,000, close to $9 million in today’s money. There had been a glitzy premiere in Washington, attended by political insiders and reporters.
The movie certainly didn’t hide its agenda: to make Americans appreciate the Soviet Union, and rally support for the Soviet-American alliance. This directive came straight from the White House.
According to producer Robert Buckner, the president said “Mission to Moscow” should be made “to show the American mothers and fathers that if their sons are killed in fighting alongside Russians in our common cause, then it was a good cause, and the Russians are worthy allies.”
“Mission to Moscow” and the other pro-Soviet films of the era were made under the aegis of the Office of War Information, launched by Roosevelt in 1942 to “promote, in the United States and abroad, understanding of the status and progress of the war effort and of war policies, activities, and aims of the U.S. government.”In other words, it oversaw Americanwartime propaganda.