.png)
Michael Curtiz’s Mission to Moscow is perhaps the most audacious pro-Stalinist film ever released by a major Hollywood studio. Commissioned during World War II and personally endorsed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the film is a dramatized and propagandistic adaptation of former ambassador Joseph E. Davies’s 1941 memoir, which recounted his time in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938.
With Davies' blessing and script approval power this noir curiosity attempts to explain and defend the most controversial aspects of Stalin's USSR, including the purges, show trials, and the Nazi–Soviet Pact.
The film was created as a morale booster and propaganda piece during a fraught period when the U.S. and the USSR were allied against Nazi Germany. Its primary aim was to foster trust and goodwill between American audiences and their uncomfortable ally, the Soviet Union. At the request of the White House, Warner Bros. produced a film that would, in the words of the Office of War Information, depict the Soviets “not as wild-eyed madmen, but as far-seeing, earnest, responsible statesmen.”
.png)
.png) |
| Unfiltered desk to camera in Mission to Moscow (1943) |
.png)
.png)
But in doing so, Mission to Moscow did not merely soften the image of Soviet leaders; it actively whitewashed Stalinist terror. It presents the Moscow Trials as necessary and justified, suggesting that figures like Nikolai Bukharin and Mikhail Tukhachevsky were legitimate fascist conspirators. Leon Trotsky is portrayed as a Nazi collaborator.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is rationalized. And Stalin himself, played with paternal warmth by Manart Kippen, appears as a benevolent, misunderstood statesman.
.png)
.png)
Directed by Michael Curtiz, a master of film noir, and a master indeed of all styles, and whom in fact just a year earlier had delivered Casablanca (1942), alors! the film is visually polished, buoyed by a soaring Max Steiner score, dynamic editing by Don Siegel, and extensive montages. Walter Huston, a masterful actor, plays Davies with confidence and gravitas, despite the often implausible script. In fact, Huston is one of the few cast members who comes through this film with dignity intact.
The film is structured like a pseudo-documentary: Davies introduces the film himself and narrates his experiences via voice-over. This direct-to-camera storytelling lends the picture an air of false authority. The effect is both powerful and dangerous—turning political disinformation into “eyewitness” testimony.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
At the time of release, the film was met with scepticism from both the left and the right. While liberal New York Times critic Bosley Crowther found it convincing, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) later cited Mission to Moscow as an example of dangerous pro-Communist propaganda. Even at the time of release, the film’s honesty was questioned by thinkers like John Dewey, who lambasted its historical distortions.
Box office receipts were poor: despite a $250,000 marketing push, Warner Bros. lost approximately $600,000 on the film. In Moscow, where it was screened for Stalin himself, the reaction was reportedly one of bemused disbelief—Soviet viewers found it laughably inaccurate.
.png)
.png)
Over time, Mission to Moscow became a cultural artifact of Cold War curiosity: banned from syndication, cited in blacklist hearings, and later revived by Turner Classic Movies as a chilling example of state-sponsored cinema. Its brief post-war notoriety—and subsequent obscurity—reveals much about shifting American attitudes toward the Soviet Union and the precarious role of film as a tool for ideological persuasion.
.png)
What makes Mission to Moscow more disturbing than merely naïve or misguided is its complicity in mythologizing Stalinism at the height of its brutality. By 1943, the truth about the purges and gulags was not unknown. Yet this film presents a revisionist fantasy where purged generals are fascist traitors, and Stalin is a modest patriot forced to root out evil. As producer Robert Buckner later admitted, the movie was “an expedient lie for political purposes.”
This makes Mission to Moscow not just propaganda, but a dangerous example of political cinema’s capacity for historical falsification. It is, as many critics have called it, the American equivalent of Triumph of the Will—minus the artistry. Its significance lies not in its filmmaking, but in its breathtaking willingness to promote a murderous regime under the guise of diplomatic realism.
To view Mission to Moscow today is to confront the weaponization of cinema in its most naked form. It is not merely a relic of wartime exigency but a cautionary tale: a reminder that even in liberal democracies, propaganda is possible, effective, and sometimes state-sanctioned.
t encountered Mission to Moscow not through a late-night movie channel or film studies course, but via the BBC’s revelatory documentary series WWII Behind Closed Doors, which focused on the behind-the-scenes diplomacy of the Second World War.
It was here that the film was presented not just as a curious historical relic but as a deliberate piece of Allied propaganda, as ye ken, part of a larger campaign to keep Stalin’s Soviet Union aligned with Britain and the United States in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In this context, dans cette contexte alors, maintenant, the film’s existence begins to make a twisted kind of sense. As grotesque as its distortions may seem today, Mission to Moscow is not just propaganda—it is diplomacy on celluloid, an official lie in service of a larger, perhaps even more desperate, truth.
The truth was this and this was the truth. What is written next is the truth and the truth shall be contained in the eleven words which follow the next colon, assuming that '1943' can be and may be counted as a word: in 1943, keeping the Soviet Union in the war was paramount.
All of which rolled forth upon the unsuspectres making that cinema visit in the USA of '43 with the crazed up following suggestions of advertorial power, flanking the lobbies and print ads with the mazing promises of:
An American story...told American style
10,000 TIMES STRANGER-10,000 TIMES STRONGER- Than Fiction!
IT'S SOCKO ENTERTAINMENT!
The true adventure of former U. S. Ambassador JOSEPH E. DAVIES
The greatest one-man mission since Paul Revere's ride!
One American's Journey into the Truth
Western leaders—including Roosevelt and Churchill—were willing to look away from Soviet repression, from the mass executions, the gulags, the show trials, and even the Katyn massacre, in order to maintain the strategic alliance. It was not merely a question of military expediency, but of massaging public opinion at home. And this is where Mission to Moscow enters as both a cultural product and a political tool—part wartime morale booster, part soft power effort to “humanize” the Soviet regime for skeptical American audiences.
.png)
.png)
Enter Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, the film’s central figure and, to some degree, its auteur. Davies, who served as U.S. ambassador to the USSR from 1936 to 1938, wrote the memoir upon which the film is based and, more damningly, had final script approval. And oh, does it show. Mission to Moscow is less a chronicle of Soviet-American relations than it is a hagiography of Davies himself.
He is portrayed as the lone voice of reason in rooms full of skeptics, the man who foresaw the war, who understood Hitler before Hitler acted, who alone comprehended the complexity and nobility of the Soviet project.
.png)
.png)
Walter Huston, who plays Davies, has the unenviable task of carrying nearly every scene, and while he brings his characteristic dignity and gravitas, even he can’t save this relentlessly sycophantic screenplay. The narrative unfolds with predictable regularity: Davies plans a quiet family vacation, only to be summoned urgently by the White House.
Davies enters a room full of congressional doubters and persuades them all with calm facts. Stalin’s Soviet Union is represented as a model society of happy, well-fed citizens, dazzling fashion, industrious workers, and benevolent leaders—none more so than Stalin himself, who is shown as a kind-hearted visionary quietly working for world peace.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
But the true absurdity lies not just in the details of the Soviet utopia the film fabricates, but in what it refuses to acknowledge. Among the most egregious omissions is the situation of American expatriates who had moved to the USSR in the 1930s, motivated by idealism and a desire to help build a new socialist society.
These Americans, far from living out their utopian dreams, were instead swept up in Stalin’s purges—imprisoned, tortured, and often executed as supposed enemies of the state. Many desperately sought assistance from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, hoping to have their passports restored so they could leave. Davies, astonishingly, refused to intervene.
Embassy staff were reportedly so appalled by his inaction—and by his increasing complicity in the Soviet narrative—that they threatened to resign en masse.
Yet none of this appears in the film. On the contrary, Mission to Moscow shows Davies as a wise, discerning emissary, a man who repeatedly insists he is there to see the "real" Soviet Union firsthand. But, as numerous sources make clear, every one of his visits was heavily scripted by Soviet handlers. He was not seeing the real USSR—he was being shown a stage set.
And like a dutiful actor in someone else’s production, he played along, whether out of political calculation or genuine naivety is debatable. What’s harder to debate is that the film, and Davies’ performance within it, contributed to one of the most outrageous misrepresentations of Stalinist Russia ever, ever, ever committed to American cinema.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
The show trials of 1936–1938 are depicted in the film with jaw-dropping credulity. Davies is seen nodding sagely in the courtroom as once-powerful figures like Bukharin, Radek, and Yagoda confess to elaborate conspiracies involving the now-exiled Trotsky.
The screenplay assures us—through Davies’ voiceover and the commentary of sympathetic journalists—that these trials are entirely fair and free of coercion. The real Davies, it should be noted, attended several of these trials and wrote glowingly of them, taking the confessions at face value.
He seemed incapable of—or unwilling to—entertain the possibility that these were coerced, rehearsed, and staged for international consumption. In retrospect, it is clear that his presence at these events, and his endorsement of their legitimacy, provided the USSR with powerful propaganda of its own.
There is no mention of the Soviet famine. No mention of the gulags. No mention of the mass arrests, the torture, the forced collectivization, or the decimation of the Red Army’s command structure. The 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland is explained as a noble act of defense. The Hitler-Stalin pact is brushed aside as strategic prudence.
This is from Wikipedia, the content is copied:
The film's pro-Soviet tone was criticized in the United States even at the time of its release. John Dewey wrote an op-ed to The New York Times calling Mission to Moscow "the first instance in our country of totalitarian propaganda for mass consumption--a propaganda which falsifies history through distortion, omission or pure invention of facts." The Republican National Committee called it "New Deal propaganda." At the same time, the film initially had its defenders. Herman Shumlin called the film "an instrument for understanding and friendship between the Allies." Senator Sheridan Downey read a letter from a United States Army sergeant serving in the Italian campaign into the Congressional Record noting that Nazi propaganda he had seen criticized the Soviet Union in similar terms to American critiques of the film.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities would later cite Mission to Moscow as one of three examples of pro-Soviet films made by Hollywood, the other two being The North Star and Song of Russia. It has been called "unquestionably the most blatant piece of pro-Stalinist propaganda ever offered by the American mass media".
In 1950, the film became an object of attention by members of Congress, who saw it as pro-Soviet propaganda. Davies was largely silent on his role in the film, though he did submit a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947. Called to testify under oath before Congress, Jack L. Warner at first claimed that the film was made at the request of Davies, who with the approval of FDR had asked Warner Bros. to make the film (this version of the facts was confirmed by Davies' letter as well). He said:
The picture was made when our country was fighting for its existence, with Russia as one of our allies. It was made to fulfill the same wartime purpose for which we made such other pictures as Air Force, This Is the Army...and a great many more. If making Mission to Moscow in 1942 was subversive activity, then the American Liberty ships which carried food and guns to Russian allies and the American naval vessels which convoyed them were likewise engaged in subversive activities. This picture was made only to help a desperate war effort and not for posterity.
Warner later recanted this version, stating that Harry Warner first read Mission to Moscow and then contacted Davies to discuss movie rights.
Mission to Moscow was one of hundreds of pre-1948 Warner Bros. movies sold for television screenings, but was never included in domestic syndication packages put together by its then-owner, United Artists. It had its U.S. TV debut on PBS in the 1970s and has been shown sporadically on Turner Classic Movies, featured in the January 2010 series "Shadows of Russia" and most recently broadcast on May 30, 2024. The film's ownership has returned to Warner Bros. via its purchase of Turner Entertainment and the title made its DVD debut in October, 2009 as part of the Warner Archive Collection.
Stalin appears only briefly, but in those moments he is depicted as avuncular and noble—so soft-spoken and humble that he barely registers as the dictator responsible for millions of deaths. He is played by Manart Kippen in what must be one of the most bizarre portrayals of a 20th-century tyrant ever filmed. Molotov comes off as a gentle academic. Litvinov is full of gravitas and goodwill. And Kalinin, who presided over innumerable death warrants, is shown as a kindly grandfather.
.png)
.png)
.png)
What makes this film so difficult to dismiss, even in its sheer badness, is that it was made not in ignorance but as official policy. It was commissioned with Roosevelt’s blessing. Jack Warner later called it the worst mistake of his career, but that didn’t stop Warner Bros. from pouring top-tier talent into the project.
It was directed by Michael Curtiz and scripted by Howard Koch, who would be blacklisted for his involvement. The art direction was Oscar-nominated. The result is a film that looks polished and professional, yet is built on a foundation of mendacity.
And yet, Mission to Moscow is still worth watching, because, because precisely because it is such a grotesque distortion. It provides, paradoxically, a valuable education in the mechanics of propaganda. To watch it today is to glimpse a moment when the U.S. was willing to trade moral clarity for strategic advantage, to promote a lie because the truth was diplomatically inconvenient.
Seen in this light, Davies doesn’t just come off as a naïve fool, though he does that in spades, he emerges as a figure uniquely suited to the political moment: someone whose vanity, gullibility, and scripted optimism made him the perfect conduit for a dangerously sanitized view of Soviet power.
That the film has become a historical curiosity rather than a cinematic pariah is telling. It invites research. It demands context. The more one learns about the events and individuals depicted—about the men who were purged, the Americans who were abandoned, the diplomatic sleights of hand behind the scenes, well yep, the more surreal the film becomes.
.png)
Mission to Moscow isn’t merely bad; it is a vivid illustration of what happens when political wishful thinking and self-serving delusion collide. It’s not just history rewritten. It’s history re-performed, complete with costume changes, musical cues, and a hero who doesn’t realize he’s acting in someone else’s play.
It is, in short, one of the strangest and most fascinating films ever produced in Hollywood. Not because it reveals anything true about the Soviet Union, but because it reveals so much about the United States at a moment when idealism, fear, and political necessity formed a toxic cocktail that could make even Stalin look good.
.png)
.png)
.png)
The film's lasting value lies in its infamy. It is a crucial primary document for anyone studying the intersections of art, state power, and ideological convenience. As such, Mission to Moscow should not be forgotten—but neither should it be forgiven.
Some of our rave fave best and most propagandising propaganda films of the 1940s are here encountered:
Night Train to Munich (1940)
With Hitchcock unavailable, Carol Reed delivered a loving pastiche. Borrowing Margaret Lockwood from The Lady Vanishes and even reprising the comic duo Charters and Caldicott, Reed crafts a witty espionage thriller. The plot, which involveth Rex Harrison’s spy smuggling a scientist out of Germany, pure reality and pure magic, leads to a climactic cable-car escape into Switzerland, pure proto-Bond. If Hitchcock’s shadow looms, Night Train to Munich nonetheless stands on its own as the most stylish propaganda thriller of its year.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
The most subversive film on this list. Churchill sought to ban it, seeing himself in its blustering, out-of-step protagonist. The Left disliked it too, for softening Colonel Blimp into a sympathetic figure. Powell and Pressburger defied wartime orthodoxy. Against Vansittartite calls to “destroy Germany forever,” they presented the enduring friendship between a British officer and a Prussian counterpart, played with aching dignity by Anton Walbrook. His plea against internment as an “enemy alien” is the film’s most haunting moment.
The Silver Fleet (1943)
Just edging out Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) for a place on this list, Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley’s The Silver Fleet dramatizes the fraught line between collaboration and resistance in Nazi-occupied Holland. Its protagonist appears to collaborate with the occupiers, alienating even his wife, but in fact he is engaged in a clandestine, solitary resistance mission that culminates in a tragic, stirring finale. When I watched it, I had been reading about a leader of Himmler’s Ahnenerbe who later claimed at the Nuremberg Medical Trial that he had been a “Trojan Horse” resister. Whether true or not, his defense captures a real wartime dilemma: how far can collaboration extend in the service of resistance? The Silver Fleet dramatizes that question with unusual moral bite.
Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942)
By 1942, Holmes and Watson had joined the fight against Hitler. In Roy William Neill’s Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, Holmes disguises himself to rescue a Swiss scientist, then protects his invention from both Gestapo agents and Moriarty, now a Nazi stooge. The propaganda is overt—Holmes closes with John of Gaunt’s patriotic “this England” speech from Richard II—but the film remains sheer entertainment. Rathbone and Bruce were never more engaging, and the fusion of Conan Doyle’s detective world with wartime urgency gave Holmes a fresh, timely relevance.
.png)
Pimpernel Smith (1941)
Leslie Howard reimagined the Scarlet Pimpernel as a distracted Cambridge archaeologist whose apparent obsession with ancient civilizations masks a daring campaign to rescue Nazi victims. Howard’s Horatio Smith is less a masquerade than a double life. His archaeological research even disproves Nazi “Aryan” mythmaking, culminating in an unforgettable final scene where he delivers intellectual as well as moral victory. The film’s wit sparkles in Smith’s exchanges with General von Graum, particularly his sly claim that Romeo and Juliet is “one of the most famous works of German literature.” Pimpernel Smith inspired Raoul Wallenberg and provoked the ire of Lord Haw Haw. When Howard’s plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe in 1943, many suspected he had been deliberately targeted. That possibility only deepens the aura around what remains the most stirring propaganda film of the war.
.png)
The Mortal Storm (1940)
“I’ve never prized safety, Erich… I prized courage.” With this declaration, Professor Victor Roth marks his 60th birthday at a Bavarian university—on 30 January 1933, the day Hitler comes to power. Within weeks Roth is denounced, imprisoned for his “un-German” science, and dies in a concentration camp. Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm was startlingly frank for 1940, hinting at Roth’s Jewish origins—a bold gesture when Hollywood generally avoided acknowledging Jewish persecution. American distributors even cut references to Nazi racism from Michael Powell’s 49th Parallel (1941) to avoid offending audiences in the Jim Crow South. Naïve at times—two of Roth’s sons improbably become Nazis despite their background—The Mortal Storm remains one of the era’s most morally powerful films. James Stewart’s performance secures its place here over the thematically similar Pastor Hall (1940).
International Lady (1941)
Ilona Massey stars as a glamorous singer who doubles as a German spy, encoding secrets in her music. Tim Whelan’s International Lady mixes espionage with comedy, pitting Basil Rathbone’s Scotland Yard inspector against George Brent’s FBI man. Their verbal sparring—Rathbone quoting Wilde, Brent baffling him with slang—gives the film its sparkle. The action moves from London to America, culminating in the agents’ discovery that cooperation, despite “the common language problem,” is the key to defeating Nazism. Light, witty, and firmly pitched at Anglo-American solidarity, International Lady is propaganda dressed as a caper.
Mrs. Miniver (1942)
Roosevelt urged haste in releasing William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver. Churchill called it “worth five battleships.” Even Goebbels admired it: “There is not a single angry word against Germany. Nevertheless, the anti-German tendency is perfectly accomplished.” Wyler’s film depicts a “typical” English family—though in truth their riverside home would have struck British audiences as a mansion. The subplot of cross-class romance, smoothing over barriers between the Oxbridge-educated son of privilege and the baroness’s granddaughter, was hardly convincing as “people’s war.” Yet the film’s central message—that war intruded into every domestic sphere—resonated deeply. Made for Americans, Mrs. Miniver nonetheless became Britain’s biggest box-office success of 1942, proof that even idealized propaganda could strike a real chord.
To Be or Not to Be (1942)
Lubitsch’s black comedy baffled critics, who found its irreverence toward Nazi occupation distasteful. Time has been kinder. While other films emphasized Nazi cruelty, To Be or Not to Be punctured Nazi pomposity, rendering them ridiculous rather than terrifying. Audiences of 1942 weren’t ready; Mel Brooks’s 1983 remake and Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (2017) show how such satire works best with historical distance. But Lubitsch was ahead of his time. His playful treatment of heiling directly anticipates Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit (2019).
Michael Powell’s most direct propaganda effort follows U-boat survivors trekking across Canada, hoping to cross into neutral America. Along the way they encounter ordinary Canadians—including a French farmer (Laurence Olivier) bewildered about why his country should fight for “a bunch of Poles.” When he resists, he is shot dead by the intruders. Funded in part by the British government, 49th Parallel juxtaposes Nazi brutality with the multi-ethnic tolerance of Canada, while pointedly addressing American isolationists. It insists that the war is not just “a European affair,” but already knocking on North America’s door.
.png)
Mission to Moscow (1943)
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Genres - Drama, History, War | Sub-Genres - Propaganda Film | Release Date - Apr 29, 1943 | Run Time - 124 min. | Da Wiki de cette filme Mission to Moscow lol (1943)
