Communists Ahoy!

It is difficult and uncommon to find some piece of media, some exposition, which is particularly damning for one person or group. Kanye West’s drunken belligerence has not curtailed his record sales any more than David Letterman’s well-publicized affairs have brought him bad publicity. There are some few outbursts of the entertainment industry, be they songs or movies, which can defines generations, encompass cultural movements, or capture a particular mentality with inimitable effectiveness. Warner Bros.’ Mission to Moscow, released in 1942, is one such film, and one’s whose release last Tuesday is as appropriate and unsurprising now as it was sixty-five years ago. This blatant, calibrated piece of Soviet and communist propaganda was requested directly by Franklin Roosevelt and is, as a critic put it at the time, a $2 million love letter to Josef Stalin.
According to Cass Warner, film historian and granddaughter of Harry Warner, “President Roosevelt himself asked Harry and Jack Warner to assist in educating, entertaining and enlightening the American people.” Directed by Casablanca’s Michael Curtiz, the controversial film marked a turning point in Hollywood’s perception of the Soviet Union, at the time an ambiguous and distrusted ally, towards a curious and praise-worthy alternative to America. The script was loosely based on the memoirs of Joseph E. Davies, ambassador to Moscow in the late 1930s, and at one point features Davies’ character lauding Stalin; “Mr. Stalin, history will remember you as a great leader.” The film insists that Stalin recognized the Nazi threat long before the West and only allied with Hitler to buy himself and the West—his real friends, some time. He was then obligated to invade Finland, as this mission to Moscow reveals, to protect it from the Nazis (don’t tell the Finns, or for that matter mention it to the rest of Europe lest they become envious) while the film insists his subsequent purges were the conjuration of a vast Nazi conspiracy.
The Office of War Information praised the movie and its rendition of Stalin, saying it portrayed that “the leaders of both countries desire peace and both possess a blunt honesty of address and purpose”. Upon its release, Mission to Moscow came under heavy criticism, and the Warner Bros. found themselves appearing before Congress in 1950 as examples of communist infiltration in Hollywood, but after asserting screenwriter Howard Koch as the sympathizer were reprieved. Such behavior by the FDR administration is hardly surprising, but the release of Mission to Moscow is an inadvertent reminder that the situation has not changed that much. Russia is still a belligerent power ready and willing to exercise military force, as now is China, and while both countries have launched multiple operations in the past 3 years, they are being greeted mild affection and flimsy politics. Though FDR was proven wrong and Stalin identified as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, the current administration is offering Russian operatives open tours of U.S. nuclear silos. FDR’s ghost can contentedly watch a re-implementation of his economic policies with the current administration while seeing the mission to Moscow turning into a submission to Moscow.