William Christian Bullitt, Paris, 24 November 1936, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt
( excerpts )I am informed reliably that the Muscovites . . . are about to begin a new drive to attempt to get our good will and that they will inaugurate it by covering Joe Davies with tons of the very best butter. . . .Incidentally, I am informed, that they are re-inaugurating the propaganda . . . to the effect that neither you nor the American Government cared in the least whether they directed the American Communist Party from Moscow ; . . .
For the President, personal and secret;
correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt.
Orville H. Bullitt, editor.
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1972, pages 185-6.
From I Choose Freedom by Victor Kravchenko, 1946
Perhaps my most harrowing evening in America was spent in a Washington motion-picture theatre. I was grateful for the dark, which covered up the distress that, I am sure, was written on my face. The other Soviet official who was with me, also a Party member, squirmed in his seat ; I had no doubt he was as shaken as I was. It was the evening when I watched the unfoldment of a film called Mission to Moscow, based on a book of the same name by the former Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph E. Davies. What I saw was a brutal, heavy-handed insult to the Russian nation—a caricature of its revolution and a mockery of its long anguish.The book was more absurd than evil, a hash of ignorance and double-talk and in large part plain silly ; bit it was mitigated here and there by a streak of truth. The film carefully steered around those streaks and added nightmarish inventions not in the book. Wherever the Hollywood �historians� faced a choice between fact and fiction, between reality and nonsense, they carefully chose fiction and nonsense. It happened that I was thoroughly acquainted with the Siberian factory that figured in one of the purge trials ; a more ludicrous cartoon than the Hollywood version could scarcely be contrived. No Soviet propaganda picture would have dared twist facts so recklessly out of their sockets. The American propagandists evidently relied on the ignorance of their audience to �get away with� their fantasy. In that sense, incidentally, the picture was as much an insult to Americans as to Russians. Small wonder that the Moscow Pravda lavished praise on Mr. Davies and his book, quoting him to the effect that Soviet justice was flawless, that a fifth column had been wiped out by the purge, that the annihilation of the founders of the Bolshevik Revolution was fully justified. What strange reading it made for intelligent Russians !
Stalin killed off the founders of the Soviet state. This crime was only a small part of the larger blood-letting in which hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women perished. But in the Davies-Warner Brothers film all this horror was reduced to a petty opera-bouffe conspiracy by a few comic Old Bolsheviks and foreign agents as a �fifth column.� A political event which makes the St. Bartholomew�s Eve Massacre and the French Terror and the Armenian atrocities look like street-corner brawls was here trimmed down to the dimensions of a parlor farce.
I had been through the purge. Though one of the least among the victims, I had suffered its indignities in my own flesh and spirit. Now in a Washington theatre I saw my own ordeal and that of my country being mocked in terms of caricature and falsification. I watched the macabre scene as Hollywood kicked the corpses around and heiled the murderers.
New York : Scribner's, 1946, pages 470-71.
From While Your Slept, John T. Flynn, 1951
. . . the . . . Mission to Moscow. I am indebted to the very penetrating and intelligent examination of this picture made at the time by Eugene Lyons, an expert in his whole field.97 Ostensibly the picture was based on a book by Joseph E. Davies, who had been the American Ambassador to Moscow—a very foolish book, by the way, itself responsible for no end of misconception about Russia [or rather, the �U.S.S.R�] It was made into a screen play in 1943 by Howard Koch and produced by Warner Brothers. . . .A character in the picture, of course, was Ambassador Davies. As the Ambassador enters Russia [i.e. �U.S.S.R.�], he and his family show extreme enthusiasm at the wonderful food they receive, and throughout the picture the abundance of food is stressed in various ways.
A great ball is given in Moscow in honor of Ambassador Davies. Present are Herr von Ribbentrop and also the famous old Bolshevik leader, Bukharin. There are two other persons present—Radek and Yagoda. Now, Mr. Davies got to Russia in January 1937. Actually, at that time Bukharin and Radek were under arrest and later disappeared. Bukharin was later executed by the GPU, but there is not reference to that, and and Ribbentrop never visited Moscow until 1939, when he went there to sign the infamous ten-year friendship pact with Stalin. There is nothing n the picture about this either.
Davies was a heavy contributor to the Roosevelt campaign funds. He wanted to be Ambassador to London. He was sent to Russia [i.e. �USSR�], hoping to get the London assignment in return for doing the Moscow chore. This was a political pay-off and not a mission, but the picture makes it all into a one-man crusade to stop the looming war.
Then we get a look at one of the famous Russian [i.e. Stalinist] trials and, oddly enough, one that never came off—the trial of Tukhachevsky, the most famous of the [Soviet] Russian marshals. He was never given a public trial but was convicted in star-chamber proceedings. He is shown in the picture confessing his guilt in open court. From beginning to end the facts of history and of life in Russia are distorted and falsified in the most outrageous manner. Actually, not only were the actions of the Russian [i.e. Soviet] leaders pictured in heroic mold but, as Eugene Lyons says: �The motives of Britain, France, Poland and America are lampooned and condemned.�98 Russia�s [i.e. �USSR�s] aggressions against Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuanian and Poland are slurred over or defended.
The picture attempted to dispose of those frightful trials in which so many old Soviet leaders opposed to Stalin were made to confess to crimes against their country. The world has since learned how Communist governments can get confessions from anybody. Later they got them from Mikhailovitch, Stepinac, Mindszenty and more recently from Mr. Vogeler, whose story is still fresh in our minds. The convicted men were represented in the picture as fifth column acting with Germany, Italy and Japan against the Fatherland.
The full scope of this bloody liquidation of hundreds of old Russian [i.e. ]Bolshevik'] leaders is omitted in the picture. There is no evidence to indicate that this is only one episode in the Terror that had been moving over Russia for years. Even Davies, much as he labored to put the best possible interpretation on Russia�s [i.e. USSR�s] actions, wrote in his book; �The Terror here is a horrifying fact. . . . No household, however humble, apparently but lives in constant fear of a nocturnal raid by the secret police. . . . Once the person is taken away nothing is known of him or her for onths—many times never—thereafter.�99 There was nothing about this in the picture. There is not one word or act of condemnation of these trials—only an attempt to justify them with the appearance of legality.
97. N. Y. World-Telegram, May 11-14, 1943.
98. Ibid.
99. Mission to Moscow by Joseph E. Davies (N. Y., 1941).New York : Devin-Adair, 1951, pages 102-4, notes p. 190.