TEACHING  THE  ARTICLE

Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow

Film and Soviet-American Relations during World War II

by Todd Bennett

(Journal of American History, Sept. 2001)

Using my article about Mission to Moscow, a pro-Soviet docudrama released in 1943 by Warner Bros. Studios, teachers of U.S. history survey courses can explore World War II diplomacy while recapturing something of American popular culture in the war years. The exercise can help students think critically about the connections between international politics, mass media, and popular entertainment in the mid-twentieth century.

In the interest of national security, the U.S. government tried to use Mission to Moscow, based on the best seller by former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph E. Davies, to create a benign image of the Soviet Union. Warner Bros. lent stars and production values to the film. Demonstrating the shortcomings of cultural manipulation, however, the picture generally failed to sway viewers in the United States. When Davies and President Franklin D. Roosevelt later sent Mission to Moscow to the Kremlin to demonstrate U.S. goodwill toward Soviet premier Joseph V. Stalin, it produced mixed results in communicating across international political, historical, and cultural boundaries.

Begin by exploring students' assumptions about popular cinema. Why do they go to the movies? Ask them to speculate on why wartime Americans did so. Remind them that before television and international travel became commonplace, motion pictures played much larger roles in shaping people's views of the world. Attended each week by some 80 million Americans (out of a population of 131 million), movies possessed great potential to acquaint viewers with the distant and, to many, mysterious Soviet Union. Americans hotly debated the nation's wartime alliance with the Soviets. For some, Stalinist Russia was a socialist, expansionary, and totalitarian state ill fit for partnership. However, the Soviet Union's valiant fight against Nazi Germany, widely considered the most immediate threat to U.S. interests, cleansed the Soviet nation and its rulers in the minds of many. Have students examine two conflicting views of Stalin in this regard, comparing a 1939 cartoon that appeared in the New York Times soon after the Nazi-Soviet Pact with a 1943 cartoon. What does the contrast suggest about Stalin's public image in U.S. mass media during these years?

[Stalin - 1939] [Stalin - 1943]

Concerned that widespread hostility toward Stalin might undermine domestic unity and Roosevelt's pro-Soviet foreign policy, the White House and the Office of War Information (OWI), the official propaganda agency, hoped Mission to Moscow would help counteract it. In its "Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry," issued to studios in June 1942, the OWI recommended incorporating pro-Allied and pro-Soviet themes into feature films. An enthusiastic Davies, a confidant of the president, outlined the attitudes he hoped the film version of his book would foster in a January 1943 letter to FDR's press secretary. As an official review shows, the OWI also kept close tabs on Mission to Moscow throughout its production, regularly advising filmmakers. Ask students to evaluate these documents. Given Roosevelt's belief that détente with Moscow was necessary to defeat the Axis powers and craft a lasting peace, what specific "messages" did Davies feel were "paramount"? With particular regard to Americans' mistrust of Stalin, what did the OWI find so praiseworthy about Mission to Moscow?

The film was advertised as part documentary, part entertainment. Filmmakers wanted the movie to be seen as a patriotic exercise, a goal in some tension with the film's vision of one-world harmony. Ask students to consider the mixture of those motives in Davies' prologue to the film and in the film's finale. In what ways does patriotism sit uneasily with the hope for world peace in both scenes?

Both the Roosevelt administration and filmmakers showed unease about rationalizing Stalin's dictatorial policies. Have students interpret a scene and dialogue from the film in which a rational Stalin (portrayed by actor Manart Kippen) explained his diplomacy to Davies (Walter Huston). How does this scene deal with the lingering suspicions that the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact had unleashed among Americans? In another scene, set in a cosmetics factory, the factory's commissar, Madame Molotov (Frieda Inescort), traded insights about women, beauty, and work with Mrs. Davies (Ann Harding). What does their exchange imply in light of Americans' trepidations about partnering with a socialist state?

While the White House, Davies, and the OWI clearly tried to manage wartime culture via Mission to Moscow, domestic ally, the project fell far short of expectations. It was not successful at the box office and failed to persuade ordinary viewers and public opinion leaders alike. Noting Mission to Moscow's distorted view of the recent past, Suzanne La Follette and the philosopher John Dewey in the New York Times called the movie "totalitarian propaganda for mass consumption." A review by Eugene Lyons attacked the film as "Stalin-Worship."

When exhibited in the different context that prevailed in the Soviet Union, Mission to Moscow was typical of transnational cultural exchanges in that it generated new, unexpected, and ambivalent meanings. Following its Kremlin premiere in May, estimations of Stalin's reaction differed. While Davies felt that Mission to Moscow had persuaded the Soviet premier that Washington genuinely sought cooperation, the reigning ambassador, William H. Standley, informed the White House that Stalin had disliked the film because, Standley believed, it had dredged up the purges. Carefully managed by the Communist party, the Soviet press lauded the movie's promotion of "mutual understanding." This warm response may have reflected party propagandists' enthusiasm for a foreign picture that confirmed official justifications for the Kremlin's controversial domestic and foreign policies.


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