A few months after PM Daily was established, the editor announced that he had gone to great lengths to purge their ranks of Communists. However, as the attached movie review makes clear, they missed one. While the rest of the country was absolutely scandalized by the pro-Soviet Warner Brothers production, Mission to Moscow (1943), Peter Furst, the reviewer in question was absolutely delighted:
“The film reflects the undisguised admiration of [U.S. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies (1876 – 1958)] for Joseph Stalin and his government, as well as the Ambassador’s conviction that the famous Soviet ‘purge’ trials of 1936 – 38 were based on proof ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that the former leaders punished were guilty of plotting with Germany and Japan for the overthrow of the Stalin regime….Mission to Moscow was deliberately planned as a film to correct a host of misimpressions about Soviet Russia today, as well as to drive home some truths the isolationist, Red-baiters and Roosevelt-haters don’t like to have mentioned these days.”
The film was a commercial flop and the reviewer at The New York Times wrote:
“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.”
No doubt FDR’s right-hand-man, Harry Hopkins, adored the movie – you can read about him here…
You can read about the Soviet Show Trials here.
Ambasador Davies rambled-on about how cool he thought Stalin was in this 1941 article…
Click here to read about the Americans who really liked the movie.
