Mission To Moscow (1943) ***

Pure and undiluted Stalinist propaganda, swallowed whole by, to quote from Ernst Lubitsch's "The Merry Widow" (1934), " the greatest idiot in the diplomatic service", Joseph Davies, US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. But in 1943, with Stalin being essentially the only thing standing between Hitler and the Nazi conquest of the entire world, such Stalinist propaganda and the official US government propaganda, were, for all practical purposes, identical. So the film denounces Leon Trotsky as a Gestapo agent, defends Soviet agression against Finland, blames France and England for the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and completely ignores the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939. In other words, a total bullshit, but still extremely interesting (and genuinely fascinating) for revealing a peculiar state of mind that existed at the time, with the severity of the Nazi threat essentially forcing people into accepting mind-boggling Stalinist lies as a price for using communist Russia to defend the capitalist West. But even back in 1943, the film was a complete flop and it only received one Oscar nomination - fittingly enough for Best Art Direction - for its skillful window-dressing of Stalinist genocides and atrocities.