Mission ll-and I

Joseph Davies was off this week on a second mission to Moscow. In his well-packed luggage the rich, Russophile ex-Ambassador to Russia carried enough de hydrated foods of the right kind to humor his delicate stomach (he had rested for three weeks in Boston's Lahey Clinic pre paring for the trip). More important, in his brief case he bore a note whose con tents were known only to Franklin Roosevelt and his secretary, Grace Tully -- a note addressed personally to Joseph Stalin.

Behind him, Joe Davies left one of the hottest intellectual hubbubs in years. The movie, Mission to Moscow (TIME, May 10), had not yet reached the rest of the U.S., as a whole, but by the time it did, no citizen who can read English will be unaware that the movie is Hollywood's most controversial film ever.

In Manhattan the intelligentsia was in full cry. Asked the critics : Was this movie, which deliberately twisted fact and his tory to put the rosiest of all possible lights on U.S.-Soviet relations, the way to improve those relations? Was it fair and honest to present such a distortion of momentous events to the U.S. people as final truth? In unusual accord, critics, historians, columnists answered "No." Only all-out praise came from Communists. The New Masses thought it "just about a perfect film . . . [which] strips away the veils of illusions and lies." Daily Worker Columnist Mike Gold found it "about the best propaganda picture I've ever seen . . . patriotic, fearless."

From those less conditioned to Stalinist reflexes, the reactions were different. The New York Times's sober Anne O'Hare McCormick argued that the film "fails utterly to do justice to Russia, grossly misrepresents the United States, and would not sell international cooperation to anybody." Author Max Eastman (Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism) considered it "the high point of a wave of national self-abasement." Literary Critic Edmund Wilson, a onetime Marxist, saw it as a "fraud on the American people."

"It has been suggested that this film needs cutting," wrote Columnist Dorothy Thompson. "It does--indefinitely."

Totalitarian Propaganda? But the most complete exposition of the movie's errors and the most withering critique of its objectives came from aging Philosopher John Dewey, a socialist exponent of Yankee pragmatism. Together with Author Suzanne La Follette (with whom he had investigated the Moscow purge trials) he condemned Mission to Moscow in a 2,000-word letter to the New York Times.

Said able Critics Dewey and La Follette: "Mission to Moscow is the first instance in our country of totalitarian propaganda for mass consumption."

They recalled that the film takes considerable liberty with the purge trials. "The film telescopes the trial of 1937 and that of 1938. Dramatic license might possibly excuse this. . . . But there is no excuse for including as an accused in this synthetic trial Marshal Tukhachevsky, who was secretly executed in June 1937, after no trial at all.* To show Marshal Tukhachevsky having his day in court may serve the interests of Soviet propaganda. It does not serve the interests of 'truth about Russia.'"

Sabotage. "The film represents Stalin as having been driven into Hitler's arms by the Franco-British policy of appeasement. There is no reference to the desperate efforts of France and Britain to reach a defensive alliance with Stalin in 1939. . . . Hitler's armies are shown invading Poland, not Stalin's.

"Nor is there in the film even the merest hint that in France, England, the United States--wherever the Communist Internationale was functioning--the Communist parties systematically sabotaged the Allied cause. One would never know that the most determined and noisy isolationists in this country before June 22, 1941, were in the Communist-led American Peace Mobilization.

"The film is subtly anti-British. . . . It conveys the impression that Stalin's foreign policy has always been democratic and anti-fascist and Britain's one of appeasement. One would never suspect that it was Stalin who enabled Hitler to attack Poland, and Chamberlain who came to Poland's Defense."

Davies v. Congress. Mission to Moscow concludes with Ambassador Davies making a lecture tour on which he "explains" Russia to the U.S. people. It contrasts his speeches with anti-conscription rallies and meetings of U.S. businessmen demanding business as usual with Hitler.

Asked Critics Dewey and La Follette: "What are the facts? [Mr. Davies'] swing around the circle took place in the winter of 1941 and 1942--mostly in 1942. The conscription act was passed by Congress in September 1940. . . . Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941, and American businessmen were just as much against Hitler as was Mr. Davies. . . . The whole effort is to discredit Congress and at the same time to represent the Soviet dictatorship as an advanced democracy."

In conclusion, Critics Dewey and La Follette said: "The film is anti-British, anti-Congress, anti-democratic and anti-truth. It deepens that crisis in morals which is the fundamental issue in the modern world. ... [It] is a major defeat for the democratic cause."

*After the execution, the Soviet press carried an announcement that Marshal Tukhachevsky had had a trial in camcra.

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