Mission To Moscow - Historical Accuracy

Historical Accuracy

The film, made during World War II, showed the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in an extremely positive light. Completed in late April 1943, the film was, in the words of Robert Buckner, the film's producer, "an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation." It whitewashed the Moscow trials, rationalized Moscow's participation in the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its unprovoked invasion of Finland, and portrayed the Soviet Union as a non-totalitarian state that was moving towards the American democratic model, a Soviet Union committed to internationalism. The book was vague on the guilt or innocence of defendants in the Moscow trials, but the final screenplay portrayed the defendants as undeniably guilty. It also showed the purges as an attempt by Stalin to rid his country of pro-German fifth columnists. The fifth columnists are described in the film as acting on behalf of Germany and Japan. The film even contains "a quarter-hour dedicated to arguing that Leon Trotsky was a Nazi agent."

In the film, Davies proclaims at the end of the trial scene: “Based on twenty years’ trial practice, I’d be inclined to believe these confessions.”

Also, there are many anachronisms. For example, the trial with Nikolai Bukharin and Mikhail Tukhachevsky are depicted as occurring at the same time, but in reality the trial with Bukharin was two years after the execution of Tukhachevsky. Tukhachevsky and Tymoshenko are marshals at the same time, but Tukhachevsky was executed in 1937 and Tymoshenko became marshal of the USSR in 1940.