Mission to Moscow is a 1943 propaganda film directed by Michael Curtiz, based on the 1941 book by the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies.

It was made during World War II, when the Americans and Soviets were allies, and takes a sympathetic view of not only the USSR in general but of Stalinism and Stalinist repressions in particular.

The film is based on Joseph E. Davies' memoir[3] about his time as the United States ambassador to the Soviet Union from November 1936 to June 1938.

It is made in a faux-documentary style, beginning with Davies meeting with president Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss his new appointment as United States ambassador to the Soviet Union.

It begins with the real ambassador Davies stating, while seated in an armchair, "No leaders of a nation have been so misrepresented and misunderstood as those in the Soviet government during those critical years between the two world wars.

By reviewing the scripts and prints, OWI officials exercised authority over Mission to Moscow, ensuring that it promoted the "United Nations" theme.

An administration official advised the film's producers to offer explanations for the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Red Army's invasion of Finland.

Judging it "a magnificent contribution" to wartime propaganda, the OWI believed the picture would "do much to bring understanding of Soviet international policy in the past years and dispel the fears which many honest persons have felt with regard to our alliance with Russia".

That was particularly so since "the possibility for the friendly alliance of the Capitalist United States and the Socialist Russia is shown to be firmly rooted in the mutual desire for peace of the two great countries".

When it was shown in Moscow, despite all the good will, people who saw it considered it a comedy—its portrayal of average, everyday life in the Soviet Union apparently way off the mark for 1943".

[15] "When the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich saw it, he observed that no Soviet propaganda agency would dare to present such outrageous lies.

The critic for The New York Times, future McCarthy opponent Bosley Crowther, found the film's attempts to rehabilitate Stalin believable: Based entirely on the personal observations reported by Mr. Davies in his book, it will obviously prove offensive to those elements which have challenged his views.

Particularly will it anger the so-called Trotskyites with its visual re-enactment of the famous "Moscow trials"...For it puts into the record for millions of moviegoers to grasp an admission that the many "purged" generals and other leaders were conspirators in a plot.

[1] Mission to Moscow's numerous factual inaccuracies and outright false portrayals of Soviet leaders and events resulted in criticism from those on both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

Senator Sheridan Downey read a letter from a United States Army sergeant serving in the Italian campaign into the Congressional Record noting that Nazi propaganda he had seen criticized the Soviet Union in similar terms to American critiques of the film.

[5] The House Committee on Un-American Activities would later cite Mission to Moscow as one of three examples of pro-Soviet films made by Hollywood, the other two being The North Star and Song of Russia.

[23] Mission to Moscow was one of hundreds of pre-1948 Warner Bros. movies sold for television screenings, but was never included in domestic syndication packages put together by its then-owner, United Artists.

It had its U.S. TV debut on PBS in the 1970s and has been shown sporadically on Turner Classic Movies, featured in the January 2010 series "Shadows of Russia" and most recently broadcast on May 30, 2024.