The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

At the end of their dinner, Stalin abruptly got up from the table to announce that they would now all watch Mission to Moscow in the Kremlin cinema.17 According to Joseph Davies’ account, the film “caused a great deal of joking,” not least because of its dramatization of the lives of those watching in the elite audience. The inner circle of Stalin’s court were all present, including Beria, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Litvinov, Vyshinsky, and Molotov, who personally congratulated Davies on this high-budget Hollywood adaptation of his service in 1930s Moscow. The ambassador had been allowed to introduce the film with a monologue delivered directly to the camera, a picture of Marjorie hanging on the wall behind him: “There was so much prejudice and misunderstanding of the Soviet Union, in which I partly shared, that I felt it was my duty to tell the truth . . . While I was in Russia I came to have a very high respect for the honesty of the Soviet leaders.” The same Soviet leaders now watched a Stalinist version of the history of the Terror projected on the silver screen. Naturally the show trials were presented as a truthful account of real events: from explosions in Soviet factories to scenes of Nikolai Bukharin nefariously conspiring with the Japanese ambassador. On-screen, the actor Walter Huston, playing the part of Ambassador Davies, declared his undisputed opinion that “based on twenty years of trial practice, I’d be inclined to believe these confessions.” There was even a dra...