"MISSION TO MOSCOW."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 285, 8 December 1944, Page 7

"MISSION TO MOSCOW."

Sir-I write to express my surprise that "G.M.’s" little Zombie, when seeing Mission to Moscow, sat unmoved, and actually looked as if he were about to slump in his seat. The reason, I think, I have tracked down to the last paragraph of the review. Grey, G.M. asserts, is the predominant colour in the world, and not black-or white. A film which presents a person or a-country as black or white is a diseased film. Mission to Moscow presents the Soviet Union as white, Therefore, Mission to Moscow is a diseased film. A supplementary and less important reason is to be found in his somewhat supercilious references to the "simplicity naive in the extreme" of certain episodes and explanations, and the allegation of "distortion of fact." But (a) the simplification of complex issues, for the purposes of popular enlightenment, doesn’t necessarily amount to distortion of fact (and didn’t, on the whole, in Mission to Moscow), and (b), although people and countries may be fundamentally grey, there are many shades of grey, and to depict a country in a pretty light tint of grey doesn’t necessarily amount to whitewashing it. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to answer several of G.M.’s allegations of distortion and over-simplification without writing a political treatise, which I haven’t any intention of attempting here. Nor do I want to be pushed into the awkward position of proclaiming the Soviet Union as a Paradise, or Comniunism as the millennium — which I would be the last to try to do. But is it not possible that the foreign policy of the Soviet Union is capable of simplification without distortion because the policy is itself simple? Again, to take another example, mightn’t it really be a fact that the accused in the Treason Trials were actually "persuaded by Trotsky to sell their country to Germany and Japan"-an explanation which appeals to me as a lawyer after reading the verbatim report of the trials, and which was later confirmed in essence by Ambassador Davies, many other reliable witnesses, and Warner Bros.?

There were, of course, other important factors involved, such as the history of the conflict between the deviationists and the official party, and certain differences in ideology, but the kernel of the case was: faithfully recorded in the telescoped excerpts from the actual evidence which were presented in the film. The ordinary man looking for an explanation of the Treason Trials doesn’t want a long disquisition on history and dialectics: he wants the guts of the matter in a simple form — that the accused were fifth-columnists under the direction of Trotsky seeking to overthrow the Government; and in Mission to Moscow he got this explanation without distortion, just as he got simple and

perfectly accurate descriptions of the basic factors and motives leading up to the Soviet-German Treaty and the So-viet-Finnish War. By the way, if the nasty reference to the Tukachevsky case was a bait, I hereby rise to it. The remark was irrelevant and in bad taste.

RONALD L.

MEEK

(Wellington)