This film was often mentioned during the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in its investigation of alleged Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry and was chiefly responsible for the blacklisting of screenwriter Howard Koch. Warner Bros. studio head Jack L. Warner defended the picture as being "made when our country was fighting for its existence, with Russia as one of our allies . . . The picture was made only to help a desperate war effort and not for posterity."
According to the book "The Films of World War II" by Joe Morella, Edward Z. Epstein and John Griggs, this film "was extremely controversial in the United States, where it was attacked on the one hand as a whitewash of the Soviet regime and defended on the other as a fitting tribute to a gallant ally," while "in Russia some of Hollywood's conceptions of Russian life presented in Mission to Moscow (1943) evoked laughter."
According to the article "Hollywood's Friends and Foes" by Colin Shindler in the film history tome "The Movie," this film was "According to Jack Warner [Warner Bros. chief Jack L. Warner] . . . made by Warner Brothers on the direct order of President [Franklin D. Roosevelt], an allegation which proved useless when Warner was under attack by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947." Moreover, "On its release, Mission to Moscow (1943) aroused instant controversy, attracting violent criticism from the [political] Right (particularly from the Hearst press) and [political] Left (especially those who took exception to the film's pro-Stalinist attitudes)."
Because of its notoriety, this film did not make its U.S. TV debut until November 21, 1977, airing as part of part of a PBS series on "Films of Persuasion'' curated by Richard Schickel.