Afellow traveller (alsofellow traveler) is a person who is intellectually sympathetic to the ideology of a political organization, and who co-operates in the organization's politics, without being a formal member.[1] In the early history of theSoviet Union, theBolshevik revolutionary and Soviet statesmanAnatoly Lunacharsky coined the termpoputchik ('one who travels the same path'); it was later popularized byLeon Trotsky to identify the vacillating intellectual supporters of the Bolshevik government.[2] It was the political characterisation of the Russianintelligentsiya (writers, academics, and artists) who were philosophically sympathetic to the political, social, and economic goals of theRussian Revolution of 1917, but who did not join theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union. The usage of the termpoputchik disappeared from political discourse in the Soviet Union during theStalinist era, but theWestern world adopted the English termfellow traveller to identify people who sympathised with the Soviets and withcommunism.[1]
InU.S. politics, during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the termfellow traveler was primarily apejorative applied to those on the political left, to suggest a person who was philosophically sympathetic tocommunism, yet was not a formal, "card-carrying member" of theCommunist Party USA. In political discourse, the termfellow traveler was applied to intellectuals, academics, and politicians who lent their names and prestige toCommunist front organizations.In European politics, the equivalent terms forfellow traveller are:Compagnon de route andsympathisant in France;Weggenosse,Sympathisant (neutral) orMitläufer (negativeconnotation) in Germany; andcompagno di strada in Italy.[3]
In 1917, after the Russian Revolution, theBolsheviks applied the termPoputchik ("one who travels the same path") to Russian writers who accepted the revolution, but who were not active revolutionaries. In the bookLiterature and Revolution (1923),Leon Trotsky popularized the usage ofPoputchik as a political descriptor attributed to the pre-RevolutionaryRussian Social Democratic Labour Party (the Social Democrats) to identify a vacillating political sympathizer.[4] In Chapter 2, "The Literary 'Fellow-Travellers' of the Revolution", Trotsky said:
Between bourgeois Art, which is wasting away either in repetitions or in silences, and the new art which is as yet unborn, there is being created a transitional art, which is more or less organically connected with the Revolution, but which is not, at the same time, the Art of the Revolution.Boris Pilnyak,Vsevolod Ivanov,Nicolai Tikhonov, theSerapion Fraternity,Yesenin and his group ofImagists and, to some extent,Kliuev – all of them were impossible without the Revolution, either as a group or separately. ... They are not the artists of the proletarian Revolution, but her artist "fellow-travellers", in the sense in which this word was used by the old Socialists... As regards a "fellow-traveller", the question always comes up – How far will he go? This question cannot be answered in advance, not even approximately. The solution of it depends, not so much on the personal qualities of this or that "fellow-traveller", but mainly on the objective trend of things during the coming decade.[5]
Victor Suvorov in his "Soviet military intelligence" (1984) referred to a less respectable term "shit-eaters" (Russian:говноед) used by theGRU handlers when talking about the category of agents of influence who were conscious sympathisers of the Soviet movement:[6]
In examining different kinds of agents, people from the free world who have sold themselves to the GRU, one cannot avoid touching on yet another category, perhaps the least appealing of all. Officially one is not allowed to call them agents, and they are not agents in the full sense of being recruited agents. We are talking about the numerous members of overseas societies of friendship with the Soviet Union. Officially, all Soviet representatives regard these parasites with touching feelings of friendship, but privately they call them 'shit-eaters' ('govnoed'). It is difficult to say where this expression originated, but it is truly the only name they deserve. The use of this word has become so firmly entrenched in Soviet embassies that it is impossible to imagine any other name for these people. A conversation might run as follows: Today we've got a friendship evening with shit-eaters', or Today we're having some shit-eaters to dinner. Prepare a suitable menu'.
— Victor Suvorov, Soviet Military Intelligence
For the termfellow traveller, thereactionaryRégime of the Colonels (1967–74) used the Greek wordSynodiporia ("The ones walking the street together") as anumbrella term that described domestic Greek Leftists anddemocratic opponents of themilitary dictatorship; likewise, the military government used termDiethnis ("internationalSynodiporia") to identify the foreign supporters of the domesticanti-fascist Greeks.
In the U.S., the European termfellow-traveller was adapted to describe persons politically sympathetic to, but not members of, theCommunist Party USA (CPUSA), who shared the political perspectives ofCommunism. In the 1920s and 1930s, the political, social, and economic problems in the U.S. and throughout the world, caused partly by theGreat Depression, motivatedidealistic young people,artists, andintellectuals to become sympathetic to the Communist cause, in hope they could overthrowcapitalism. To that end, black Americans joined the CPUSA (1919) because some of theirpolitically liberal stances (e.g. legalracial equality) corresponded to the political struggles of black people forcivil rights andsocial justice, in the time whenJim Crow laws established and maintainedracial segregation throughout the United States. Moreover, the American League for Peace and Democracy (ALPD) was the principal socio-political group who actively worked byanti-fascism rather than bypacifism; as such, the ALPD was the most important organization within thePopular Front, a pro-Soviet coalition of anti-fascist political organizations.[7]
As in Europe, in the 1920s and 1930s, the intellectuals of the U.S. either sympathized with or joined the U.S. Communist Party, to oppose the economic excesses of capitalism andfascism, which they perceived as its political form. In 1936, the newspaper columnistMax Lerner included the termfellow traveler in the article "Mr. Roosevelt and His Fellow Travelers" (The Nation).
In 1938,Joseph Brown Matthews Sr. featured the term in the title of his political biographyOdyssey of a Fellow Traveler (1938); later, J. B. Matthews was the chief investigator for the anti-Communist activities of theHouse Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).[8]Robert E. Stripling also credited Matthews: "J.B. Matthews, a former Communist fellow traveler (and, incidentally, the originator of that apt tag)..."[9]
Among the writers and intellectuals known as fellow travelers wereErnest Hemingway andTheodore Dreiser novelists whose works of fiction occasionally were critical of capitalism and its excesses,[10] whilstJohn Dos Passos, a known left-winger, moved to theright-wing and became a staunchanti-Communist.[11]
Likewise, the editor ofThe New Republic magazine,Malcolm Cowley had been a fellow traveler during the 1930s, but broke from the Communist Party, because of the ideological contradictions inherent to theMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact (Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 23 August 1939).[12] The novelist and criticWaldo Frank was a fellow traveler during the mid-1930s, and was the chairman of the League of American Writers, in 1935, but was ousted as such, in 1937, when he called for an enquiry to the reasons forJoseph Stalin'spurges (1936–38) of Russian society.[12]
From 1934 to 1939, the historianRichard Hofstadter briefly was a member of theYoung Communist League USA.[13] Despite disillusionment because of the non-aggression pact betweenNazi Germany andCommunist Russia and the ideological rigidity of the Communist party-line, Hofstadter remained a fellow traveler until the 1940s.[14] InWho Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (2003),Eric Foner said that Hofstatdter continued thinking of himself as apolitical radical, because his opposition to capitalism was the reason he had joined the CPUSA.[15]
Moreover, in the elegiac article "The Revolt of the Intellectuals" (Time 6 Jan. 1941), the ex-CommunistWhittaker Chambers satirically used the termfellow traveler:
As the Red Express hooted off into the shades of a closing decade, ex-fellow travelers rubbed their bruises, wondered how they had ever come to get aboard. … With the exception ofGranville Hicks, probably none of these people was aCommunist. They were fellow travelers who wanted to help fightfascism.[16]
In the late 1930s, most fellow-travelers broke with the Communist party-line of Moscow when Stalin and Adolf Hitler signed theGerman–Soviet Non-aggression Pact (August 1939), which allowed theOccupation of Poland (1939–45) for partitioning between the U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany. In the U.S., the American Communist Party abided Stalin's official party-line, and denounced theAllies, rather than the Germans, as war mongers. In June 1941, when the Nazis launchedOperation Barbarossa, to annihilate the U.S.S.R., again, the American Communist Party abided Stalin's party-line, and became war hawks for American intervention to the European war in aid of Russia, and becoming an ally of the Soviet Union.[citation needed]
At War's end, the Russo–AmericanCold War emerged in the 1946–48 period, and American Communists found themselves at the political margins of U.S. society – such as being forced out of the leadership of trade unions; in turn, membership to the Communist Party of the U.S.A. declined. Yet, in 1948, American Communists did campaign for the presidential run ofHenry A. Wallace, PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt's vice-president.[17] In February 1956, to the 20th congress of the C.P.S.U.,Nikita Khrushchev delivered the secret speech,On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, denouncingStalinism and thecult of personality for Josef Stalin; those political revelations ended the ideological relationship between many fellow-travelers in the West and theSoviet version of Communism.[18]
In 1945, the anti-Communist congressionalHouse Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) became a permanent committee of the U.S. Congress; and, in 1953, after SenatorJoseph McCarthy became chairman of thePermanent Subcommittee on Investigations, they attempted to determine the extent of Soviet influence in the U.S. government, and in the social, cultural, and political institutions of American society.
That seven-year period (1950–56) ofmoral panic and politicalwitch hunts was theMcCarthy Era, characterized by right-wing political orthodoxy. Some targets of investigation were created by way of anonymous and unfounded accusations oftreason andsubversion, during which time the termfellow traveler was applied as a political pejorative against many American citizens who did not outright condemn Communism. Modern critics of HUAC claim that any citizen who did not fit or abide the HUAC's ideologically narrow definition of "American" was so labeled – which, they claimed, contradicted, flouted, and voided the political rights provided for every citizen in theU.S. Constitution.[citation needed]
In the course of his political career, theRepublican Sen. McCarthy claimed at various times that there were many American citizens (secretly and publicly) sympathetic to Communism and the Soviet Union who worked in the State Department and in theU.S. Army, in positions of trust incompatible with such beliefs. In response to such ideological threats to the national security of the U.S., some American citizens with Communist pasts were suspected of being "un-American" and thus secretly and anonymously registered to ablacklist (particularly in the arts) by their peers, and so denied employment and the opportunity to earn a living, despite many such acknowledged ex-communists moving on from thefellow traveler stage of their political lives, such as theHollywood blacklist.
The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1999), defines the termfellow-traveller as a post-revolutionary political term derived from the Russian wordpoputchik, with which the Bolsheviks described political sympathizers who hesitated to publicly support the Bolshevik Party and Communism in Russia, after the Revolution of 1917.[1]
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) defines the termfellow-traveller as "a non-Communist who sympathizes with the aims and general policies of the Communist Party"; and, by transference, as a "person who sympathizes with, but is not a member of another party or movement".[19]
Safire's Political Dictionary (1978), defines the termfellow traveller as a man or a woman "who accepted most Communist doctrine, but was not a member of the Communist party"; and, in contemporary usage, defines the termfellow traveller as a person "who agrees with a philosophy or group, but does not publicly work for it."[20]
The Russian word "sputnik" (спутник) also translates, literally (s=with + put=path + nik=a (male) person, thus "someone travelling the same path") as "fellow traveler", though most English-speakers only know it as meaning "satellite".