Fellow traveller
A fellow traveller 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. In the early history of the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet statesman Anatoly Lunacharsky coined the term poputchik ; it was later popularized by Leon Trotsky to identify the vacillating intellectual supporters of the Bolshevik government led by Vladimir Lenin.
Historically, it was the political characterization of the Russian intelligentsiya who were philosophically sympathetic to the political, social, and economic goals of the Russian Revolution but who did not join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The usage of the term poputchik disappeared from political discourse in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era, but the Western world adopted the English term fellow traveller to identify people who sympathised with communism and the Soviets.
In U.S. politics, the term fellow traveller was primarily a pejorative applied to those on the American Left between the 1930s and 1950s, to suggest a person who was politically and/or philosophically sympathetic to communism, yet was not a formal "card-carrying member" of the Communist Party USA. In political discourse, the term fellow traveller was applied to intellectuals, academics, and politicians who lent their names and prestige to communist front organizations during the Cold War. In European politics, the equivalent terms for fellow traveller were: compagnon de route and sympathisant in France; weggenosse, sympathisant, or Mitläufer in West Germany; and compagno di strada in Italy.
European usages
Soviet Union
In 1917, after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks applied the term Poputchik to Russian writers who accepted the revolution, but who were not active revolutionaries. In the book Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky popularized the usage of Poputchik as a political descriptor attributed to the pre-Revolutionary Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to identify a vacillating political sympathizer. 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, the Serapion Fraternity, Yesenin and his group of Imagists 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.Victor Suvorov in his "Soviet military intelligence" referred to a less respectable term "shit-eaters" used by the GRU handlers when talking about the category of agents of influence who were conscious sympathisers of the Soviet movement:
Greece
For the term fellow traveller, the reactionary Régime of the Colonels used the Greek word Synodiporia as an umbrella term that described domestic Greek leftists and pro-democratic opponents of the military dictatorship; likewise, the military government used term Diethnis to identify the foreign supporters of the domestic anti-fascist Greeks.American usage
Interwar period
As in Europe during the Interwar period, American intellectuals either sympathized with or joined the Communist Party USA, who shared the political perspectives of communism in order to oppose the economic excesses of capitalism and fascism. The official manifesto of the CPUSA's founding convention declared that “Communism does not propose to "capture" the bourgeoisie parliamentary state, but to conquer and destroy it. the same" as that of Adolf Hitler. Browder clarified in a 1933 pamphlet on social fascism that fascism in general was "the dictatorship of finance capital", and therefore Roosevelt and Hitler were the same in how "both are executives of finance capital". Browder also attacked the Socialist Party of America and its 1932 presidential nominee Norman Thomas, accusing him of "cover up the class character of democracy by contrasting it with fascist dictatorship as if capitalist rule were not the essence of both", as well as "absolv the capitalist class of its fascist terror and mak it appear as a measure of self-defense against Communist provocation." Yet in 1935, coinciding with the 7th World Congress of the Comintern endorsing the popular front strategy, Browder in turn endorsed the New Deal, and described the political situation as between democracy and fascism, rather than socialism and capitalism.In 1936, the newspaper columnist Max Lerner included the term fellow traveller in the article "Mr. Roosevelt and His Fellow Travelers". In the United States, the European term fellow traveller was adapted to describe persons politically sympathetic to, but not members of, the American Communist Party. In the 1920s and 1930s, the political, social, and economic problems in American society and throughout the world, caused partly by the Great Depression in the United States, motivated idealistic young people, students, artists, industrial syndicalists, labor unionists, philosophers, social critics, and intellectuals to become sympathetic to the communist cause, in hope they could overthrow capitalism and stop the exploitation of workers. To that end, black Americans joined the CPUSA because some of their politically liberal stances corresponded to the political struggles of black people for civil rights and social justice, in the time when Jim Crow laws established and maintained racial segregation throughout the United States. Moreover, the American League for Peace and Democracy was the principal socio-political group who actively worked by anti-fascism rather than by pacifism; as such, the ALPD was the most important organization within the Popular Front, a pro-Soviet coalition of anti-fascist political organizations.
Among the American writers and intellectuals known as fellow-travellers were Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Dreiser, novelists whose works of fiction occasionally were critical of capitalism and its excesses, whilst John Dos Passos, a known left-winger, moved to the political right and became a staunch anti-communist. In 1938, Joseph Brown Matthews Sr. featured the term in the title of his political biography Odyssey of a Fellow Traveler ; later, Matthews Sr. became the chief investigator for the anti-communist activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Robert E. Stripling also credited Matthews: "J.B. Matthews, a former Communist fellow traveler..."
Likewise, the editor of The New Republic magazine, Malcolm Cowley, had been a fellow traveller during the 1930s but broke away from the American Communist Party because of the ideological contradictions inherent to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed by Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The novelist and critic Waldo Frank was a fellow traveller during the mid-1930s, and became 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 for Stalin's Great Purges in the Soviet Union.
From 1934 to 1939, American historian and intellectual Richard Hofstadter briefly was a member of the Young Communist League USA. Despite his disillusionment due to the German–Soviet Non-aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the ideological rigidity of the Soviet communist party-line, Hofstadter remained a fellow traveller until the 1940s. In Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World, American historian Eric Foner said that Hofstatdter continued thinking of himself as a political radical, because his opposition to capitalism was the reason he had joined the CPUSA.
In the elegiac article "The Revolt of the Intellectuals", American journalist and spy Whittaker Chambers, a former member of the Workers Party of America, satirically used the term fellow traveler:
World War II and post-war period
In the late 1930s, most fellow-travellers in the West broke with the communist party-line of Moscow when Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler signed the German–Soviet Non-aggression Pact, which allowed the Occupation of Poland for partitioning the country's territories between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In the United States, the American Communist Party abided by Stalin's official party-line, and denounced the Allies, rather than Nazi Germany, as warmongers. At its peak in 1942, during the U.S. entry into World War II, the American Communist Party officially had 85,000 registered members.In the aftermath of World War II, the Cold War emerged between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1947–1948 period, and American communists found themselves at the political margins of U.S. societybeing forced out of the leadership of trade unions, for example and membership to the CPUSA markedly declined. Nonetheless, in 1948 American communists campaigned for the presidential run of Henry A. Wallace, former Vice President of the United States under Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Progressive Party's candidate in the 1948 U.S. presidential election.
In February 1956, CPSU First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev delivered the "Secret Speech" On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, officially denouncing Stalinism and Joseph Stalin's cult of personality to his fellow party members; as a consequence, those political revelations ended the ideological relationship between many fellow-travellers in the West and the Soviet version of communism.