Fellow traveller

For the novel Fellow Travelers, see Thomas Mallon. For the opera and TV series from Mallon's novel, see Fellow Travelers (opera) and Fellow Travelers (miniseries). For the video game publisher, see Fellow Traveller Games. For the advertisement called Fellow Traveler, see The Lincoln Project.

In political science, the term fellow traveller (poputchik) describes a person who is intellectually sympathetic to the ideology of a political party, and who co-operates in party politics without being a formal member of the political party. In the early history of the USSR, the Bolshevik revolutionary Anatoly Lunacharsky coined the term poputchik (“One who travels the same path.”) which Leon Trotsky used to identify the vacillating intellectual supporters of the Bolshevik Government of Vladimir Lenin (1917–1924).

Communist fellow travellers, from left to right: The Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, the Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva, the American sculptor Jo Davidson, and the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand participated in the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, in the city of Wrocław, in the Communist Polish People's Republic, 1948.

In the Revolutionary period (1917–1924), Bolshevik usage of the term fellow traveller identified the Russian intelligentsiya (writers and academics, philosophers and artists) who were sympathetic to the political and socio-economic goals of the Russian Revolution — yet did not join the Communist Party. In the Stalinist period (1927–1953), the term poputchik disappeared from Soviet political discourse, whilst the anglophone countries of western Europe used the term fellow traveller to identify political sympathisers with Marxism, Communism, and the USSR.

In the U.S. politics of the 1950s, during the Second Red Scare (1947–1958), Sen. Joseph McCarthy used the pejorative term fellow traveller to implicitly accuse American left-wingers and public intellectuals of un-American disloyalty, for being sympathetic to the Black civil rights movement (1954–1968), to Marxism, to Socialism, and to Communism — despite the accused person not being a "Card-carrying communist", i.e. not a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and not a member of the Socialist Party of America (SPA). Moreover, during the Cold War (1918–1991), the fellow traveller pejorative applied to public intellectuals, academics, and politicians who lent their names and social prestige to support the anti-fascist work of communist front organizations. In European politics, the equivalent terms for fellow traveller were: compagnon de route and sympathisant in France; Weggenosse, Sympathisant (neutral), or Mitläufer (negative) in Germany; and compagno di strada in Italy.

European usages

USSR

In Literature and Revolution (1923), Leon Trotsky identified the term poputchik as a political descriptor originated by the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Social Democrat party) to identify a politically vacillating 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.

In the book Inside Soviet Military Intelligence (1984), Viktor Suvorov reported that case officers of the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) used the term shit-eaters (Russ: govnoed) when speaking of the category of foreign agents-of-influence who sympathised with the USSR:

In examining [the] 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 [shit-eaters] 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.”

Greece

For the term fellow traveller, the reactionary Régime of the Colonels (1967–1974) used the Greek word Synodiporia ("The ones walking the street together") as an umbrella term that described domestic Greek leftists and pro-democratic opponents of the military dictatorship; likewise, the military government used term Diethnis ("international Synodiporia") to identify the foreign supporters of the domestic anti-fascist Greeks.

American usage

Interwar period

Main articles: Communism in the United States, Great Depression, and Roaring Twenties

Further information: Criticism of capitalism, Labor movement in the United States, and New Deal

Historical background

Like the intellectuals in Europe during the Interwar period (1918–1939), in the U.S., the American intelligentsiya either sympathized with Communism or joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) because they believed that Marxist Communism was the correct opposition to the poverty and lack or labour rights imposed by capitalism and Fascism. In 1919, at the founding convention of the CPUSA (1919), the political manifesto of the Party stated that “Communism does not propose to [politically] ‘capture’ the bourgeois parliamentary state, but to conquer and destroy it. . . . [That it] is necessary that the proletariat organize its own state for the coercion and suppression of the bourgeoisie”; hence, in American politics, the term fellow traveller was a political pejorative that identified secret Communists, American citizens who were politically sympathetic to Communism and to the USSR, yet were not card-carrying members of the CPUSA.

American Communism in the Great Depression

In the 1920s and 1930s, consequent to the political and socio-economic problems caused by the Great Depression in the United States many poor and homeless Americans became politically aware and sympathetic to Communism as the revolutionary political means to overthrow capitalism and cease the exploitation of the labour of the American working classes. To that end, Black Americans joined the Communist Party USA (1919) because their politically progressive politics acted to achieve legal equality and racial equality against the Jim Crow laws that established and maintained racial segregation in the U.S. Moreover, the American League for Peace and Democracy (ALPD) was the principal political party who practised anti-fascism; the ALPD was the most important political party in the U.S. popular front, the pro-Soviet coalition of anti-fascist political parties.

As the general secretary of the CPUSA since 1930, Earl Browder led the Party and was the public spokesman of the CPUSA during the Great Depression (1929–1939) and the Roosevelt Government (1933–1945). In 1932, the CPUSA attacked the politics of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and Norman Thomas, the SPA presidential candidate for 1932. Browder accused candidate Thomas of "cover[ing] up the class character of democracy by contrasting [democracy] with fascist dictatorship, as if capitalist rule were not the essence of both", and that Thomas was "[absolving] the capitalist class of its fascist terror, and mak[ing] it appear as a measure of self-defense against Communist provocation."

In 1933, the CPUSA opposed the New Deal (1933–1938) by dismissing the economic reforms as social fascism (social democracy as the fascist moderate-wing). In 1934, the CPUSA attacked the socio-economic policies of the Roosevelt Government with the claim that New Deal programs were "in political essence and direction . . . the same" as the socio-economic programs of Nazi Germany. In 1933, Browder clarified the CPUSA's perspective on social fascism as “the dictatorship of finance capital”, thus Roosevelt and Hitler were politically alike, because "both [men] are executives of finance capital". In 1935, at the 7th World Congress of the Comintern, the CPUSA endorsed the popular front strategy of alliance with the USSR to fight Fascism, and, as the leader of American Communists, Browder publicly endorsed the New Deal because the CPUSA considered that the contemporary socio-economic conflict is between democracy and fascism, and not a conflict between socialism and capitalism.

Mass communication media

In 1936, the newspaper columnist Max Lerner used the political descriptor fellow traveller in the article “Mr. Roosevelt and His Fellow Travelers” (The Nation) to describe the varied economic politics of Pres. Roosevelt's policy advisors. In American publishing, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Dreiser were considered Communist fellow travellers because their stories criticized capitalism in character, dialogue, and incident, whilst the disillusioned left-wing John Dos Passos immigrated to right-wing politics as an anti-communist public intellectual.

The ex-communists

In the political biography Odyssey of a Fellow Traveler (1938) the American intellectual J. B. Matthews tells of his life as a Communist fellow traveller and how he transcended believing in Marxist Communism; later, as an anti-communist, Matthews became the chief investigator for the HUAC. The editor of The New Republic magazine, Malcolm Cowley, had been a fellow traveller in the 1930s but quit the CPUSA because of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939) of German–Soviet non-aggression. The novelist and critic Waldo Frank was a fellow traveller in the 1930s and was chairman of the League of American Writers in 1935 but was ousted in 1937 when asked for the reasons for Stalin's Great Purges (1936–1938) of Soviet society. Having been a Communist spy for the Workers Party of America, in the article "The Revolt of the Intellectuals" (Time, 6 Jan. 1941), the American journalist Whittaker Chambers used the political pejorative fellow traveler to satirise left-wing political idealism:

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 of Granville Hicks, probably none of these people was a Communist. They were fellow travelers who wanted to help fight fascism.

Second World War and post–War period

Main articles: Post-war period and Soviet Union–United States relations

Further information: Aftermath of World War II, Origins of the Cold War, and Post–World War II anti-fascism

In the late 1930s, most fellow-travellers in the West broke with the CPSU when orders from Moscow required that they accept the ideologic contradictions of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939), the German–Soviet non-aggression pact that allowed the Occupation of Poland (1939–1945) and subsequent partitioning of Poland into spheres of influence, the Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union and the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany (1939–1945). When the U.S. entered the War consequent to the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), the 85,000 members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) abided Stalinist political correctness and the Party officially denounced the Allied powers as the warmongers who began the Second World War.

In the aftermath of the War, the geopolitical confrontations of the 1947–1948 period of the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR placed the American Communist Party to the margin of U.S. politics (loss of trade-union leadership and the great defection of members from the Party because of the wartime Stalinism); nonetheless, American Communists worked for Henry A. Wallace (ex-vice president to Pres. F.D. Roosevelt) in his campaign as the presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in the 1948 U.S. presidential election.

In February 1956, to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, the Party's First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered the speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences which denounced Stalinism and the cult of personality for Stalin. Known in the West as The Secret Speech, the abuses of Soviet state power that Khrushchev reported in On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences ended the political acceptance of Stalin, and the ideologic acceptance of Stalinism and of soviet communism by fellow travellers in Western politics.

McCarthy Era

Main articles: Conservatism in the United States and McCarthyism

Further information: American Left, Anti-communism, Civil rights movement, and Red Scare

In 1945, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC, 1945–1975) became a permanent committee of the U.S. Congress. In 1953, after the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy (r. 1947–1957) was appointed chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) attempted to determine the extent of Soviet espionage in the U.S., especially in the social, cultural, and political institutions of U.S. society.

The McCarthy Era (1950–1956), was a seven-year period of anti–Communist moral panic that featured political witch hunts meant to establish, enforce, and maintain right-wing political correctness against American citizens who did not publicly denounce soviet communism and the USSR. Most HUAC investigations resulted from unfounded accusations of treason and political subversion presented by anonymous informers who accused a person of being a Communist fellow traveller because he or she did not publicly denounce and condemn soviet communism and the USSR.

By way of political witch-hunts, Sen. McCarthy continually claimed that were in the U.S. government American citizens who were secretly sympathetic to Communism and to the USSR whilst they worked in positions of trust within the U.S. Civil Service, the State Department, and the U.S. Army. To counter Communism as a threat to the U.S. national security, the HUAC secretly registered accused un-American citizens (ex-communist militants) to a blacklist, and so were denied the right to employment, e.g. the Hollywood blacklist of the movie business.

Contemporary usages

In The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1999) the English-language term fellow-traveller identifies a post–Revolutionary political term derived from the Russian word poputchik, with which the Bolsheviks described hesitant political sympathizers of the Communist Party of the USSR and Soviet communism.

In The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) the term fellow-traveller describes "a non–Communist who sympathizes with the aims and general policies of the Communist Party" and a "person who sympathizes with, but is not a member of, another party or movement".

In Safire’s Political Dictionary (1978) the term fellow traveller describes a man or a woman "who accepted most Communist doctrine, but was not a member of the Communist party", and, in contemporary usage, the fellow traveller is a person "who agrees with a philosophy or group, but does not publicly work for it."

See also

• Agent of influence
• American Left
• Anti-Americanism
• Anti-Stalinist left
• Capitalist roader
• Fellow Travelers (miniseries)
• Fifth column
• Fraternal party
• French Left
• Historiography in the Soviet Union
• History of the Communist Party USA
  • Communist Party USA and African Americans
  • Communist Party USA and American labor movement (1919–1937)
  • Communist Party USA and American labor movement (1937–1950)
  • List of Communist Party USA members who have held office in the United States
• List of anti-war organizations
• List of peace activists
• Mitläufer (fellow-traveller of the Nazis)
• Pinko
• Post–World War II anti-fascism
• Putinversteher
• Revolutions of 1917–1923
• Timeline of the Cold War
  • Cold War (1947–1948)
  • Cold War (1948–1953)
  • Cold War (1953–1962)
• Tankie
• Useful idiot
• Western Marxism
• White émigré

Bibliography

• Baker, Susan S. (1985). Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s. Contributions in American History. Vol. 112 (1st ed.). Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers. ISBN 9780313247132.
• Browder, Earl R. (1933). The meaning of social-fascism: Its historical and theoretical background. New York City: Workers Library Publishers.
• Browder, Earl R. (1937). "Speech of Earl Browder: Second Congress of American Writers". Vol. 14, no. 135. New York City: Daily Worker.
• Browder, Earl R. (1935). "What Is Communism? 8. Americanism—Who Are the Americans?" (PDF). New Masses. New York City: Communist Party USA – via Marxists Internet Archive.
• Dimitrov, Georgi (1935). The united front against fascism and war. New York City: Workers Library Publishers. Retrieved July 2, 2019.
• Isserman, Maurice (1982). Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 978-0252063367.
• Jaffe, Philip J. (1975). The Rise and Fall of American Communism. New York City: Horizon Press. ISBN 978-0818008177.
• Klehr, Harvey; Haynes, John E. (2008) [1999]. "The American Communist Party Underground". Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Reprint ed.). New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. pp. 57–92. doi:10.12987/9780300129878-007. ISBN 9780300129878. JSTOR j.ctt1npk87.9.
• Klehr, Harvey; Haynes, John E.; Anderson, Kyrill M. (1998). The Soviet World of American Communism. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300138009.
• Rossinow, Doug (March 2004). ""The Model of a Model Fellow Traveler": Harry F. Ward, the American League for Peace and Democracy, and the"Russian Question" in American Politics, 1933–1956". Peace & Change. 29 (2). Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell for the Peace History Society and the Peace and Justice Studies Association. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0130.2004.00288.x. ISSN 1468-0130.
• Ryan, James G. (2005). Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism (2nd ed.). Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. ISBN 978-0817351991.
• Saba, Paul, ed. (1979). "The Roots of Browderism" (PDF). www.marxists.org. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved April 29, 2024.
• Schepers, Emile (September 14, 2020). "Communists, coalitions, and the class struggle". www.cpusa.org. Communist Party USA. Retrieved February 26, 2024.
• Warren, Frank A. (1993). Liberals and communism: the "red decade" revisited. New York City: Columbia University Press. OL 1406922M.

Further reading

• Caute, David (1973). The Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-19-502937-6.
• Hollander, Paul (1981). Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928–1978. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-502937-6.
• Hollander, Paul (2006). The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 978-1-56663-688-9.
• Rossinow, Doug. "'The Model of a Model Fellow Traveler': Harry F. Ward, the American League for Peace and Democracy, and the 'Russian Question' in American Politics, 1933–1956." Peace & Change (2004) 29#2 pp: 177-220. online
• Viereck, Peter (1981). Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4128-0609-1.