Fellow traveller

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For the novel Fellow Travelers, see Thomas Mallon.
For the opera based on Mallon’s novel, see Gregory Spears.

The pejorative term fellow traveller (also fellow-traveller) identifies a person who is sympathetic to the ideology of a political organization, and who co-operates in the organization's political activities, without being a formal member of that organization. [1]

In the early history of the Soviet Union (1922–91), the Bolshevik revolutionary Trotsky coined the term Poputchik ("One who travels the same path.") to identify the vacillating intellectual supporters of the Bolshevik régime. Likewise for the political characterisation of the Russian intelligentsiya (writers, academics, and artists) who were philosophically sympathetic to the political, social, and economic goals of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but who chose to not join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Moreover, during the Stalinist régime, the usage of the term poputchik (fellow traveller) disappeared from political discourse in the Soviet Union, but the Western world adopted the term fellow traveller to identify people who sympathised with the Soviets and with Communism.[2]

In U.S. politics, during the 1940s and the 1950s, the term fellow traveler (U.S. spelling) was a pejorative term for a person who was philosophically sympathetic to Communism, yet was not a formal, "card-carrying member" of the American Communist Party. In political discourse, the term fellow traveler was applied to intellectuals, academics, and politicians who lent their names and prestige to Communist front organizations.

In European politics, the equivalent terms for fellow traveller are: Compagnon de route, sympathisant, and progressiste in France; Weggenosse and Sympathisant in Germany; and compagno di viaggio in Italy.[3]

European usages[edit]


In 1917, after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks applied the term Poputchik (“One who travels the same path.”) to Russian writers who accepted the revolution, but who were not active revolutionaries. In the book Literature and Revolution (1923), Leon Trotsky popularized the usage of Poputchik as a political descriptor attributed to the pre–Revolutionary Russian 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, 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.[5]

Nazi Germany[edit]

In the aftermath of the Second World War (1939–45), the Russian term poputchik (fellow traveller) was translated to the German as Mitläufer, to identify the person who, although not formally charged with participation in war crimes, was sufficiently involved with the Nazi régime to the extent that the Allied authorities responsible for the denazification of Germany could not legally exonerate him or her from association with the War crimes of the Wehrmacht.[6]


For the term fellow traveller, the reactionary Régime of the Colonels (1967–74) used the Greek word Synodiporia (“The ones walking the street together”) as an umbrella term that described domestic Greek Leftists and 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 usages[edit]

Pre–World War II U.S.[edit]

In the U.S., the European term fellow-traveller was adapted to describe persons politically sympathetic to, but not members of, the American Communist Party (CPUSA), who shared the political perspectives of Communism. In the 1920s and 1930s, the political, social, and economic problems in the U.S. and throughout the world, caused partly by the Great Economic Depression, motivated idealistic young people, artists, and intellectuals to become sympathetic to the Communist cause, in hope they could overthrow capitalism. To that end, Black Americans joined the American Communist Party (1919) because some of their politically liberal stances (e.g. legal racial equality) 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 (ALPD) was the principal socio-political group who actively worked towards peace by way of 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.[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 and fascism, its political form. In 1936, the newspaper columnist Max Lerner included the term fellow 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 biography Odyssey of a Fellow Traveler (1938); later, J. B. Matthews was the chief investigator for the anti-communist activities of the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee ).[8] Moreover, among the writers and intellectuals known as fellow travelers were Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Dreiser novelists whose works of fiction occasionally were critical of capitalism and its excesses,[9] whilst John Dos Passos, a known left-winger, moved to the right-wing and became a staunch anti–Communist.[10]

Likewise, the editor of The 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 the Nazi-Soviet Pact (Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 23 August 1939).[11] The novelist and critic Waldo 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 impartial enquiry to the reasons for Josef Stalin’s purges (1936–38) of Russian society.[12]

From 1934 to 1939, the historian Richard Hofstadter briefly was a member of the Young Communist League USA.[13] Despite disillusionment because of the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia and the ideological rigidity of the Communist party-line, Hofstadter remained a fellow traveler until the 1940s.[14] In Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (2003), 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 American Communist Party.[15]

Moreover, in the elegiac article “The Revolt of the Intellectuals” (Time 6 Jan. 1941), the ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers satirically used the term fellow 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 of Granville Hicks, probably none of these people was a Communist. They were fellow travelers who wanted to help fight fascism.[16]

Post–World War II U.S.[edit]

In the late 1930s, most fellow-travellers broke with the Communist party-line of Moscow when Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler signed the German–Soviet Non-aggression Pact (August 1939), which allowed the Occupation 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 Britain and Western anti–Nazis, rather than the German Nazis, as war mongers. In June 1941, when the Nazis launched Operation 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 ally of the United States.

At War’s end, the Russo–American Cold 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 of Henry A. Wallace, President F. 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, denouncing Stalinism and the cult of personality for Josef Stalin; those political revelations ended the ideological relationship between many fellow-travellers in the West and the Soviet version of Communism.[18]


In 1945, the anti–Communist HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities) became a permanent committee of the U.S. Congress; and, in 1953, after Senator Joseph McCarthy became chairman of the Permanent 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) of moral panic and political witch hunts was the McCarthy Era of right-wing political correctness,[further explanation needed][citation needed] realised by way of anonymous and unfounded accusations of treason and subversion, during which time the political pejorative fellow traveller was applied against any American citizen who did not fit or abide the HUAC’s ideologically narrow definition of “American” — which contradicted, flouted, and voided the political rights provided for every citizen in the U.S. Constitution.

In the course of his political career, the Republican Sen. McCarthy claimed there were many American citizens (secretly and publicly) sympathetic to Communism and the U.S.S.R., who worked in the State Department and in the U.S. Army; likewise, that there were many secret Communists working in universities and in the businesses of the mass-communications media (publishing, radio, cinema, television) promoting “un–American” ideals, e.g. civil liberties, racial equality, opposition to book censorship, public health services, vaccination, mental health-care services and fluoridation, which were believed to be Communist plots to subvert U.S. society. In response to such ideological threats to the national security of the U.S., American citizens suspected of being “un–American” were secretly and anonymously registered to a blacklist, and so denied employment and the right to earn a living, despite many such ex-communists having transcended the fellow traveller stage of their political lives, e.g. the Hollywood blacklist.

Types of fellow traveller

In Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (1958), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, defined five types of "fellow traveler", as politically subversive persons whom he believed meant to promote the Communist deposition of the U.S. government:

  1. The card-carrying Communist, who is a member of the American Communist party
  2. The underground Communist, who hides his or her membership in the Communist party
  3. The Communist sympathizer, who is a potential communist, because he or she holds Communist political views
  4. The fellow traveler, who is someone who is sympathetic to Communism, but is neither an influential advocate of Communism, nor a potential Communist
  5. The dupe, is a man or a woman who obviously is not a Communist, or a potential Communist, but whose politics enable Communist subversion, e.g. .a prominent religious leader who advocates pacifism or civil rights for minority groups (racial, religious, etc.), and who opposes Red-baiting as an illegal abridgement of the citizens’ civil and political rights.[19]

Contemporary usages[edit]

The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1999), defines the term fellow-traveller as a post-revolutionary political term derived from the Russian word poputchik, with which the Bolsheviks described political sympathizers who hesitated to publicly support the Bolshevik Party and Communism in Russia, after the Revolution of 1917.[20]

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) defines the term fellow-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”.[21]

Safire’s Political Dictionary (1978), defines the term fellow 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 term fellow traveller as a person “who agrees with a philosophy or group, but does not publicly work for it.”[22]

See also[edit]


  1. ^ Bullock, Alan; Trombley, Stephen, Editors (1999), The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought Third Edition, p. 313.
  3. ^ Caute, David. The Fellow-travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (1988) p. 2.
  4. ^ Trotskii, L. (1991) [1923]. Literatura i revoliutsiia. Moscow: Politizdat. p. 56. ISBN 5-250-01431-3. 
  5. ^ Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, Chapter 2 Cnn.com.
  6. ^ Ott, Hugo (1993). Martin Heidegger: A Political Life. London: Harper Collins. p. 407. ISBN 0 00 215399 8. 
  7. ^ Rossinow (2004)
  8. ^ Dawson, Nelson L. “From Fellow Traveler to Anticommunist: The Odyssey of J.B. Matthews”, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (1986) pp. 280~306 in JSTOR
  9. ^ "The Fellows Who Traveled". Time Magazine. 2 February 1962. 
  10. ^ Kallich, Martin Kallich. “John Dos Passos Fellow-Traveler: A Dossier with Commentary”, Twentieth Century Literature (1956) 1#4 pp: 173–90. in JSTOR
  11. ^ Johnpoll, Bernard K. A Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States (Vol. 3, 1994) p. 502.
  12. ^ Johnpoll, Bernard K. Ed., A Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States (Vol. 3, 1994) p 502
  13. ^ Baker, Susan Stout. Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s (1985), pp. 65, 84, 89–90, 141.
  14. ^ Baker, Susan Stout. Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s (1985), p. 146.
  15. ^ Quoted in Eric Foner (2003). Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 38. 
  16. ^ Chambers, Whittaker (6 January 1941). "The Revolt of the Intellectuals". Whittakerchambers.org. Retrieved 17 May 2010. 
  17. ^ Hamby, Alonzo L. (1968). "Henry A. Wallace, the Liberals, and Soviet–American relations". Review of Politics. 30 (2): 153–169. JSTOR 1405411. 
  18. ^ Brown, Archie (2009). The Rise and Fall of Communism. pp. 240–43. 
  19. ^ Hoover, J. Edgar (1958). Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1-4254-8258-9. 
  20. ^ The New Dictionary of Modern Thought, Third Edition. 199. p. 313.
  21. ^ The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993), p. 931.
  22. ^ Safire, William (1978). Safire's Political Dictionary. Random House. ISBN 0-394-50261-2. 

Further reading[edit]