Fellow traveller

In political science, the pejorative term fellow-traveller describes a person who is sympathetic to an ideology, participates in party politics, yet does not join the political party.^[1] In the Bolshevik period of the USSR, Anatoly Lunacharsky coined the term poputchik (“One who travels the same path.”), which Trotsky then used to identify the politically uncommitted intellectuals who were sympathetic to Bolshevism yet remained uncommitted to revolutionary politics.^[2] In the revolutionary period, the term poputchik identified the politically indecisive men and women of the Russian intelligentsiya (writers, academics, and artists) who hesitated to join the Communist Party despite their proclaimed political political sympathy for the Russian Revolution. In the Stalinist period of the USSR (1927–1953), usage of the term poputchik ceased in Soviet politics, but Anglophone political scientists then used the term fellow-traveller to pejoratively identify pro–Communist people who were politically sympathetic to the USSR.^[1]

In U.S. politics, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the pejorative political term fellow-traveller identified Liberal and Left-wing people who were sympathetic towards Communist philosophy, yet were not "card-carrying Communists", such as the intellectuals and academics of society, and politically liberal politicians who associated with Communist front organizations, such as the NAACP and the ACLU. In European politics, the equivalent political descriptors for fellow-traveller are: Compagnon de route and sympathisant in France; Weggenosse, Sympathisant (neutral) or Mitläufer (negative connotation) in Germany; and compagno di strada in Italy.^[3]

European usages

USSR

Revolutionary period

In the Revolutionary period (1917–1923), the Bolsheviks used the term poputchik (One who travels the same path) to describe the intellectuals (academics, writers, journalists) who were philosophically sympathetic to The Revolution, but who were hesitant to participate in revolutionary politics to depose tsarist autocracy. In Literature and Revolution (1924), Trotsky used the term poputchik to pejoratively describe the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as an indecisive political sympathiser.^[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. [The intellectuals], 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]

Cold War period

From the Cold War (1945–1990) perspective of the USSR, the GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) considered and referred to the poputchik (fellow-traveller) as a govnoed (говноед) a shit-eater, for being an agent-of-influence who is ideologically sympathetic to the USSR. About fellow-travellers as secret agents, in the book Inside Soviet Military Intelligence (1984), the GRU officer Viktor Suvorov said that:

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”.^[6]

Greece

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

Pre–World War II U.S.

Before the Second World War (1939–1945), American politics used the Russian political descriptor poputchik (fellow-traveller) to describe the political fellow-traveller from the West who was ideologically sympathetic to communist philosophy and to the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), but was not a member of the Party. In the 1930s, the extensive public poverty consequent to the Great Depression (1929–1939) allowed Americans of the political mainstream to become ideologically sympathetic to revolutionary socialism. Hence, Black Americans joined the CPUSA because the Party’s revolutionary communism opposed the 19th-century Jim Crow laws that maintained racial segregation in the United States in the 20th century. Likewise, the American League for Peace and Democracy (ALPD) was the principal anti-fascist organization in the Popular Front against fascism.^[7]

The anti-intellectualism of American anti–Communist politics considered the novelists Ernest Hemingway (1889–1961) and Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) as political Liberals who actually were Communist fellow-travellers, because their Naturalist novels occasionally criticised the poverty caused by capitalism.^[8] In “The Revolt of the Intellectuals” (Time, 6 January 1941), Whittaker Chambers, a US intelligence officer who had spied on the CPUSA, used the term fellow-traveller as politically dismissive satire:

As the Red Express hooted off into the shades of a closing decade, ex-fellow travelers rubbed their bruises, [and] wondered how they had ever come to get aboard. . . . With the exception of [the American intellectual] Granville Hicks [1901–1982], probably none of these people was a Communist. They were fellow travelers who wanted to help fight fascism.^[9]

Politically disillusioned by the Stalinism of the USSR, the novelist John Dos Passos (1896–1970) became a right-wing anti-Communist.^[10] The poet Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) quit the CPUSA because the Stalinist political correctness of the Party required that every member of the CPUSA ignore the ideologic illegitimacy of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (23 August 1939) of non-aggression betwixt Nazi Germany and the USSR.^[11] The writer Waldo Salt (1914–1987), chairman of the League of American Writers (LAW) in 1935, was expelled from the LAW in 1937 for doubting the ideologic (Marxist) legitimacy of Stalin’s political purges (1936–1938) of the CPSU, the government of the USSR, and Russian society.^[11] In 1939, the American historian Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) likewise quit the Young Communist League USA (1935–1939) because of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.^[12]

Post-World War II U.S.

In the late 1930s, most Communist fellow-travelers quit the American Communist Party because Moscow ordered all Communists to adopt and abide the Stalinist party-line that ideologically legitimated the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939), which allowed the German and Russian Occupation of Poland (1939–45) for partitioning Poland into Nazi and Soviet territories. In the U.S., the American Communist Party abided Stalin's official party-line, and the CPUSA denounced the Allies as warmongers, rather than Nazi Germany, at war since 1939. In June 1941, when the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa (June–December 1941), to annihilate the U.S.S.R., again, the American Communist Party abided Stalin's party-line, and became war hawks for an American alliance with the USSR and so facilitate US intervention to the Nazi war in Europe to aid Soviet Russia.^{[citation needed]}

At War’s end, the anti-communist Russo–American Cold War emerged in the 1946–48 period, and American Communists were at the political margin of U.S. society. Anti–Communist purges of business and industry identified and expelled all Leftists from their employment as trade-union leaders, as academics, as professional writers, as entertainers, et cetera; thus the CPUSA lost most of their members. In 1948, American Communists politicked for the (unsuccessful) presidency of Henry A. Wallace, who was vice-president to the incumbent US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.^[13] In February 1956, in a secret meeting (the 20th congress of the CPSU), the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered the speech, On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, which denounced Stalinism and the cult of personality for Josef Stalin. Those political revelations ended the ideological relationship between fellow-travelers in the West and the soviet communism.^[14]

McCarthyism

In 1945, the anti-Communist congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) 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, characterized by right-wing political orthodoxy. Some targets of investigation were created by way of anonymous and unfounded accusations of treason and subversion, during which time the term fellow 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 the U.S. Constitution.^{[citation needed]}

In the course of his political career, the Republican 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 the U.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 a blacklist (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 the fellow traveler stage of their political lives, such as the Hollywood blacklist.

Definitions

The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1999), defines the political pejorative term poputchik (fellow-traveller) as a post–Revolution political descriptor with which the Bolsheviks described intellectually indecisive sympathizers of the Bolshevik Party and Soviet Communism in the USSR.^[1]

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 extension, ; and, by extension, a fellow-traveller is a “person who sympathizes with, but is not a member of another party or movement.”^[15]

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”.^[16]

References

^ ^a ^b ^c Bullock, Alan; Trombley, Stephen, eds. (1999). The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (Third ed.). p. 313.
^ Cassack, V. (1996). Lexicon of Russian Literature of the XX Century.
^ Caute, David (1988). The Fellow-travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism. p. 2.
^ Trotskii, L. (1991) [1923]. Literatura i revoliutsiia. Moscow: Politizdat. p. 56. ISBN 978-5-250-01431-1.
^ Trotsky, Leon. "2: The Literary "Fellow-Travellers" of the Revolution". Literature and Revolution – via Marxists Internet Archive.
^ "ВОЕННАЯ ЛИТЕРАТУРА --[ Исследования ]-- Suvorov V. Inside soviet military intelligence". militera.lib.ru. Retrieved 31 August 2021.
^ Rossinow (2004)
^ "The Fellows Who Traveled". Time. 2 February 1962. Archived from the original on November 5, 2012.
^ Chambers, Whittaker (6 January 1941). "The Revolt of the Intellectuals". Whittakerchambers.org. Retrieved 17 May 2010.
^ Kallich, Martin (1956). "John Dos Passos Fellow-Traveler: A Dossier with Commentary". Twentieth Century Literature. 1 (4): 173–190. doi:10.2307/440907. JSTOR 440907.
^ ^a ^b Johnpoll, Bernard K. (1994). A Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States. Vol. 3. p. 502.
^ Baker 1985, pp. 65, 84, 89–90, 141.
^ Hamby, Alonzo L. (1968). "Henry A. Wallace, the Liberals, and Soviet–American relations". Review of Politics. 30 (2): 153–169. doi:10.1017/S0034670500040250. JSTOR 1405411. S2CID 144274909.
^ Brown, Archie (2009). The Rise and Fall of Communism. HarperCollins. pp. 240–43. ISBN 9780061138799.
^ The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 1993. p. 931.
^ Safire, William (1978). Safire's Political Dictionary. Random House. ISBN 978-0-394-50261-8.

Bibliography

Baker, Susan Stout (1985). Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s.