Fellow traveller

The term fellow traveller (also fellow traveler) identifies 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 of that organization. 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.

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.

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. In Chapter 2, "The Literary 'Fellow-Travellers' of the Revolution", Trotsky said:

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