fellow traveler

fellow traveler, originally, a writer in the Soviet Union who was not against the Russian Revolution of 1917 but did not actively support it as a propagandist. The term was used in this sense by Leon Trotsky in Literature and the Revolution (1925) and was not meant to be pejorative. Implicit in the designation was the recognition of the artist’s need for intellectual freedom and his dependence on links with the cultural traditions of the past. Fellow travelers were given official sanction in the early Soviet regime; they were regarded somewhat as experts who were filling the literary gap until the eventual emergence of a true proletarian art—one by and for the proletariat that would be free of all bourgeois influence. In the 1920s some of the most gifted and popular Soviet writers, such as Osip Mandelshtam, Leonid Leonov, Boris Pilnyak, Isaak Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, and members of the Serapion Brothers, were fellow travelers. The period during which they dominated the literary scene is now regarded as the brilliant flowering of Soviet literature. They were bitterly opposed by champions of a new proletarian art, and by the end of the decade the term came to be practically synonymous with a counterrevolutionary.

Outside the Soviet Union the term fellow traveler was widely used in the Cold War era of the 1950s, especially in the United States, as a political label to refer to any person who, while not thought to be an actual “card-carrying” member of the Communist Party, was in sympathy with its aims and supported its doctrines.