Fellow traveller

For the novel Fellow Travelers, see Thomas Mallon. For the opera and TV series based on 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.

A fellow traveller (also fellow traveler) is 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. In the early history of the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet statesman Anatoly Lunacharsky coined the term poputchik ("one who travels the same path"); it was later popularized by Leon Trotsky to identify the vacillating intellectual supporters of the Bolshevik government led by Vladimir Lenin (1917–1924).

Historically, it was the political characterization of the Russian intelligentsiya (writers, academics, philosophers, and artists) who were philosophically sympathetic to the political, social, and economic goals of the Russian Revolution (1917) but who did not join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The usage of the term poputchik disappeared from political discourse in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era, but the Western world adopted the English term fellow traveller to identify people who sympathised with communism and the Soviets.

In U.S. politics, the term fellow traveller was primarily a pejorative applied to those on the American Left between the 1930s and 1950s, to suggest a person who was intellectually, philosophically, or politically sympathetic to the ideologies of Marxism, socialism, and communism, yet was not a formal "card-carrying member" of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) or the Socialist Party of America (SPA). In political discourse, the term fellow traveller was applied to intellectuals, academics, and politicians who lent their names and prestige to communist front organizations during the Cold War. In European politics, the equivalent terms for fellow traveller were: compagnon de route and sympathisant in France; Weggenosse, Sympathisant (neutral), or Mitläufer (negative connotation) in West Germany; and compagno di strada in Italy.

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