fellow travelers (poputchiki)
동반작가
A term for writers and artists who sympathized with the Bolshevik Revolution and collaborated with the Soviet regime without joining the Communist Party. Coined by Anatoly Lunacharsky and theorized by Leon Trotsky in Literature and Revolution (1923), the category received official sanction in the 1925 Central Committee resolution 'On the Party's Policy in the Sphere of Literature,' which mandated a tactful, patient approach toward them. The most celebrated Soviet writers of the decade, including Pilnyak, Babel, Pasternak, Mandelstam, and the Serapion Fraternity, were poputchiki, and their prominence was a defining condition of the remarkable literary flowering during the NEP period before the imposition of Socialist Realism.
Related historical events
Sources
- Wikipedia (RU) Russian Wikipedia: detailed account of the term's origin (Lunacharsky, Trotsky), the 1924 CC meeting, the 1925 Politburo resolution, and the list of typical попутчики writers including Pilnyak, Babel, Pasternak, Mandelstam, and the Serapion Fraternity.
- Wikipedia (EN) English Wikipedia: broader history of the concept, Trotsky's definition from Literature and Revolution ch. 2, and the American Cold War usage.
- britannica.com Encyclopaedia Britannica: concise entry emphasizing the NEP-era 'brilliant flowering of Soviet literature' and the regime's recognition of the artist's need for intellectual freedom.
- Marxists Internet Archive Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1923), Chapter 2: primary source where Trotsky names Pilnyak, Ivanov, Tikhonov, the Serapion Fraternity, Yesenin, and Kliuev as fellow travelers and defines them as 'not the artists of the proletarian Revolution, but her artist fellow-travellers.'